2021 December Challenge Postmortem

How did I do?

Goals:

• Photo Studies: 44/100
• Imagination Paint Sketches: 9/60
• New Sketches: 10/30

View what’s been posted on DeviantArt View what’s been posted on Artstation

Take-aways?

As you can see, this challenge was ambitious. I had no real frame of reference (or set standard from the start) for how long each study would take me, and they varied wildly from 10min-2hrs, with most coming in between the 20-40min mark. Ideally, I would have been rolling along at 15 minutes a piece – but I wound up spending as much time figuring out how to wrangle the tools as I did figuring out how to wrangle the colors and light.

I’d like to say it’s embarrassing not to have finished, and I admit that there’s part of me that feels it, but honestly it’s super cool to have some real painting work under my belt and the work that I did was, for all the time I spent confused, better than I expected starting out.

Some more specific stuff I noticed throughout the studies: chroma variation in the shadows goes quite a long way toward an image feeling lively; you really do need the contrast between your darks and light for the image to read, but you also need to know the ranges of each of them - especially since they’re relative; areas of high saturation along form turns are the tits (a quote directly from my real-time painting notes, yw); relative saturation is kinda wild, and I don’t quite understand it yet, but it definitely seems to do a lot of work in establishing distance.