Things I Learned From Don Suggs

This is Don Suggs.


Don Suggs is a guy who talks a lot. Here is what he told me.

General Advice:
- Steal everything you can while you are a student. Take everything that you like and put it into your own work. Originality is not important now. Building a wide vocabulary is.
- Visual Representation alone is not interesting enough by itself. You need something more.
- Things put where we least expect them create interesting pictures.
Art vs. Illustration
- Illustration is about giving you all the information necessary for you to receive it and move on.
- Art is about provoking you, grabbing you, and giving you a deeper meaning.
- If you want the viewer to linger on your piece, don't give them all the information. Use inferences.
- Art is NOT about inspiration. Art is about working through boredom for 8 hours a day to produce something that is not horribly unnattractive.

Art Advice:
- Don't look at the details. Look at the big picture. Work from the formless to the forms.
- There is no reason why you can’t tilt the horizon.
- Don’t be too cute. Always be a little sinister in your pieces. [???]
- Still lifes are boring. [...]
- Don’t overwork one area of your image. Concentrate on the image as a whole. Work on everything with equal priority.
- Repetition (or echoes) creates visual interest and partnering balance [...].
- Unifying patterns or textures help to break up the space in an otherwise “clean” image.

Important Advice:
- Adding birds makes everything better.

Obi Wan (Digital Painting)

Digital Painting Attempt #02.
Rules:
1 Layer + Background
No Tracing, No Color Swapping
No Photoshop Effects, No Transparency (100% opacity brushes)
No Manipulation of image (Brushes Only)
5-10 MIN: My main plan is to work from large forms and break them down smaller and smaller until I reach the final image. I want to start out with large brushes, and only several colors, no more. I attempt to start out with loose shapes to Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy (Thanks, Miss Frizzle)! I currently have three colors here: Skin, Robe, and Dark Robe.20 MIN: I realize that the round brush in Photoshop is not very good. I switch to a somewhat horizontal brush that closer resembles that of a paintbrush. I go down slightly smaller in brusher size and I use more colors, but I still keep the palette manageable.
30 MIN: Now some real forms start to appear and it looks like a human, but not Obi-Wan yet; continuing with smaller brushes and more colors. This is the first real stage where I start to refine the shape from my messy beginnings.60 MIN: I get pickier about the palette and try to nail the basic forms down to the wire. It starts to resemble Obi-Wan. I must get the likeness and impression down here, before I go down and refine it, or else I am a goner.
100 MIN: This is where I start the process of refinement to break down the larger forms into smaller forms. It starts to look like Obi-Wan a lot more. I still must resist the notion of going into details, however. I also must be careful in my smaller work process not to destroy the basic forms. 150 MIN: Further refinement leads to a crisper image. Since I have the basic forms down now, its just a matter of more refinement (last time I use this word, I promise), cleaning up, and alteration to fix any mistakes. This is where it can get tedious.190 MIN: I add in a background. I'm getting slightly bored after three hours.
300 MIN (Final Image): Five hours later I break my rule to add a lightsaber with a glow effect on a separate layer (it wasn't worth it to paint the glow). That didn't feel like five hours. Luckily I am not a perfectionist anymore, or else I would be here for at least two more hours. I think I did alright for my second ever digital painting, but this is more like my first digital painting since my self-portrait doesn't really count. That was more like a digital mish-mash experiment.
The End!

Self Portrait 1

I believe the rule is, you work on the picture for as long as you can until you get sick of it, and boy am I sick of it.

Picture Taken: June '07
Drawn from Reference: November, 17-27, 2007
No color sampling or tracing was done. 2 layers used: 1 for background, 1 for head. Total hours of work: roughly estimated between 5-8 hours.

Beginner's Guide to Drawing (For Adventure Games?)

Alrighty then... I am going to outline several (common?) mistakes that face beginner artists when creating their first backgrounds. All of these mistakes I made myself, and I hopefully have outgrown them by now.

1 - Make A Sketch

When I first started drawing, I had some idea of what I wanted the background to look like, but ideas always work better when fleshed out first. After making a sketch, you can re-evaluate your ideas and change them if necessary.

2 - Color Choice
I think this is quite a common mistake that beginners make. When I first started drawing, I used alot of highly saturated colors. In real life, you won't come across pure blue, red, or white that often. You should choose colors that are less saturated and don't strike out of the screen very brightly (but it all depends on what you're drawing).

3 - Perspective
Many beginner drawings look flat, fake, and unrealistic because of bad perspective. 1 Point perspective is easy once you learn it, and it can help make the leap from a fake drawing, to a more realistic one.

4 - Objects
Rooms exist with alot more than bare walls, blank ceilings, and just a chair or table. This seems quite obvious, but many people (myself included) just draw rooms as bare as can be, until they start thinking about it. There are many things that can be added to a room besides the basic furniture. These could be lights, vents, baseboards, outlets, switches, or other pieces of furniture.

5 - Shading

Shadows can add life to a picture, and make objects stand out, or appear realistically. There's some kind of special rules for shadows, but I forget them or never learned them.

6 - Broken & Dirty

When I first started drawing, I would draw objects as clean as possible. This meant that all tables, chairs, and walls looked liked they were just built yesterday. But as in the case of real life, things get old, dirty, and they wear out over the years. You could add cracks, dried out paint, smudges, or anything that would happen to the item in question if it existed for awhile. You don't have to go overboard though. Some things actually do manage to stay clean :P.

7 - Lighting
It gets dark outside when it's late. Night and day should always be conveyable in your pictures. Make the scene darker or lighter if necessary, depending on whether it is an interior or exterior scene. Always pay attention to your light sources, whether these be lamps, the sun, the moon, or a single light hanging from the ceiling. Lighting is very important to a realistic picture.

Teh Secret Trick! Okay everybody knows this, but flipping a picture horizontally will expose errors that you did not see previously. This is because of something in your brain/eye.

This guide is not based on any proven techniques, professional or otherwise. It is mainly based on my personal experience, and the advice of some other people.

The End.