Results of PG Supplementary Examination of August 2015

The Results of

P.G. Supplementary Examination of 

August 2015 

has been notified in the College. 

For details contact college office

End Semester PG Results of July 2015

PG Results July 2015

A Psychochronography in Blue (Part 6)

I think, by now, you probably know the drill.  On the chance that you're a newcomer to these here shores you can read the previous entries in this series by clicking here. You don't need to in order to follow along, but the option is there if you need it.

So, new cover for a new Phil Sandifer joint, this one being the 6th of the main series of TARDIS Eruditorum, 'The Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who' (because Phil loaths a short subtitle).  To see Phil's post on the subject, click here.

By all rights, this should have been my personal favorite of the series to do, as it lands smack dab in the middle of an era I hold dear.  Oddly though that very fact made it less satisfying, as nothing I could do would ever live up to the memories of the ridiculous gaudy graphic excesses of the mid-80's (the prime example of the theme being the 6th Doctor's much maligned coat).  I did my best though, in line with Phil's preferences, and quite like the result.

You may note that it looks a bit like a book cover, but also ever so slightly like a cover from a video game.  There are reasons (other than just myself and Dr. Sandifer being colossal nerds), but we'll get to that later.  If we follow Dylan Thomas' advice to begin at the beginning (which wasn't actually advice), then we track back all the way to a set of thumbnails.  Ideas and options for further exploration.

This is actually the second set of thumbnails I'd sent, the first consisting of only the first row.  Let's break down the thought process in picking the 'right' one (you'll note none of these tally exactly with the final cover - we'll get there).  The cover had an additional difficulty this time, since it had to cover two Doctors instead of one, complicating the amount of information the cover had to relay.

The first two were dismissed because Phil thought they might be too 90's - they're not, being pretty strongly mid 80's, but if Phil's memories were throwing him off he wouldn't be the only one, so they were out (I think there's some potential in the second one for some other things though).

The last one was dismissed because it might be too obscure (It's based on Queen's Kind of Magic album cover), and raise questions in those who got it as to why the book didn't contain an essay on Highlander, which then raises the question, why wasn't there an essay on Highlander?

This left the other two as the only strong contenders in the first batch.  From the rest, Phil liked the Rubix Cube TARDIS (And I've now forgotten why we didn't push another round with those, because they are sort of fun), ruled out the neon faces and crest, and liked some of the Logos.  The C64 ASCII art TARDIS was deemed too plain, but it did bring up that we both have associations with the era and the Commodore 64 computer.  Some logos were liked, and some were not.  Somehow, through the discussions, the following resulted.

In these you can see the first real signs of what would become the final cover.  It also raised a lot of points for discussion, such as how noisy the cover could be in terms of looking like a photograph of a graphic over just being the graphic, and how the books apparent age is worked out (this wasn't an issue before, but this one has two Doctors, and the next covers time outside the airing of the show on TV).  For the record, the book covers are intended to be era appropriate for the end of the time covered within them.  And I just realised that this is the first book without the dates it covers marked. Bugger. Not the end of the world though.  Moving on.

So from that we arrived at these two, which are minor variants of the same (one was ironing out some things I wasn't sure I could do, like making it look as though the image was a photograph of a CRT television), including the heavily sloped A, because nothing says 80's like a heavily sloped letter or two - just ask Jean Michele Jarre.  Phil approved the first, and then went radio silent on the second because he was busy - this may have had the longest gestation period of the covers since we were both tremendously busy at various times during it.  The last book technically took longer, but most of that time it wasn't under discussion, so much as sitting on my hard drive doing nothing.  The first email on the subject of this one was back at the beginning of June.

Anyway, he didn't respond for a while, which gave me time to mull things over - always a dangerous occurrence.

Phil also writes Last War in Albion as you possibly know.  Last War in Albion is about the mystical war between the writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.  That sounds weirder than it is, but it uses that to explore the history of the two and all sorts of asides in a similar way that TARDIS Eruditorum uses the alchemical aspects of Doctor Who as a springboard to other diverse topics of discussion.  Anyway, that's all by the by, the important thing is that that reading it reminded me of the rear cover to Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke, which is a playing card featuring Batman and The Joker.

Since we were already discussing the possibility of the cover containing a computer style illustration it made sense to make the playing card idea following that sensibility, and furthermore, once I did it the whole thing looked to me like the cover to a video game from Rainbird or Firebird; things like Elite, Starglider or Morpheus (I may be showing my age here).  Based on that I wanted a screenshot on the box.  A screenshot of the non-existent TARDIS Eruditorum game.

I may have nerded out a little over this cover.  Again.

So since we're in nerdville I may as well go a little further and cover some things I did for the cover that most people will never notice or care about.  If you really don't want to know any of this, scan on down past the red framed text.  If you're a hopeless saddo like me, then it's time to get (gently) technical, a little personal and somewhat old school.  Reminiscence is likely to happen.

Geek Starts Here

So I got my start in digital art a long time ago in a country far far away.  We'd borrowed my grandfather's Dragon 32 computer for a few weeks, and so my dad, being a hopeless geek himself, decided to learn to program it.  I was 8, and Oh My God That's My Son's Age!  I only remember one thing he did, which was a graphics package called Doodle.  It was pretty amazing, featuring such advanced things (for the time) as rubber banding & limited animation.

It should have sold thousands of copies and funded the next version (which he started on but never finished - pixel editing and zoom were on the cards); it sold about 10 copies.  After that we gave the computer back, and eventually got a Commodore Plus/4.

Nobody remembers that computer it seems, but I rather liked it.  I learned to program a bit myself, and worked out how to do art on it.  This involved working a picture out on graph paper and entering the colours and co-ordinates as a program.  Eventually my dad bought me an art package for it - I don't remember the name of it sadly, but it was a start.  For old times sake here's a link to a video of the C+4 rip-off of Boulderdash; Icicle Works.

Eventually we got a Commodore 64 (I think I was 11 or 12) and a copy of OCP Art Studio and that was pretty much it for me, I was hooked.  Eventually I got an Amiga with Deluxe Paint, and then a PC with Photoshop, and then a tablet for it and so on and so on.

But I did a lot of work on the C64.  A lot.  In fact my GCSE art project was done on one (this was a combination of original art and loading screens from various games copied pixel by pixel from games magazines.  Yes it was partially plagiarism, but I didn't appreciate that at the time since I was doing it the hard way, and learning a lot at the same time. You'll note I credit pretty much everything when I can these days - Guilt from when I was 15.

But this does mean I have a pretty solid understanding of the limitations of computers, specifically the C64, circa 1986.  With that in mind I decided to be as accurate as I could.

Firstly, I did it the dumb way.  I should have looked for something like HermIRES, which purports to simulate the C64 limitations on other systems (I just found that while looking for something unrelated, and I'm totally going to snag it in case I need to do something like this again).  Instead I set Photoshop to use double wide aspect pixels and did it in there with the pencil tool and the C64's 16 colour palette and resolution.  Yes, the C64 had double wide pixels on it's multicolour mode - it also had a limitation on 4 colours per 4x8 'square'; I couldn't simulate that limitation, but I did my best to stick to it anyway.

So that got me the Game screen and the Playing card, but back in days of old the way you'd get things from the computer into a magazine or on to a gamebox was to photograph the screen, which gave such shots a fairly distinctive look.  Here's a couple of scans from the old Zzap 64 magazine -1, 2 - note the screenshots are slightly blurry and slightly distorted and you can see the pattern of the TV's electron mask.  Sometimes you'd have the slight shadow of the screen's redraw too, if the photographer messed up the exposure.

So I wanted to simulate all of that, even though it would be quite likely nobody would have any idea that I had.

Short of buying a CRT, and working out how to hook the PC up to it, and then photographing it (yeah... no thanks), I had to simulate it.  I did this by creating a small mask pattern and then repeating that for each pixel in the simulated screen.  For the low resolution CRT display (400 x 480i) this worked out at a whopping image of 12240x8160.  Into this I would paste my simulated C64 resolution image, and then scale it up using Nearest Neighbor mode (which doesn't blur or sharpen the pixels).  Some additional fiddling with blend modes and offsets and such gave me a pretty reasonable CRT look.  Then that was duplicated, flattened, and the next step was simulating the photography of an actual screen, which involved distorting the previous image, adding  some vignetting and some reflection off the curvature as well as a little bit of a redraw shadow.

Yes, that was a bit long winded, but I think the results are pretty good.

Geek Ends Here

After that it was predominantly a case of finalising the layout, adding the text, doing the wear, lightening the blue, that sort of thing.  Stuff I've covered in many of the posts about the previous covers.  I did go back and add 'rounded' corners to the playing card, and give it a little perspective and a reflection though, because 80's, and I also cut it out of its 'screen' a little less accurately because back then people did such things by hand (you'll never notice, it's really subtle).  I also cut out the torn label by hand, but it's basically using the exact same technique as I use to do the wearing on the cover, and I covered that back on Book 2.

One thing that's worth covering here though is the Chrome logo.  Because 80's chrome is the best chrome.

I've done a lot of chrome over the years, firstly because I was actually around during the 80's, when everything had some chrome, but then because I was doing vehicle logos for things like Saints Row (now there's a Before the Blog post I should do).  Usually I can do a pretty reasonable job by hand, or with filters or by using layer FX.  None of that would work here (at least on its own) because the logo was too big.

So it's all done with vectors, other than a drop shadow and slight bevel overlay using the Layer FX options.   This was actually pretty easy - a couple of gradient shapes, an outline, another gradient, done.  Not terribly in depth, but worth noting that I did something I'm very familiar with in a very different way.

Once Phil had the final page count I decided to put the original Pixelated Doctors image on the spine, because the spine was huge, and I liked the image.  Phil submitted and there was a mistake somewhere that meant I had to reduce the size of the spine again, but the image still fitted just fine.  Both myself and Phil were a little surprised the cover didn't get rejected due to some of the text being upside down.  That actually answered a question we had over a previous cover, but didn't  have the guts to try back then.  This wasn't done as a test for this cover - we just forgot it might be an issue until it wasn't one.

And there you have it.  This is the second and last 1980's cover, since the next book covers up until 1995, so I'll have to brush up on my 90's before then.  I promise the next one won't have a huge influence from era specific home computers though.  Well... maybe not.

ಗಾಂಧಿ-ಮರಳಿ ಮಣ್ಣಿಗೆ, ಶತಮಾನದ ನೆನಪು

The Bumper-Fun Summer Speedpaint Special

"You only posted once last month you lazy bugger."  I know, I know, I'm just not as committed to this blogging lark as I should be, but in my defence last month I messed up my back, had a vehicular breakdown, bought a new car, had two family visits, did (a lot of) things at work I can't divulge, saw a meteor shower, had a kid that couldn't sleep (this is not a new child, the old one is just now having issues), had my wedding anniversary, did five speedpaints, read three books, taught my son to play Chess, and made an omelette.  Given all that it's amazing I managed the (fairly wordy) post that I did.

Actually, it was six speedpaints I guess, but one of them was more like a speed sketch page (I did almost no actual sketching this last month - busy, see?), I'll show it anyway.

But in addition to that, since I didn't post about it last month it's actually eleven speedpaints I need to cover this month, plus a bonus guest one from my brother, for reasons we'll get to below.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software Used: ArtRage
Based On: A Pinterest pin I neglected to pin.

This one was an odd experience.  I tried to take a reference (which I've now lost; it was a thumbnail on Pinterest and I forgot to pin it) and then paint something slightly different from it.  I mostly succeeded I think, although her stomach looks slightly odd, like there's no definition there (I don't mean she's lacking muscle).  Now I've said that I realise I should do another speedpaint focussing on that area from a similar angle to help me work it out for next time.

Nothing terribly exciting in the step by step, except I'd abandoned the reference by the second stage here.  Some things worked out quite well (I like her shirt and trousers), while other things sort of got a little muddled as I went along (I prefer the original angle of her head for example, and I think I made it too small when I was refining it).  At the end I threw on some filters and such for fun, but it wasn't like it was going to save it or anything.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
Software Used: Photoshop
Based on: Nada

This was one of those 'sketch it as soon as you think of it' things that I've started to try and do.  It was a possible book cover, but looks like if I ever do a more finished version now it won't be for a book.

Time Taken: 175 Minutes
Software Used: ArtRage
Based On: Personal Photo

This is one of the 'Designated Area' series.  It's not really a designated area, it's just a side road opposite the police station that I stopped at for a smoke (I wasn't headed to or from the cop-shop, it just happened to be across the street).

Before I started this one I created some perspective lines for reference using a free piece of software called Carapace (From the makers of Gears of War... really, kinda).  The vanishing point is not quite in the same location as it was in the Photograph, so the end result is from a subtly different angle, with a slightly different FOV.  I don't love it - I certainly need more environmental practice, but I've done a lot worse.

Time Taken: 40 Minutes
Software Used: Photoshop
Based On: A thumbnail I saw somewhere

This was indeed based on a thumbnail I saw somewhere.  I don't recall where, and it doesn't really matter since the only real resemblance between this and the thumbnail is her hairstyle and the frilly bits at the top of her dress.  I was playing around with doing something more colourful and more graphic (very loosely inspired by the works of Vasili Zorin), and I like the result (for a change), but haven't done anything similar to it since.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software Used: Photoshop
Based on: A Streetview view

I was wandering around in Google Streetview, sightseeing, as you do, when I 'looked' up for a change and decided 'I needed to paint that'.

I forgot to bookmark where the view was though, so I can never go back there, because Earth is a very large place.

I'm a little sad that the leaves got a little smushy toward the end, but I was surprised how well a brush I made for painting oilstains 8 years ago worked for painting leaves in the first place.  Also, there's a surprising amount of blue and yellow in this picture of something you'd usually think of as being green.

Time Taken: 30 minutes
Software: Photoshop

I was just mucking about with brushes for 30 minutes.  The head in the upper middle is made out of hand prints.  I should do a full painting like that someday.  This was the first image of August incidentally, if you were trying to keep track.

No, it shouldn't count as a speedpaint, but I'm doing so anyway, because male ballerina, or something.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: An image about halfway down this page

Saw this one on Pinterest, and decided I liked the pose, and the amount of contrast, so I knocked it out pretty quickly.  I should have spent a little more time on it perhaps because my Wife thought it was a picture of Prince.  Clearly it's Little Richard, but what can you do?

Time Taken: 115 Minutes
Software: ArtRage
Based on: This photo by DrunkHobo-Stock

I was trying something new for this one.  Basically I took my usual preferred settings for the ArtRage Oil tool and reversed them to try and get a more Acrylic looking result.  It mostly worked I think.  I also used the Palette Knife tool to distress it up a bit.

Two Step by Step images for this one, as I thought his face was actually the most interesting bit.  You can also see just how roughly this one was painted here.  I quite like the result, and I'll probably do more in this manner in the future.

Time Taken: 125 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: This image sort of, from the gallery of William Yan

Similar to the first image of the post, this was an attempt to modify an image while I painted to produce something very different, this time combined with a lighting study.  It's the most successful attempt so far, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. I got quite into painting this one, and am lacking a step by step image as a result, but originally she was going to have horns.  By the time I was at this point though I'd forgotten about them, so this one may come back some time in the future - this time with the headgear.

Time Taken: 25 Minutes
Software: Photoshop

This one is basically awful  It's okay, it happens.  More than I'd like really.  Anyway, moving on.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Really?  I think you should know this one.

This was a fun one because it was part of a challenge me and my brother set for each other.  He's an artist too, which I'm sure distressed our parents to no end when we were growing up, but my mother seems quite proud now that her two sons are making a living in a creative field.

Anyway, he recently started Speedpainting himself (not pictures of himself you understand; he, himself, recently started), and so after his first couple of goes we thought it might be fun to have a Paintoff.  Nothing serious of course, no honor on the line, just an interest in how close our respective styles are.  The rules were simple: Use Photoshop, 1 hour time limit, Use of grids allowed, no tracing and colour sampling, and no filters except Gaussian Blur (use of adjustments was allowed).  Each of us picked a photo, and we'd paint both (you can see the other next month if you haven't seen it posted elsewhere yet).

So, the step through is basically what you'd expect from me.  Originally I was going to give it a really scratchy look, but I didn't like the brush I started with much and so switched back to the tried and true one by Stage 3, which I mostly stuck with for the rest of the paint except right at the end where I switched to the same blobby oil stain brush I used for the leaves in the tree painting above.  That's probably the most useful 'odd' brush I have - I've used it for smoke trails in the past too. I should do a whole painting with it one day.

This is the result of the challenge, with mine on the left and his on the right.  He didn't crop his, but he also went over the time limit and took twice as long over it.  Despite that mismatch, I think it's still interesting to compare the two.

INAUGURATION of P.G. Courses 

scheduled for 2nd September 2015 

has been postponed to 3rd September 2015 

due to the probable BHARATH BUNDH

A Musing 7: 10 Tips for Digital Beginners

I was asked yesterday if I had any tips for digital painting I could share.  The answer to that is "Yeah, I do, but it might not be much help to you." Which isn't terribly useful, but is potentially true.  My way of creating art isn't necessarily your way.  I can give helpful advice and tips, some of which may work for you, and others won't, depending on your style, chosen subject matter and so on.  Use what works for you, ditch the rest.

So the following are some tips for those just starting out at digital painting (as the person who asked my advice was). For more advanced things... well, see point 3 below.

There are no images in this post - I might rectify that at some point.


1) Know Your Software

When people think of Graphics software they usually think of Photoshop.  If you have Photoshop you don't need anything else right?  With Photoshop you can do everything!  Well, yes and no.  It's true that there are very few two dimensional tasks you can't do with Photoshop, but that doesn't mean Photoshop is the easiest way to achieve them, and also not the best way to learn to do them.

When I was first learning to paint digitally...  Sorry, relearning to paint digitally, and of course I still am learning... I thought Photoshop would be the way to go.  I have many years of experience with it after all, and, well, it can do anything.  It wasn't though - the way I'd used Photoshop was to do specific things, and paint (textures mostly) in a specific way, and I discovered that Photoshop is crap for some things you want to be fairly fluid, like changing your color.  It's improved a lot in that regard in the last few years, and of course I use it a lot for painting now. Still, there are enough technical restraints in place that it can detract from the process of learning to paint digitally in favor of just learning to use Photoshop.

There are other options, some of them much cheaper.  Some of them you may take to like a duck to water, and others you may despise and never want to use again.  Fortunately for this latter point, a lot of commercial software has a 30 day demo.

Personally I like ArtRage.  It's what I started reteaching myself on, and as well as having a very naturalistic feel it also has a very intuitive UI intended to make painterly tasks such as switching or mixing color very easy.  It has a limited set of default paint tool types, but a 'sticker' spray that has more Photoshop like power should you need it.  It encourages 'real' painting, where once you put down a brush stroke you're more or less stuck with it, lacking many of the manipulation tools that Photoshop has (it does have some, but they aren't anywhere near as powerful, and of course you can undo, so you're not really stuck with it).  As well as all of this, it's also extremely cheap!  I believe the current price is $50 for desktop, $5 for tablets.

Other popular packages include PaintTool Sai (small, shareware, has a trial), Autodesk Sketchbook and Sketchbook Pro (smallish, cheapish, available for tablets), and Corel Painter (complex, pricey, powerful, has a trial), but there are dozens more, including the recent Paintstorm Studio, which has some bugs, but is currently very cheap and has even more powerful brush options than even Photoshop.

Even if you have several of these packages, it's worth taking the time to get to know what they can do, and how easily they can do it.  As I've said, for what I wanted to do Artrage was the best way to go, and I've taken what I learned there and applied it to other packages (mainly Photoshop).  Each package is capable of supporting a wide range of styles and techniques, but in some ways they're just like traditional media in that each one has it's own pros and cons, its own feel and limitations, and its own learning curve.  The better you learn the software the better the stuff you can create with it, and just like traditional media, where you need something that makes a mark in order to produce 2D art, you need software to do it digitally (even if it's Notepad - yes, really).

So pick the one that feels best to you (within your budget), and stick to it for a while, branching out when you're more comfortable.

2) Pick Useable (but cost effective) Hardware

If your software is the pencil lead making the marks, then the hardware is the barrel of the pencil that you actually hold.  If your pencil is too thin or too thick or too long or short then it's going to make creating with it more difficult, no matter how well sharpened it is.  Same for computer hardware; I can paint with a mouse, but it's going to require more time and frustration than using a tablet, and the results won't be as good.

Tablet in this case can mean two things - A Graphics Tablet, such as the Wacom Intuos, or something like an iPad or Nexus.  I don't much like using my Nexus for painting.  I can do it, but I miss the pressure sensitivity the Wacom for my Desktop brings.

The price of these things may be an issue, but while I'm 'upgrading' to a Cintiq in the next week (like a monitor with a pressure sensitive tablet built in), I've been using the same small first generation Intuos tablet for the last 15 years, and it hasn't failed me yet.  So they can cost a fair penny, but you don't need a large one, and they can last an extremely long time (I'll still be using this one to supplement the Cintiq).

The pros and cons of the Wacom style tablet are that it's highly sensitive (pressure, tilt, etc), and much easier and more accurate than using a mouse, but it takes some getting used to having to move your hand here, while the cursor moves over there.  Cheap alternatives are available, but almost every professional will pick the Wacom brand over anything else.

A Nexus style tablet on the other hand has the advantage of being able to see exactly where you're going to put a stroke.  On the other hand you lose a lot of the sensitivity, and keyboard shortcuts become problematic (there are gestures though, but they're on the same screen you're painting on).

I wouldn't recommend a Cintiq to someone starting out - they are extremely expensive, and surprisingly quite a few digital illustrators actually don't like them much.

And despite what I said above, it is possible to create amazing work with a mouse, if you have the patience.

3) Learn Art

This is of course a given, but it's surprising how many people don't realise it.  Digital tools make art easier, a lot easier in some cases, but they don't replace the need to know the same fundamentals of art that traditional media requires. Things like composition, colour usage or anatomy.  If you're a good traditionalist, then move along, but if not you'll still need to work on the same skills, just that you can work on them digitally and take advantage of the Undo option.

I'm not going to cover the fundamentals of art here, but there are a lot of tutorials out there on the web.  I'd recommend the blog of James Gurney, Muddy Colors and Proko as reasonable places to learn more about the basics (and some of the more advanced things - you'll need to dig a little on the blogs to find the learny bits).  You can also check out Deviantart or Pinterest and do a search for tutorials.  There's libraries too - a lot of knowledge found in books has not filtered onto the Internet yet, which is why I have a bookshelf groaning under the weight of art tomes.

Anyone can learn to be a reasonably competent artist, but you need to work at it, Digital or not.

4) Take It Slow

So you've got some grounding in art, and you've moved to digital and... well things just don't look as good as when you use a pencil or a brush, what gives?  Or maybe you don't have a grounding in art, but you can draw a stick man, and can't do one digitally.

Well, if you were an artist versed in the use of colored pencils or marker pens, you wouldn't be surprised if your first foray into oil paint wasn't a great success, because even knowing the fundamentals all the details are different.  Digital is no different.  Before you can really produce masterpieces (or any pieces really) you need to work out how the software (or the software's individual tool) handles color mixing, or blending or how big your brush is at any one time.

Unlike the previous point though, learning software doesn't take very long, and has some advantages if you need to make use of them for learning.  The undo tool is of course the most obvious.  Make a mistake?  Undo it like it never happened.  Most modern software has multiple undo states, so you can make quite a few strokes before you realise you went wrong and need to remove them.

One thing people used to painting traditionally - or who just learned about colour at school - can have difficulty is the way computers handle color.  They use an additive system rather than the subtractive one most children first learn and painters are familiar with.  This is less of a problem when you can see the color wheel right in front of you, as is quite common now, but it can be confusing when you need to mix red and green to make yellow rather than yellow and blue to make green.  Just experiment with it for a bit and it will become second nature as will using the software in general.  Don't work on serious pieces right out of the gate - simple experiments that don't take long are more disposable, and teach you just as much about how to use the tools (I should take my own advice going the other way there, and do small practice pieces with real paint).

5) Show People

Whatever you do, share it with people.  If you want feedback or help then ask for it, there is probably someone willing to supply it.  One nice thing about sharing (even the 'bad' stuff) is that people will see when you're improving and remark upon it.  Artists are usually their own worst critics, and so relying upon their own view of their works can be discouraging.  It can be difficult to gauge the quality of work without having fresh eyes upon it.  Equally though, it is more than possible to get so hung up on that bit of the painting you hate that you completely missed that it looks like a flying penis instead of an angel (this has happened, allegedly).  So again, getting other folks eyes on it occasionally can help.

One thing about critiques though; a well reasoned critique can help a lot, but you should never take a critique personally no matter how instructive or blunt they are.  Some folks are not artists, but can still critique your work with valid observations.  Other folks are artists but are terrible at supplying useable critique.  "It sucks" or "You suck" is not helpful to anyone.  If you get such critique you should ignore it, or at least ask someone why it might suck.

On the opposite side, if someone compliments your work, bask in the glory for a moment, thank the commenter, but then ask yourself why it's good. Or ask someone else.  "This is awesome!" is technically no more constructive than "This is awful!", but it can still be a learning experience either way.

Positive comments do help the ego more though, and might result in more artistic drive, but that shouldn't be the only reason to share your work (if it is then the eventual "This sucks" will hurt all the more).  Sometimes those compliments might make you feel odd that nobody can see how awful that piece is - it happens.  Learn from it anyway.

6) Study Others

In addition to books and other sources that can tell you how to approach things, you can also learn a lot from studying how others do things.  A lot of artists (of which I'm one, as are some of the amazing illustrators on Muddy Colors) will happily share their processes.  Others will record video of themselves working and put it on YouTube, and some post their works to Pinterest as well as their own sites (or others post 'for' them - Often with no credit sadly).

Having someone walk you through it might be better, but you can still glean a lot from someone just demonstrating how they do things. Yes, it may be that is still seems like magic as they work, but they've studied at least a bit, and have been doing this longer than you.  When you discover how a good magician does a trick, it doesn't mean you can automatically copy them.  In fact for me it actually increases my level of respect for the amount of time it must have taken them to master something so complex and make it look simple and natural (or supernatural, given they're a magician), or even something so simple, yet make it look so very complex that nobody can work out how it was done.

The same is true of art. An artist is much more likely to share their 'tricks' with you than a magician, but it will still take a lot of practice to pull that off yourself.  Even so, at least you know how the trick was done from the study of it, which  puts you a long way ahead of those who think it was produced out of a hat with nothing more than some mythical natural talent*.  It can also ground you with regards to how much work can go into a really polished piece, so you don't beat yourself up that you're not as good after only 30 minutes.  Yes, they might be faster and better than you no matter what, but again, they've been doing it longer.

*There is such a thing as talent, but it just gives a head start - you need to work at it just like anyone else to make the most of it.  That's the topic for another post, eventually.

7) Begin at the Beginning

No matter which artist's work you look at, the chances are they all started each piece in more or less the same way - they started simple, and built up from there.  Starting simple can mean working out a basic line drawing or guide first, or it can mean building up layer after layer of successive detail.

Whatever it is, working simple first means you can often identify issues early and correct for them before you spend a lot of time on a piece.  If a progression image consisted of a piece just filling in in a clockwise direction it wouldn't be very interesting, or very useful to you as a thing to study.  Fortunately this is usually not the case, and you can see how the artist builds up the image in stages, with each successive stage including more and more detail or refinement.

The same applies to anyone, including you.  You can't paint a room effectively without putting down primer first. Why would an illustration be any different?  keep it simple to start, and build up on it as you go.

8) Use the Tools to Learn

Once you've dug into the software you've chosen for a while you'll notice that it has a lot of tools that can be used to make your life easier.  Generally I try not to use too many of them as I don't want them to become crutches - but I do know how to use them (well, some of them) if I need to.

How you use them is up to you, but don't be afraid of them.  I very rarely use a color picker tool to directly use the colour from a photograph these days, but I still use it on a regular basis to get a true sense of how much darker Area A is than Area B (see the previous A Musing posts on optical illusions if this being difficult is news to you).  I don't use either of those colors, but to me this is the equivalent of viewing a scene through a pinhole in a black card in order to gauge true color (yes, many artists do that.  Not all, but enough).

So learn to use those tools, and then use those tools to better teach yourself.  But be honest about it - if you picked colours directly from a photograph it's okay to mention that, and there's less backlash if someone realises you have done so and never mentioned it (you don't have to recite a list every time, but if someone asks, be honest).

9) Embrace the Format

Digital painting is an odd thing.  In a very real sense any piece you've produced doesn't exist.  It's just a series of 1's and 0's floating around on a hard drive platter.  And yet in another sense it has more presence than a real painting in today's society.

When was the last time you saw a real painting?  If you own one it may have been this morning, but for many people it was the last time they visited a gallery, and it's slightly depressing how few people make it to even their local gallery every year (I'm sad to admit I hold myself in their number - I've not been to a gallery in far too long).

So the last time you saw a 'real' painting was probably online, or in a magazine, and in most cases such things are poor reproductions of the originals that can use paint in a way that catches the light and produces particular effects.  You can't really see silver thread in a magazine or on a screen, you just see a photograph of it.  With digital art though, what you see is what you get.  You're painting it in the same basic medium that most people are going to see it in (well, there is some loss if it's going to be printed, but not much comparatively).

So embrace that.  And embrace the things you can do with a digital work that you can't do easily, or perhaps at all, in a traditional work.  One thing I love about painting digitally is that thanks to layers I can go back and work on the background separately from the foreground, and work on it as though the foreground isn't there.  I don't always; a lot of my speedpaints are done on one layer, but often I do, and it's wonderfully freeing to be able to fully adapt the background without worrying that it might damage the foreground (you can mask a foreground in a traditional piece, but it's not as easy as jut adding a layer).

The end result, no matter how many layers are used, or which blending modes, or which post processing effects, is what you see on the screen - and it will be the same - bar some calibration issues - on the screen of the viewer.  So use what you have at your disposal as you need to, to improve that final result.

10) Have Fun

At this stage, if you are a digital beginner, you're probably just doing it for fun, or as a learning experience.  Well, the best way to learn is to do things you enjoy, so have fun with it.

Nothing is off the table as long as you're having fun with it, and learning as you go.  If it's not fun, and it's not making you money, then why do it?  You might be creating works that seemingly nobody else likes, but if it's fun for you who cares?  If you want to make a career out of it then at some point you'll need to do things that are less enjoyable to you and more acceptable to others, but in the meantime do what you want to, do it how you want to and 'cheat' all you want (but be honest about it - I'm not sure it can be called cheating if everyone knows what you did because you told them)

Do it for yourself, don't be ashamed to be learning, and if others like it too then all the better for everyone.

Note: This was an impromptu post, and eventually I will get back to the A-Musing series I started way back when once more. Have patience, it's been a busy year.