Male reference is hard to come by as is, but Jason even offers specific poses for a model fee payable through Paypal. It is very reasonable. Check out his work and remember if you use his pictures even as reference for anatomy give him a plug. All of use creatives are on the same team here.
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
By no mean is perfect and if one wants a true colour calibration for their monitor they should either by an high end monitor that has built in colour calibration like some Apple monitors. Or one should buy a colour calibration software. However if you are like me and cannot afford these tools, then your best bet is to eyeball it. I have found this website to be the best.
This has nothing to do with education but it is really creepy, it just happened, and I want to write it down. So, I am painting a demon for personal work and I have been looking up things about demons. During this search I decide to re-size my image that I have been working on for some time. I re-sized it with the new crop tool in PS5 which allows you to re-size the canvas without putting in any numbers, you just drag outside your image to the desired size. After painting for a bit I decided to look at the image size. It is 6666 x 6000. How creepy is that. I researched about demons on this website if you are interested.
Everyone go check this out. Just click the link above and if you can donate to the art order Jon Schindehette gives so much back to the fantasy art community.
A great podcast interview on Sidebar with Brad Rigney. I have never met him or talked to him, but he sounds like one of the most humble ridiculously talented artists. He is so honest about the struggles he has with each painting. Check out the interview by clicking on the bottom image or go to sidebar by clicking on the link. http://www.richardjholland.com/www.richardjholland.com/Portfolio/Pages/Dragon_Ball.html#13
Production Artist Do you have a passion to iterate on your 101th box. From concept to ideation to orthographics, do you have the obsessive attention to detail your 50th character and texture variant of the week. To be able to design from first principles of basic pen & paper through to a full 2D digital pipeline, this position is ideally suited to the candidate with a strong technical and traditional skill, with a strong eye for functional believable design.
Dr. CM Wong is one of the most giving artists to the online forum education. He is a great artist and he has done so much for use self taught guys and girls. Check out the above websites to see some of his work and educational offerings.
These are the principles of design that Jason Manely talks about in his introduction to his tutorial video on composition. So, if you want to know more about the exact definition of each go and "BUY" the video don't torrent it. At some point I will critique paintings from my favorite artists using these principles of design.
A great deviant art post about colour theory from Fernando who is a traditional artist from Spain.
"I use Titan because those are the most common in Spain, no particular reason. Also I buy the medium line, not the super expensive one. Just avoid the cheaper ones. And try not to mix different brands because they may use different mediums.
About colors there's a lot to say, but I'll try to make it short and somewhat simple: my opinion is you should use the minimum (at least when you are learning), that is three primary colors plus white and mix them to get the color you want. Which primary colors? cyan, magenta and yellow. You can also use the classic Goethe's color theory (which was used by all the classic painters) and use yellow, red and blue as primaries: with those you get a somewhat smaller color range, but one that contains 95% of what you can find in nature. Use what you are more comfortable with, what makes you mix the colors you want more accurately. What do I use? it depends: for example this painting was made with Prussian blue (really deep blue), cadmium yellow and "carmÃn de garanza" (dark crimson red). Those give you a very "dry" color range that I really like, even if there's some colors you can't get like vivid blues or reds. Lately I've been using those three plus cyan and magenta. The point is to use the ones that will give you the color range you want for your painting. Or just use cyan/magenta/yellow which in theory you can mix to get every possible color... that's probably the way to go when learning."
This is a great extension for photoshop. It is not a necessity by no means and one does have to pay for it but the features help me a lot. Check it out.
Being an artist who has leaned to paint through digital media I am finding pitfalls that can develop from not learning any traditional techniques or not using any traditional media which is a very bad idea. I do use traditional media, however, I learned to paint digitally first, then I transitioned what I learned about painting digitally that to traditional media because in the end both are just tools. The reason for my backwards education is digital is cheaper and less toxic, but I cannot wait for the day I can do both traditional and digital equally.
The pitfall is a digital artist does not have that moment when painting where a certain brush stroke become critical. Watch this trailer for Greg Manchess Paints "Above The Timberline"
"The next bunch of strokes are going to be pretty critical," states Greg at 2:07. I realized that is something that is one of the most important aspects and the difference between digital and traditional. In digital one never has a critical stroke because of layers and undo, I think that this can be a handicap if one takes for granted the impact of that one stroke. That is why Greg can paint so fast, over the decades of painting he has leaned to trust himself and he has learned to see a few strokes a head, almost like a chess master.
So, when painting digitally think about how each stroke impacts the rest of the painting. One of the best ways to do this is to use layers to one advantage. Drop a paint stroke in turn it on and off and study what the stroke did for your painting, but think before you drop in that stroke. The other way is to USE TRADITIONAL MEDIA because it really does make one a better artist.
This is a great place to get traditional colour swatches. It really helps if one is too poor to afford real paints or if like me you have to young boys that seem to find a way to get into everything. Gouache which derives from the Italian guazzo, water paint, splash or bodycolor, seems to be my best option right now because it is water based and easily washes off of most things. The most important is human skin, just wet a paper towel and your son or daughters face is clean at least for a couple of minutes.
