Practices 22/23 – How To Stay Consistent

The straight answer is: pick the silly challenges. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many times I've told this to artists, and yet they don't do it. I guess it happens to me as well, especially when one is inspired.

If you're trying to build consistency, start with challenges you can actually finish. Over time, small wins create the momentum you need to stay in the game long enough to get good.

That’s why some of the practices in this article might seem simple—those help me get started so I can later try more complex subjects. That said, it’s not always the case: in practice 22, I went a bit complex with the tiger, but in practice 23, it applies.

1. Why did I paint this big cat? First of all, the colours were beautiful. I liked the shape of the body leaning forward—I don’t know why I’m drawn to that gesture, but it’s something I’ve used before in characters I’ve designed. I had a bit of a hustle trying to get the proportions right, but once I felt satisfied, I pushed the line of the back a bit more to give reality a more stylised perspective. I didn’t create shadows in the traditional way, since most of the tiger’s body was already in shadow. Instead, I used strokes to add rim light on the left side, then used texture brushes to play around with the values in the shaded area. On the front of the tiger, I kept the colours as close as I could to the reference, but in the back I went a bit off, trying cold tones. Why? Shadows cast by sunlight are slightly desaturated, and that desaturation—almost a grey palette on dark colours—is something I like to push into more saturated versions of cold tones like purple, blue, or green, but softly. I don’t want everything to be very colourful—it must be balanced.

2. I saw the leek picture and it looked simple to paint, in my opinion. What I liked was the degradation from a white/blueish clear tone into variations of green moving toward yellow. These practices lately are very colour-influenced, now that I notice. I like to pick simple themes as practice so I can play around with textures and colour variations. The little face was just me having fun.

3. The woman at the door. Well, there's a reason I stopped painting portraits long ago—I got bored. So now, every time I find an unconventional way of showing faces, or a type of portrait I haven’t tried before, it's a yes for me. I liked the composition in this one: leaving just a straight vertical rectangle for information and the rest grey. Because there’s such a small amount of information, I tried to put more effort into the rendering—basically to boost the three-dimensional look and counterbalance the large empty area covering the rest of the composition.

4. Eggs! Besides the fact that I eat scrambled eggs pretty much every day of my life, I was surprised I had never painted eggs before. I liked the lighting in the yolk, and just like the leek practice, keeping the reference simple allowed me to play around with textures and colours that weren’t necessarily in the original picture. Why? Because it gives the practice a slightly new perspective on reality.

5. The mother and her child—these two looked way too cute not to try. The picture looks way better than my practice. It was very hard to add anything new there, besides a bit of colour and texture. Nevertheless, I enjoyed trying it.

6. And of course, a very traditional skull practice. Anyone who has tried painting—whether traditional or digital—has probably done at least one skull. If not, go ahead and try. It’s fun. I pushed the shape to make the mouth wider and did the same thing I mentioned earlier with the cold values—making them saturated. Of course, most of this work is done after there's a clear drawing and a strong distinction between light and shadow. Having that clarity from the start allows you to experiment without confusion about what value your colours should have, and helps prevent the piece from looking flat.

If you’re trying to build the habit of creating regularly, don’t start with the hardest thing. I’ve found that simple challenges not only sharpen your skills, they help you stay motivated. Once you feel that sense of progress, you’re more likely to move on to bigger challenges with confidence. That’s something worth building.

Process: https://youtu.be/j5GBXHRL_04

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