Crankshaft's Sketchbook

Wip Still life. Spending lots of hours on it. First time drawing/painting in color. I'm learning lots from it.

This is a nice image with good crisp lines and well defined detail. I really like the wood texture, it's subtle yet still instantly recognisable.
One thing to think about when using colour is to vary your hues from warm to cool. The hues throughout your picture are almost identical, varying only in saturation and brightness. If you were to introduce some subtle blues in the shaded or shadow areas it would help "turn" the surfaces and add to the realism.
This is a good start though, keep at it.

Valence wrote:

This is a nice image with good crisp lines and well defined detail. I really like the wood texture, it's subtle yet still instantly recognisable.
One thing to think about when using colour is to vary your hues from warm to cool. The hues throughout your picture are almost identical, varying only in saturation and brightness. If you were to introduce some subtle blues in the shaded or shadow areas it would help "turn" the surfaces and add to the realism.
This is a good start though, keep at it.

Thanks! I never thought of toggling between cool and warm hues. I knew the picture was missing something!

Going from pencil sketches to colour is always tough. Instead of just worrying about value you have to juggle with three things by including hue and saturation and it's way too easy to forget about one of them. I think I've said before somewhere that it's like doing a Rubik's cube; you get one side right but mess it up when trying to get another side right (and yes, I know that's not how you should solve the Rubik's cube but it's a good analogy.)

I've noticed that you've been working through a bit of Loomis (looks like Figure Drawing For All It's Worth). Do you also have his book Creative Illustration? That one is less specialised and offers an education on general things like line, tone, composition, storytelling and ... colour. It's well worth a read.

Valence wrote:

Going from pencil sketches to colour is always tough. Instead of just worrying about value you have to juggle with three things by including hue and saturation and it's way too easy to forget about one of them. I think I've said before somewhere that it's like doing a Rubik's cube; you get one side right but mess it up when trying to get another side right (and yes, I know that's not how you should solve the Rubik's cube but it's a good analogy.)

I've noticed that you've been working through a bit of Loomis (looks like Figure Drawing For All It's Worth). Do you also have his book Creative Illustration? That one is less specialised and offers an education on general things like line, tone, composition, storytelling and ... colour. It's well worth a read.

Thanks for the additional info! I don't have Creative Illustration but I'm planning on ordering it soon. So far the only books I have are Scott Robertson's How to Draw and How to Render. Regarding color, I'm really learning lots from Feng Zhu's videos and books from the library. Going from greyscale to color is hard work! I'll need all the help I can get

Some old art work and new studies. These color brush studies helped me understand a lot!

Aren't all the Loomis books still online? There was a link in the resources section, if I remember rightly. Although I recall the PDF version of Creative Illustration to be a little ropey.

Valence wrote:

Aren't all the Loomis books still online? There was a link in the resources section, if I remember rightly. Although I recall the PDF version of Creative Illustration to be a little ropey.

That's true but I just much prefer having the physical books in front of me when drawing, especially if they're technical studies.

Some old work






Some gesture studies. I'm working smaller now to focus more on the forms.








Recent work.

Recent work as well. This is the update on the flashlight. I added the advice Valence gave me about the cooler/warmer hues. I think the addition looks terrific!