tttia

Nice work entangle. Um...a bit on the racey side, but nice work. The specular highlights on the ...er...top covering seem a bit off...too far to the left where one would expect more shadow. Very good shades on the outfit, giving that shiney look.

well since most of the posts were ONLY by geezers I decided to change the title to draw in more folks. I also moved some of the posts to the first one so that people can get right to the meat of the lessons.

I am using it for some brushing right now to see how it stacks up against corel. So far I love it. It won't have all the features of ps ,etc. but it is great for an artistic program. It is free, developed by a guy from Korea and then extended by the community that loves it :) http://park18.wakwak.com/~pixia/download.htm

There were good artists leaving before the pixel trend. There have always been trends. I think it is more that they outgrow both the help the board gives and the audience it provides. Our two options are to a. Grow artists until they leave b. raise the level of the board to make it worth their time.

download the gimp :) not a bad little free program. Here is the link to the free Gimp runtime environment and the download itself (you need both). http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html It is free, open source, ported from linux/unix :) Pixia is also free http://park18.wakwak.com/~pixia/download.htm Actually I just tried pixia again and I LOVE its color control. It also has zooms with the scroll wheel which I can't live without after corel. I might be using the program a lot. The controls are not user friendly though......least figuring em out. enjoy

lol if you really have to lg...but it is a brushing school. Tell ya what, why not do both?

Good work :) love the artwork, though this is only the second sample I have seen.

Great Orchiare, another to try!

(Portion moved to first post) AS for recording....try a program called Satori Photo xl . It is free if you can find it still, and has several unique features such as saving all of your actions in a sliding undo or a seperate file. You can adjust the speed of play back. It also works in somewhat of a hybrid vector format allowing it to reduce ram load. I however use corel photopaint or classic painter (I really want the real painter but the cash just isn't there).

Alrighty, here it is. Post your line work or unfinished piece for others to learn to brush. Likewise, post your results! First a rundown of the basic concepts of shading. Then two examples of how tipit members shade. And here are two walkthroughs in two different styles. Here are some drawing to use. By Tttia . By Orchiare By Nadril By Eccentric

trends require willing minion! The masses! ok, let's stop whining here and teach brushing. folks can at least learn that :)

There is nothing new under the sun. Oh that ISN'T my idea, it was Solomon's some 3 thousand years ago :) (though one has to admit....the last 200 years have proved him wrong lol).

the last time we did a brushing contest /fun deal xawsomex was about the only entrant :( But hey would be fun. I could post the linework for my latest pic (unfinished of course) and see how folks do.... Vector as usual. If you have some too that would be great. Others could post linework too.

Face it guys, the past was not really that much better. It is just that you are hitting the wall like we all did. The same ole' same ole' just loses its magic after a while. The only problem is moving on. Where to? And will ya miss your friends. Then you realize most of your friends are doing the same and there is just no point. Check back now and again and hopefully you see them post. In the meantime you lose track of all the new members until it seems pointless to bother. Then you start to get crusty and defensive like keiphus and have to flex your artistic muscles! haha couldn't resist. And you take some perverse joy in knowing that--if you really wanted to bother--you could blow away all the lousy first time pixelers with some real art. Then you post it, see it on page 3 and say...wow, either a. I suck b. They suck c. I need a new forum. I am not sure which of the three it is for me yet, I am leaning towards a. only because I have been artistically lazy for a long time now. We will see :) At the moment i am into the rs clan scene and it is eating up all of my time. Oh and Keiphus. we all know you don't learn much here, but it is the community that helps you WANT to learn and makes ya put in the time on your own. At least it was for me. I didn't probably learn much here in the long run, but it kept me wanting to learn.

It's true that people have improved, but I really doubt much of that is from the media board. For me at least, the media board hasn't really helped me improve myself, but working on things on my own, and bouncing them off some of my artistically-inclined friends has helped a lot. Never underestimate the power of a bit of gp :) I do think that there are two trends. 1. people improve to sell sigs ,then find they like it and work hard at it. 2. The board has ATTRACTED some better artists.

I think we all know that i am not a big fan of non-representational art (it is not really abstract, please let's not rehash all that again), so I find the pixel trend to be great. The only thing it has done that I don't like is to push people into that pursuit rather than to large scale art works. I also know that my old art posts were often fairly lame. But ....having said that...some of the ones now are basically stick figures. That is just not constructive. A bit of learning in art is fine to post. A stick figure that you just know is not good is kind of embarassing in my book.

Here are my views. 1. Has the quality declined? Actually, I would say the better artists have gotten BETTER by a long shot. In my time here we keep getting more and more progress. I think the media board has proven to be a good place for people to hone their skills and learn :) 2. Is the pixel trend positive? I commented on this earlier. I think it is great for developing free hand artists, and allows high detail images in a small size. But the problem is that it has been so high profile that it drives some nutty :) 3. What keeps people coming back? Learning and...that age old reality, showing off :) 4. How many rate my whatever posts are too many? I don't mind them in general, but the problem now is the media board is a victim of its own success. It used to be that there were not enough artists for these topics to clog up the whole board. Now it is easy to see your post on the second page in no time. 5 What kind of posts do you REALLY ENJOY. I love discussions of art trends, discussion of media board artists, obviously cool looking sigs of nearly all types (though I prefer brushed and freehand ,etc.) and Large scale artistic works, rs related or not. 6. For those who have left , cut back activity or are considering it, why? I honestly think it is cyclical. This is a great place to learn and to teach. But after a while everything becomes the same, ya get lazy, etc. I know I used to post on ever rate my sig post. But after a while you see some grow, some stay the same, and so many new ones that you can't keep track. For me when I stopped recognizing a lot of the artists I lost interest.

As someone who has been a part of the media board for a long time I would like to have a post that discusses the current trends in a more calm manner. Some questions for thought: 1. Has the quality declined? 2. Is the pixel trend positive? 3. What keeps people coming back? 4. How many rate my whatever posts are too many? 5 What kind of posts do you REALLY ENJOY. 6. For those who have left , cut back activity or are considering it, why? ps, Is it not clear from just the last two days that all you have to do to get a topic locked here is to stir up trouble, whine and posture a bit? That is pathetic.

What on earth was really that bad about it? Is there really something of such a hideous nature that it can't be at least locked and left up for all to see and cast shame? It was a discussion of art styles for crying out loud. Just take the ones turning into a personal critique of the other's mental state to the woodshed ! I even begged you not to lock it but simply to delete the objectionable material. We know some of it was in poor taste, but really, the discussion was a good one. This kind of wholesale disregard for the posters is getting ridiculous. I didn't type for pages just to have it axed because someone couldn't control themselves.

What happened to that nice discussion of the pixel sig craze? I did a search for my name and found no such topic, though I know I posted there not 2 hours ago! Is this a glitch or did the mods kill it?

oh how I wish the old boards were still around so I could cut and paste.. art for most of time was representational. It was not abstract or about feelings. It was only after the advent of workable photography that artists for forced this direction to make a living! The fantasy and sci fi genres have been a great boost to realistic art.

They are just breaking the conventions of pixeling, adapting it to their task. Only a truly rabbid prescriptive pixeler would really stress over that :)

One other issue...the lighting, as it is at night, seems to be coming from the staff and lightning, yet the character in zammy is shaded as though the light comes from the right. Hm...teaches me to look too long at a piece :)

It is not the kb limits that bother me. It is the 150 pixel height limit. And if one click produces that many colors you did something wrong. The only art done here is NOT sigs. That is my point. the DAG might have been in many ways flawed, but it certainly was an era of more than just sigs. We saw some cool paintings from witty, some large 3d stuff, etc. It is the media board. Not the siggy board. I agree that sigs do and should make up a large portion of the subject matter here, but they should not be, and are not , the only thing. Personally I think Jeppoz' other works are better than his pixel sigs. I think if he honed his skills he could some day be making paintings on devart that people would BUY WITH REAL MONEY and exclaim about. This is no slam at his pixel work,or his sig work in general. It is just the limitation of the medium. His first color job on that goblin was awesome. And he has a line drawing that he never finished (I don't think) that I really loved (the baby draconian looking one). I think both the sigs and the larger scale works should be encouraged.

Mods, I hope to reply, please don't lock this yet due to one or two ppl flaming. The rest of us are having a sensible discussion. Just trim out the bad spot in the apple so to speak, I implore you! ---------------------edit. K, here is my reply.... ---------------------------- I like to do some brushing myself, and vector, as of course you and Terry know. But I will say this for pixel, a. It is a real art form. It does take skill, and it is representational, which to me is a good thing. I really like some of them. b. It is easier to fit pixel images in sigs. I love brushing, but getting them under that 150 height limit and still having them look good is just DIFFICULT! That is why we see more brushing works in larger sizes. Not everyone wants to buy a computer program for $700 now do they? I classify sigs as; pixel, landscape, photomanip, brushed or absract. I don't know them all cause I'm a noob. And the fact that you can say you made such a wicked looking thing in the most basic of programs; MS Paint is alot cooler than saying you made it in PhotoShop. And yes, misterx does rule at pencil drawings, my dragon owns ;). Actually using a lesser program and saying that makes you better is illogical. Yeah, it might take more effort. I think the term "work smart not hard" applies here. You can do incredible things with the tools of better programs. And they are not all skill free either. Airbrushing which simulates actual art mediums is a great fun tool that still requires skill. Naw, I don't think so at all. It all depends on the picture. Cell shading...maybe, but really a lot of pixelers USE cell shading styles if not techniques. wow...I cant believe how dumb of a statement that was. Have you ever seen a digital painting? I dont mean a crappy one. I mean the kind that take 20 hours, the kind that look so real they look like a photograph. the kind that take so much work its not even funny, painting it in with the paintbrush, one layer only, and using matte colors. same as above. have you ever heard of a wonderful new thing on the internet, called downloading? and you should not classify sigs at all. theres a lot more styles than that, and its great to see everyone with a unique style. thats why I associate sig 'types' with their artist's name. And I do not believe the program should matter. the people who are making 3d models for movies, should they be criticized for using a 3d program and not drawing the thing out frame by frame in a basic program? no. advanced programs take advanced talent, thats a fact. with greater functionality comes a greater learning curve. I do not believe the statement "theres more quality in pixel work, then cged/ cell shaded works" can be even close to true. everyone has their own idea of quality. AS for downloading, yup, illegal, shoudln't do it, shouldn't promote it, shouldn't even think about it. Those guys have to make a living too. That is why I am still with photopaint 9, but hey, I can still get some decent results from it and I know I am legal. But there are decent free programs. Pixia churns out some good work, and open canvass in its earlier versions is free, so there is no need to resort to illegality. Also check out project dog waffle...yes, that is the real name. Great brushes etc...but no layers! Something about wanting realism. DOH! The best thing about the spendier programs is the community! They have lots of refinement and tutorials. But the lesser programs can still do well. I tend to agree with the other comments you made. ok show me a 'high quality' digital painting. Pixel art can have the most quality ever because it does down to the smallest unit on the computer. And yes everyone has different versions of quality. Little kids will see these ugly pixel sigs coming up as really good. erm...no. Limiting yourself to one pixel does result in small, compact, vivid images. But it does not come close to accomplishing the variation of hues, transparency, transluscence, blending of colors, etc. that occurs in real life. All raster painting gets down to the pixel level. Just that some actually make better use of pixels to create more realism. Some of the digital paintings out there simply astound me. Having said that I think that pixeling is a tough art form. Not because some use archaic programs, but because it requires you to make everything compact, reduce colors to base values, and in other ways LIMITS your expression. Real pixelers even minimize their color palette to fit game display capabilities, etc. I would in fact like to try it sometime. It seems quite nice for small format images such as sigs, and limiting oneself can be fun...think of haiku or sonnet writing for instance. Insanely strict meter to express boundless ideas. The big downfall of the pixel craze though is that it finally put a knife in what was actually a good movement. The movement away from sigs as the dominant expression of artistic talent on this board. I love sigs, and trying to fit a masterpiece into a customers wishes and the space allotted definitely hones skills. But in the final analysis I think that expanding out to larger art forms is a plus for this board. And while I rejoice at more actual free-handers now, I am a bit down that they are using it just for pixel sigs.