ramonn90

Practice 4/5 – Working for Style in Lines and Painting

Added 2025-02-21 16:33:07 +0000 UTC

Well, these process videos are getting dense for sure. What can you expect from eight hours of practice besides doggo sketches and landscape paintings? Well, I hope some useful techniques, but today I’d like to briefly write about style, considering two aspects—one about movement and the other about the approach to painting them.

Pushing Inclined Shapes

For drawings or shapes in general, I tend to make quick, continuous strokes to convey a sense of movement that aims to cover complex-shaped surfaces or silhouettes. These lines are also pushed at the end of the drawing process to make the movement more evident. There’s no specific direction I thoughtfully consider when distorting the lines, but rather a sense of movement I feel compelled to emphasise—like when a line starts from the right and ends on the left of the reference to suggest a shape (anatomical, architectural, or natural forms). I just make that inclination more evident in my sketch.

References

It is very easy to fall prey to a beautifully composed photograph that seems worth painting. Some look very professional (already stylised artistic work), while others are random, casual pictures with no filter or professional work behind them. In both cases, you must consider that your goal is not to make an exact copy. Not only because the work is already done by the photographer and you are literally not adding anything, but because the point of painting these is for you to find a way to capture some of that reality using your technique. The simpler the technique—something that might take you years to master—the better, in my opinion.

A good rule of thumb is choosing one key element of the reference and putting your effort into that. Whether it is the overall shape structure you can convey with lines or rendering one spot as realistically as possible, capturing one essential aspect of the original while keeping the rest loose and light ensures that, regardless of the reference's nature, the outcome will feel authentic.