A great blog post I found the other day about shipping your program early. Found it on “Seth’s Blog“, another unmissable.
I like to read blogs from programmers and entrepreneurs. They think sooo different from artists. But their job is highly creative too – so much of what they say applies to painting.
How many artworks did you not “ship” because it was just not perfect? I hear this often. Many artists never finish bigger works, because there is always mistakes and room for tweaking.
Of course there are differences. Iterating an artwork is not always possible. But there are tricks to push it out there: Get time limits! Maybe join contests, or, as I like to do: Draw from real life. The obvious reason is that they force you to say “I have to stop now”. Maybe more importantly, I feel they also force you to only work the parts that really matter.
Because – you know it if you ever painted – any image can be infinite abyss. There is no limit to the time one can spend on even a single background detail.
But it makes me also think: Especially for our digital work it is possible to make new version numbers. Why do I do it so rarely? Just take an artwork from some time ago and make it better with what one learned. And show it off even if it’s not perfection.
Very hard for me… but now… uhh, oh, wouldn’t it be hypocritical if I would not post an artwork that I’m scared to show as it’s not done yet? So well, ok – here is one:
"Origin Princess" - beta version 0.2
It’s a painting from one year ago and I started tweaking again. Right now the values are much better (heh,no need to release older version) – but what to expect for version 0.3:
- Revamped anatomy of the hips and left arm.
- Redesign of some important edges in the background (the boring long wall edge is bugging me).
- Fixing the two-dimensionality of the dress.
- A new pose maybe… if I get an idea for something more meaningful than “holds hand up”.
- Anything the users might tell me – so if you see somthing you don’t like: Please, write a bug report in the comments. :)
This is really different from your usual stuff! The lighting and reflections and textures look amazing! the character looks kinda really ‘asian fantasy’ like. I can’t really tell if she’s supposed to be a warrior, a sexy dancer or just pretty looking for no reason other then it’s pretty.
But honestly if i hadn’t know it wasn’t finished, i wouldn’t have known :)
Heh. It started as assignment, that’s why the topic is unusual. But its a good excuse to try different stuff.
I feel that after one year, I should be able to improve on it – makes my fingers nervous to get to it. I learned a lot about paintin naked girls – so that should help. :) Now I just have to find the time.
I think you’re right with that its unclear what she does – it’ll probably make it more interesting if I can explain that in the picture.
Thomas, beautiful! Breathtaking!
Lovely color, composition and pretty girl.
One tip i can give is that her foot is both facing the camera, which makes the figure less dynamix, check out poses of dancers… Notice their foot, its always go in a certain direction to give the body more flow.
Cheers and thanks for sharing your unfinished work.
Thanks for the input Bang. You’re right – the feet… now that I look at it. Eeek. I think I’ll repose here, maybe like she’s walking a bit.
Got good feedback form conceptart.org too – I think this might change a lot.