Yesterday I suddenly had a realization. I remembered back to when I was first trying to figure out how to airbrush T shirts, how long it used to take me (often like 8 hours) and how crappy they looked - I used to nickel and dime it to death, work small areas at a time and keep going back over parts again and again. Until I bought some video tapes with tutorials done by pros, and almost overnight I got way faster and way way better. It was all about the way I was approaching it.
I feel like I'm at that stage now with digital painting. I can get some halfway decent results, but it takes for-freakin-evar and I'm nickel and diming them, working small areas when I should be working holistically on the entire image.
Though I suppose a lot depends on what kind of image you're doing. If you're trying to do a fully detailed portrait or a vast battle scene with loads of detail it's just going to take a long time and a heck of a lot of work. I should try to figure out how to do easier stuff - work out techniques I see people using like starting with silhouettes. I think it's important to learn how to simplify the early stages of the process, to develop a straightforward technique that quickly gets you through the bullshit parts.
One thing I notice is that some people are doing a very specific kind of art. Certain types of stock poses and stock ideas for instance. While I'm just spinning my wheels with no idea what kind of art I want to do, just basically "trying to learn the basics of painting".
I think when you have a very specific goal in mind you get there a lot faster than when you have no idea where you're headed. It's just a damn shame I don't want to do any of the typical stuff that's popular now, like fantasy card art or video game design. But I still need to work on streamlining the process.
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