slight detour into painting

hey everyone!

so I'm still editing the next videos for my zbrush tutorial series but in the meantime, since i am taking a short break from 3D freelance I decided to draw & paint.

now if you're here for 3D please understand I have no intention to quit, I just got horribly burned out from working with a gazillion clients who don't understand how 3D works. In fact the whole reason I got into 3D art was nothing short of a fluke.

*mini lifestory explanation start* you can skip this part if you already know!

I moved to New York from San Francisco in the summer of 2018 to become a painter. Like all I brought to NY were paintbrushes, paint, and my first lease wasn't even an apt it was a studio I rented from a girl doing ceramics. I literally came here to paint... however the same day I signed the lease, a friend I met months prior told me to come to a meeting with his business partner about a 3D startup. I can't disclose much about the job bc NDA but I basically started working for this startup as the one and only 3D person putting out 3D work every single day. I had to learn on the job, usually stay 3-5 hours after work just to study and practice. I disclosed this in a few online interviews early on when my 3D nails & 3D makeup stuff gained traction with fashion editorials. The 3D I did for the rest of 2018 and the first half of 2019 was practice material for my then full-time 3D start up job. It came with many perks and I enjoyed full time pay, health benefits, a huge office with free snacks, etc. However it did overwork me... a bit (an understatement). I was always stressed and never felt satisfied so I later quit and poured my entire being into h99 & underpaid freelance work.

I had to forfeit my lease on the painting studio pretty much a week after I signed the lease. I never put down a single stroke of paint. I seriously got whisked away into a midtown office job surrounded by techies! It was kinda the vibe I was trying to get away from when I left SF but you know it's hard to turn down a stable income! Anyway, it's been 2.5 years and I am finally... painting! 

*mini lifestory explanation end*

It's 2021 and I am so happy to start painting (and making prints). My friend asked me if I regret the time I waited and honestly, I don't. 

Quite frankly, I was pretty insecure and barely knew myself as an artist in 2018. Today? I feel a bit anxious but confident. I have the resources, the experience, and the know-how to produce work and market it. I think had I tried to just be a painter out of nowhere, I would have seriously struggled to get anywhere. I'm also grown (I turn 28 in like 3 weeks) and have significantly more mental stability compared to when I was 24/25. I just want to remind everyone that time and experience really matters. I've spent over a decade hating my work to finally start liking it... a little bit.

Images:

1-4: Clip Studio Paint. yo I haven't tried Procreate but this program is doing entire laps around my digital painting process in Photoshop. I've tried Corel, Paint Tool Sai, GIMP, etc and nothing has ever made me consider leaving Adobe until now. If you don't already know, Clip Studio Paint allows you to draw lines as vectors. Basically this is a god-send when it comes to cleaning up lineart, which can be demonstrated in this video. 

If you've ever tried to do any lineart in any digital program, you'll often get lines which cross. This program allows you to just click lines and erase them "to the intersection". Words cannot describe how mind-blowing and powerful this is. This will save you so much time and turmoil and actually make digital inking a fun process.

I've also experimented with painting and it's super straight forward. The brush options are limitless, and there's amazing shortcuts on how to fill your lineart (a painful process in photoshop). The fill tool also can close gaps in your lineart for you... which is also mind-blowing.

5-7: Oil painting. So I'm just getting started with this but I've got a canvas and some new brushes and my untouched paints. Getting started with a super basic set of colors (you can mix any color with these) 

• Cadmium Yellow Light (cool yellow)
• Yellow Ochre (warm yellow)
• Cadmium Red Light (warm red)
• Alizarin Crimson (cool red)
• Ultramarine Blue (violet blue)
• Cerulean Blue or Phthalo Blue (green blue, dark)
• Burnt Umber (warm dark brown)

Basically I'm starting with shades of yellow, red, and blue. Traditionally you can also get Sap/Veridian Green but you can mix green using yellow and blue. You can also buy black but I try to stay away from it bc I prefer to mix Burnt Umber and Ultramarine Blue into black. Using black from a tube usually enables me to just mix it into any color instead of thinking strategically like "I need a darker yellow, do I need to add warmth and cold to darken it?" 

This way of thinking was beat into me by my first year teacher at art college bc I would routinely take shortcuts with black that would cause my paintings to suffer in saturation. Color theory is also very useful information to know regardless of what medium you choose, whether it's traditional paint or 3D lighting. It's good to know the basics!

8. I used a grey acrylic paint (also known as gesso) to roughly fill my white canvas. This is a common procedure that a lot of artists use to see values (lights & darks) more accurately. I do this even in digital painting so I can see my colors without the blinding light of the white canvas.

I’ll keep y’all tuned in with my progress. I currently have no idea what to paint sooo I’m going to do a bit of sketching and research.

I also have a personal goal of getting that next modeling video up tomorrow.

Hope y’all stay inspired and motivated!