Don't feel let down, at least the
GREAT Marx-Man posted in your thread.
In answer to this:
GypsyNicks wrote:
I enjoy posting my pictures. Sure I'm not a member. Sure my chops aren't the greatest. But how can anyone compete when you have a group of people that keep voting for the same user, time and time again? Just because they make themselves known to all. I have seen some amazing chops get low votes. What's going on here? Doesn't really give others incentive to even try.
I say that the solution to make sure you stop sucking is very simple, stop sucking.
It's difficult to say when the sucking is going to stop but usually the sucking stops around the time you take those fine art drawing lessons and learn how to paint.
1: Knowing how to paint a picture from scratch - makes a great deal of difference to a photoshop user with a...
2: Pen tab - this tool will turn your awkward mouse drawn garbage into beautifully constructed pen tab drawn garbage. The difference between the two, you might think is negligible, however, pen-tab drawn garbage is in a totally different class to mouse drawn garbage.
Mouse Drawn
Pen-Tab Drawn
Your probably thinking one took more time than the other and that they aren't a fair comparison...
Well you just cottoned on to 4 but lets not go there until we have talked about 3.
3: When you look at other peoples work, you aren't improving.
You see a finished article, you don't know how much work has gone into it, it takes dedication and time to create something good, that time and dedication is not visible in the final picture as much as you might think.
For a highly skilled individual the amount of tricks that are applied to make the task shorter increases and therefore the overall time is reduced. Time is very relative to the artist but the best way you can improve is keyboard short-cuts.
4: Slow as shit, yeah the process is very slow and can be quite arduous, Photoshop blindness is an unfortunate condition many suffer with. In order to combat this problem, merely flip the entire canvas you are working on, once you have done this your image will look backwards and the mistakes kind of pop out.
Photoshop blindness occurs when you look at an image too long and it starts looking more real because you have been working on it for so long.
5: You're just plain terrible.
I know, I am a dick but most of what I sa... The majority of what I sa... Some of what I say is... I occasionally come up with true statements.
Who am I kidding I am Mr Perfect...
You're just plain terrible deal with it. You can deal with it by being as unoriginal as possible.
"But surely Marx, artists are only good if they are original"
*Slap* No!
Artists are derivative 'ass-holes' who have formulas on how to create art, these are evident in the Drawing styles, Tropes and Idioms of the genres, The definitions of the genre, The Techniques used, the Equipment used...
If you think being original is the only way forward, enjoy your mountain climb to being good at anything.
You will want to focus on the technique and most techniques require ball-achingly-long-stints-of-just-repeating-shit.
Like when a teacher tells you to write calligraphic lines that say.
"I will not be shitty at writing calligraphy."
Or when Mr Miyagi told that Karate kid who wanted to learn how to make his ride look better how to wax the car by just repeating the same thing over and over.
6: Copy / trace and repeat.
You want to get photo realistic?
Imagine if you were learning how to draw realistically, tracing to start with is the best way to get your hands used to the form and over time you will learn how everything supposed to go together.
When you are trying to make something, following tutorials is the best way to learn. It's boring when you get to a point but just keep on following those tutorials and soon your skills will be honed to perfection.
7: Copy pasta is never realistic...
EVER!!!
It looks awkward and flat, the object is hardly ever going to look 3D unless the plane matches perfectly.
Photoshop is a compositional program, you compose the image and alter the parts appropriately, never think you can just quick fix an image, it's rarely ever that straight forward.
Accept your image looks as fake as hell from the off and then work to fix it. As soon as you think it looks real, take a break and then come back, you would be amazed how unrealistic it could be.
Most of the fixes for COPYPASTED shit is the application of shadowing... Good shading will make a hell of a difference.
8: AVOID REFLECTIONS and GLASS!!!
You are going to get them wrong, I have seen so many attempts at GLASS and so many TERRIBLE reflections that it stopped being funny a while back.
If you are going to do glass or reflect something, you need to account for a lot of variables, so you may want to lay off this subject until you can at least replicate an image to a lesser extent painting.
9: Burn out...
Taking a long time is it?
Better stop before you burn out. Burning out is the leading cause of abandoned work.
Make some food, think about what you need to do to finish it, take a break, your only human.
So in summary.
Follow tutorials, Practice until your hands are numb, Learn keyboard shortcuts, be humble in your approach and most importantly, take a break from your work to avoid burn out.
That's pretty much it.
