Eye practice

Wow, looks great.

Just in case you want to look at a different technique.....i found these 2 tuts fantastic.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/21817387/

or

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/29300384/

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=227727&highlight=eye

this ones awesome, and Enalya is like, one of the best freehand artists I know of.. :drool

Very nice Lil. Keep up the great work!

Thanks guys, and thanks for the tuts.

Lessa, thanks for the tutorial but i wont read anything by linda berkgvist. Ballistic publishing have just found out she's a fraud and paints over photos. (quite funny how she's been MIA ever since) They found some of her tutorials with previous photographers signatures in her pieces.... People had been taking her tutorials into photoshop, playing with brightness and contrast and finding photo elements underneath.
Shame really because she's good at what she does, shame also she couldn't be honest about it.

hehe well the tuts are still useful, even if the images arent real, I couldnt even paint over that well.

I hadnt heard that about her though, it is a shame :)

Yeah it is a shame..... makes it look worse because she wasn't honest about it. She even used copyrighted stuff from book covers without permission....... so no wonder she's in hiding :(

http://kyena.deviantart.com/journal/14191196/#journal

hehe heres that response you wanted

i dunno what to believe, seems so much evidence against her and many artists out there, look at that page she posted about henning, black keri and them.... i read whatt she wrote but whats stopping her going home, getting in the pose copied from the picture? There'll be never enough proof for anybody......
the link you posted to wasn't bergkvist that's somebody elses work.

youre right, thats natascha, i dont process too well at 6:30 am lol
I had to go back and look. :)

lol Don't worry about it.......you should see me on a morning sometimes.....practically crawling to the toilet...... "arrghh the light.....IT BURNS!!!"

Something I wonder about, and this is going to further derail the thread I guess...

Why is drawing over a photo "bad"?

Artists have since time immemorial used different tracing/coping methods to help block out a drawing, especially of people. Why is doing it digitally bad? Does it somehow diminish the picture? After all, isn't the skill in laying down shading and color? Or should a freehand artist be a master of form AND design? Just curious what other people think on it.

When I draw, like for real, with a pencil on paper... I draw without tracing. I usually have photo references. I shade according to my eye, not neccessarily what is on the photo/reference.

When I work in photoshop, and admittedly I haven't done very much freehand drawing with the tablet into photoshop, I am ususally doing postwork on a 3D scene and its not really "drawing", its "editing" like deepening shadows etc.

The only time I have done a "paint over" was of a photo of my hubbys Ford truck for him to put on his desktop LOL But that isn't to say I have a bad feeling about paint overs. I just suck at them. Getting the lines right is actually probably the easy part for me. Color is where it all falls apart here. So.. my convoluted point is, does it matter if I trace the lines versus doing via a grid copy, I just don't see how its that far removed. If I take a photo of me and draw 1 inch boxes over it and use them to copy into a fresh new PSD, how is that really different from scanning the picture and having it set to Layer 1? How is that different from me drawing the outlines of the photo in charcoal and doing a relief rubbing to get the linework onto a piece of paper?

I just don't see the problem in drawing over a photo for reference I guess.

Tamaelia it isn't tracing, what some of these artist are doing is using the original photo but they're actually smudging the real photo and saying they painted from scratch, when really its a photomanipulation. This is why people are getting a bit miffed because these named artists are claiming they paint from scratch when they don't. For example one artists work had the original signatures in the image from the original photo the photographer took. This is the thing i do not agree with. Yes their images are beautiful, but for god sake, dont sit there and claim it was painted from scratch when it wasn't!

Oh, that's stealing. If you claim someone else's art for your own because you added a blur layer, that's patently wrong.

I guess I misunderstood the debate. I totally agree, if you use a photo reference you should not be manipulating it and then call it your own.

I should add, I like the eyes you drew at the top.

I enjoy watching people learn and refine stuff :) Your freehand is really going great, I would love to see you do a really complex work... even if it was over many months... something that really shone when it was done. You have a knack with the human form, I like seeing your WIPs :)

Hiya Tam,

I have done a full body image, with cloth and the female form. It was done about a month ago. :)

I've posted it below so you can see, she's called Red Passion:
A photo reference was used and she was painted in photoshopcs2 and painter 9