Last Friday, courtesy of the fine programs at conceptart.org, I had the amazing opportunity to get a portfolio review from Jon Foster and Carl Dobsky. If you aren't aware of who these two folks are, go find out - it's worth it.

I had the privilege of sitting through just a fraction of their bajillion hour portfolio review for a huge line of folks (myself included) and in doing so got to see a lot of recurring themes on what people need help with. I wanted to take a moment and share a thought that was highly brought on by this.

KEEP PRACTICING FUNDAMENTAL THINGS.

You don't have to be horribly knowledgeable to understand that there are foundation things that many of us need help with. Not only that, but foundation things that we will ALWAYS need to practice to stay on top of things.

You've all heard it before - anatomy, composition, lighting, focal points and movement, etc etc. These aren't all the easiest of things, but they are all things that are important to study often. Yet we saw, for hours on end, people who were avoiding these very things. Growing complacent with things that we know aren't right, isn't what art is all about.

Some things that I really want some of you to think about:

-Figure studies. We always need some help with people, the tighter your knowledge becomes on people the easier you will have convincing an audience that this figure is real. How do you do this? You draw a lot of them. Borrow a friend, draw them. Find awesome stock artists here on DA and draw the poses. Go to a life drawing class. Whatever it takes, do more figure studies. Afraid of nudes for some reason? Fine, don't bother with nudes. It helps a lot, but you can learn plenty from clothed models too. What matters is that you study these forms. Especially in different lighting.

-Lighting. Do more of it, move the light source around - set up things in your own living space under different angles of lighting and draw it. I loved doing this with crumpled up blankets, perhaps I'll do more of this soon. None the less - see how light falls over a form.

-Time. Take longer than 20 minutes on the base level of your sketch guys.... I'm not kidding... I'm so tired of watching friends spend less than a half hour conceptualizing and then painting it up and spending weeks fixing the errors that they created when they could have just fixed the sketch with another half hour of tweaking. Really now, get the foundation strong before you build the structure. Stop rushing though.

-Composition. Many of you over-complicate this (I know this because I get questions monthly about how to make a composition). Think of simple geometry and then how to make your image structure fit within that to keep things interesting. Then think of how to make the values and colors support this with depth. Think simple, then work up to the complex juicy bits.

There's more, but hopefully you get the jist of it all - think through your pieces, slow down a bit, do studies to get solid on your knowledge, and generally treat yourself like a student. We're never done learning, so why slow it down out of complacency?


With this in mind, I think it's fair to talk about the criticisms against my own work. None of us are perfect, I'm certainly far from it. It came out very quick in the review that my work is too contrasty. Too many dark darks, not enough mid tone. I need to work on this! I got complacent as I found it sped me up and allowed me to hit deadlines... but perhaps it's keeping me from the next tier of clients.... I need to find out. From there, at times my focal points got funky, this is on a few newer pieces (and will be changing before most of you see said pieces ). And through a critique on another person I started to believe that I use the same lighting too much, so I need to move this around a little more, change the Point of View a bit perhaps, and generally direct the image into more exciting views that keep a viewer more engaged. And finally, my anatomy use didn't come up, but I know I know I need to work on faces, especially female faces.

I urge you all to look upon your own work with honest eyes, truly ask yourself if anything is holding you back from what you want to be doing with that work. Write down what you discover, and slowly work to cross those things off of the list. We owe it to ourselves.

This winter I believe I'll be doing more studies and posting them up. Work by example, I was taught, I hope some of you will join along

-CMalidore