I'm learning Live classes Term 2 on NMA now and super excited to explore the Digital Figure Painting Techniques (taught by Iliya Mirochnik) and Introduction to Still Life Painting (taught by Catherine Bobkoski).
It's thrilling to come back to do figure painting. I did only one figure painting in April 2021 and that was it, nothing more after that. I have been focusing heavily on portrait drawing and painting for about seven months as I've been thinking that it was not the right time to do figure painting, it's too hard! Luckily, the Digital Figure Painting Live class from Iliya has appeared, and I now think that it's about time.
It's not easy at all as I've already imagined, but I can see improvements in my color choices and painting techniques. Interestingly, portrait painting practice in previous months have made me a better painter somehow. I need to learn more about human anatomy and it's going to take a long time. I'll do whatever I can, otherwise, figure painting will be unreachable forever! After receiving feedbacks from Iliya, my instructor, my artwork has looked better as you can see from the April vs the August figure painting above.
(This figure was done entirely in Clip Studio Paint using Lasso Fill)
One of my assignments suggested to use Clip Studio Paint. Luckily, I bought Clip Studio Paint for like a year ago when it was on sale, but I had rarely used it until Iliya showed me how he did a whole painting by using only the Lasso Fill in this software. Lasso painting is much faster in Clip Studio Paint than Photoshop as I don't have to press Alt + Backspace repeatedly to fill each selection with foreground color. In Clip Studio Paint, after select the Lasso Fill, I can simply focus on drawing selection areas and the software will automatically fill in the foreground color. This makes the whole lasso painting process twice as fast in my opinion. Furthermore, Clip Studio Paint can run very smoothly with the current 8GB DDR3 RAM of my five-year-old PC computer.
(I painted all these three practice artworks using Rebelle's digital oils)
Meanwhile. I'm doing the Still Life Painting Live class digitally in Rebelle 4 after observing how Catherine did her painting demo with traditional oils. This is quite fun and challenging just as the time I decided to do portrait painting in digital oils in previous months. It stills feel helpful to revisit art fundamentals like value scale, how to turn a form and edge control with each still life painting assignment.
I think that's it for now. I'll keep having fun exploring new drawing and painting skills.
Thanks for reading my monthly blog and have fun exploring, everyone!