tripsis

A warm shower or bath always works for me!

Maybe I will eventually :lol: I don't have time for a shop :P Each picture takes about 15 hours - sometimes more. On top of personal work, school and Tip.it, I don't have time to do requests! And I don't want to get peoples' hopes up and then let them down by not being able to finish D:

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You were kind of setting yourself up for disappointment by doing that with a girl who has a boyfriend. But in your defense, it does sound like you were acting impulsively in the heat of the moment rather than thinking things through. My advice: don't even cuddle with her. To me cuddling suggests flirting and wanting to be with someone. IMO she shouldn't even be cuddling with you if she has a boyfriend (I doubt he'd be pleases about it). I just don't see it as something *friends* do. Either way, even just cuddling is setting yourself up for more disappointment. The whole time you'll be thinking about your experience together and how much you want her.. But you can't have her. Don't do that to yourself.

Ahhh - you need to resize them! :P

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This one was fun :lol:

The Bank Job - not great but good :) I enjoyed it.

[hide=WIP Sketches]Rough conceptual sketch: Meh :P This is a runecrafting sketch from about a year ago (not even joking lol): [/hide] This weekend, however, I'm going to start working on a brand new picture ;) Then hopefully I'll get the K'ril Tsutaroth picture done, but the other one needs to take priority.

I do think it's kind of weird. It's also sad because it means that the parents will die much earlier in their child's life. I mean my parents weren't THAT old when they had me but my dad will be 70 when I'm in my early 20s and honestly that scares me. When considering that two of my grandparents died before they hit 80, it's frightening to me that my dad could die by the time I'm 30.

It is kind of sad but they did choose not to pay.. :-?

I watched Ocean's Thirteen last night.

Try adding a wider range of shades to make it more three dimensional. I would recommend adding at least two more. In addition to making it more three dimensional, it will also help better define your light source. Also, I would recommend blending (read what I wrote to stevepole about blending). But blending will probably be easier with a larger subject to work with. Your vase is pretty small on the canvas. Do it, do it! :P But yeah I'm enjoying this thread a lot!

Great job, stevepole! :) The shading looks great in this piece. I think something that could help with the "fuzziness" problem would be blending a little more. Especially with the shadows on the right, you have a lot of single brush strokes and I think that's one of your biggest problems. Use the eyedropper to pick up that colour, lower the opacity of your brush to around 20% and brush over it with a hard round brush. Then use the eyedropper again to pick up your *new* colour and brush again. Slowly do this to blend that shadow with the ligher shadow/midtone to create a better, less fuzzy transition. Two more things to keep in mind: brighter highlights and reflections. Things like vases are very reflective so you will have some (don't go overboard!) extra bright highlights (almost white), and the vase will have some of the background colour in it. Finally, on the vase itself your lightsource is very well defined. The light is clearly coming from the left. However, your background does not reflect this. Everything in the background seems very random. Make sure that the background AND subject follow the same light source. This will help unify your picture a bit more :) I applied all of the above to your picture to help show you what I mean:

Lol Neopets. I still log on now and then for a laugh. And excellent, I see an 8 - good to know I'm not colour blind :P Confession: I'm addicted to skipping class.

Well if you want to be hopeful, there are a few possible explanations. Maybe she just went on Facebook for a minute to check something. Or maybe she was browsing on her phone, which is why she was on Facebook but not messenger.. or on a friend's computer. Later, maybe she was busy/distracted and didn't notice or have time to reply to you. If you really like this girl, then it may be worth holding out for a few more days and see how she acts when she finally does talk to you. I think at this point, you've made your feelings clear by even asking her on a date. If she shares those feelings (now, or later), then she'll make it clear. Maybe not by asking you on a date or some other direct method, but just by initiating conversation and maybe flirting a bit.

Since I already drew a vase in my tulip picture, I took this opportunity to do an easy experiment with colour - There's quite a bit that I dislike about it but I'm bored of it and ready to move on :XD:

You stole my line! :lol: Nice job :)

Yeah honestly at this point it seems like she's just not interested but feels bad about giving a flat out "no" D:

Don't get too caught up with brushes and brush settings. Settings can be important when achieving certain effects, but in the end, brushes and brush settings alone won't improve your work that much. It's good to experiment, just don't get caught up thinking that they'll make all the difference. Basically what I'm saying is that I'm sure your brush settings are fine :) Which are you really concerned about: the brush you use and the more specific settings (roundness, hardness, spacing, etc.) or the basic settings like opacity and flow? Most of my work is done with the basic, hard, round PhotoShop brush with pressure sensitivity enabled for opacity and size. For my tulip picture I decided to try something new and 95% of it was done with a custom brush composed of like 6 tiny dots (spacing set to 0, pressure sensitivity enabled for opacity and size). The other 5% was done with that basic, hard, round brush. For the first part of my painting, opacity and flow were both 100%. This was for when I was laying down all the main colours. When I started blending, opacity was lowered to 30% (flow remained at 100%).

You hate periods? Try being a girl and actually having them. Not only do you not get sex but you have CONSTANT cramps. Worst feeling ever. Why not mix your ideas? Make her like a scrapbook or something. In it you can include photos of you two together, a poem you wrote, and you can hand-pick some quotes to throw in there. It can be like a "memories of the past year" kind of thing.

Having to wake up early and people who are overly persistent. As an example: when someone wants to hang out with you and you say you're busy the entire weekend. The person texts you every day on the weekend anyway, asking if you're free yet. When you don't respond, they text you even more.

I guess I'll try to answer some stuff for once :P Two main things really jump out at me: the white background and the lack of refinement. But given that this was a 20 minute painting, I won't go too much into refinement (but I will address it in a minute). First of all, don't use a white background. Always pick a background colour that will serve as a base for your painting and set the mood. Backgrounds play a huge role in what colours you use for your subject, because everything reflects. So even if you're just painting a still life, spending 1-5 minutes on a non-white background will make all the difference. Pick a colour that goes well with your painting and maybe spend a few seconds briefly hinting at the direction of the light. Also, if you have a non-white background, it will make your subject more interesting. You will be able to integrate more colours. So if you're drawing a pink tulip, depending upon your background colour you could also include colours you might not expect (such as blue, green, brown, purple, etc.). One more thing that's kind of related - never use white for highlights. You can use very very light pink or yellow, etc., but never pure white. Also in this case, because you have a white background and used white highlights, parts of the tulip kind of disappears into the background. As for the refinement issues, I see a lot of small, messy lines. You could have maybe spent a few more minutes blending the colours better. Also, right now I'm having a hard time distinguishing the different petals. Based on the highlights I can kind of make out three different petals, but going further with some shadows could help distinguish them a bit better. Honestly, basic techniques will only get you so far. In the end, everyone has their own techniques and it really comes down to personal preference and what you're comfortable with. A good example is your lineart question. There is no better way to do it. Some people prefer to have really refined lineart, whereas others can't stand doing that and just jump straight into painting. Personally, when I'm working with something really detailed (usually human figures), I prefer to have really refined lineart to use as a guide. I find it easier to perfect things like anatomy with lineart rather than just with painting straight away. But for this particular painting, I didn't use lineart at all and just jumped right in. But this is a very simple subject, so I didn't feel lineart was necessary. As for your other question, most artists find it easier to start with larger strokes. Lay down some large, basic colours as you're working out the composition, mood, lighting, etc. and slowly start moving in and refining. Start big, end small. Read what I said to Shiny about white backgrounds. I know since we're just drawing a simple subject it doesn't matter all that much, but I think it's good to break out of that habit and it will help you once/if you start doing more detailed paintings :) Putting even just 5 minutes of effort into the background will make all the difference. Other than that, two main things: light source and refinement. The stem would suggest that the light source is somewhere on the right, but this is not true with the petals. The petals seem to have a bunch of random, small highlights. You used a very small brush to make these highlights and you need to work up to them a bit more. Using a larger brush and a less intense colour for the highlight, block in the lighter areas. The lightest of the highlights (close to white) should be reserved for the small details that refine the petals. That brings me into my next point. Right now it looks like you have one massive petal. You should probably be able to see at least two or three (with more suggested on the other side) from this angle. You should use shadows to distinguish the petals from one another. I also agree that the leaf could use some work but you covered that yourself :) ---------------- Here's a TERRIBLE example of my process.. I say terrible because I made this GIF after the picture was made. So the only thing I was able to do was go back and hide all the layers, and then unhide 1 or 2 for each frame. There are a lot of steps missing within each layer. For example, the jump from the first to the second frame is pretty big because all that work on the tulip was on one layer.

I watched How To Train Your Dragon. How cuuuuute! But lol at how the main character's name is Hiccup. I kept giggling whenever someone said his name.

The vase made me want to claw my eyes out. An hour maybe?