I've been sharing some lessons on making art lately using some master paintings as guidance and here they are so far. Hope they help you learn a few things

There is an eternal angst as a landscape painter of looking up at a brilliantly blue sky and knowing that we can never, with paint or pixels, hope to capture how vibrant it really is.

WRECKED. Hirono: Has any court said that DEI is unconstitutional? Yes or no?. Hamilton: Yes. Hirono: Which court?. Hamilton: The United States Supreme Court. Hirono: I disagree with you…. Hamilton: You can go read it yourself. 🔥🔥🔥

Now that I finally have a group to play D&D with I'm way more interested in various ttrpg games and all that and would love to do some art for some of the other companies sometime. It's funny that for all my years of making art for D&D, Pathfinder, etc. I never played.

Also goddamn I love that composition.

Part of the reason this piece feels so unsettling is that the yellow sky isn't being reflected in the snow nor really illuminating much below it.

Oh and just to clarify if I had to do it all over again I almost certainly would use a pseudonym from the start.

It seems like most artists younger than me. 1. don't use their real names.2. don't use a photo for their profile pic.3. put their ages in their bio for some reason?. Nothing wrong about any of it, I guess. Just an interesting generational divide happening.

I usually talk about painting landscapes, but the same principles apply when you draw them. It just becomes even more essential to design your environment & light to accentuate that light/dark separation. See how he arranged each of these rocks and the light direction so that

Exquisite example of well painted reflections. Captures that feel of looking through the surface in the foreground, the subtle blue reflections of the sky, the few hits of deep, dark orange in there. And excellent value handling of that—note how damn close lots of the values are.

Always curious and full of energy, Beagles turn every walk into an adventure 🐾🎉.

To make anything better, add a bear.

This is an excellent glimpse into the process—look how he's mapping out the trees and understanding the trunks/branches and giving form to them before getting into noodly details of all those leaves.

Absurdly good example of painting an interesting ocean. So often they end up repetitive, flat, fucking boring. But this has depth, interest, form, and beautiful color/value variety. The ship is cool and all but look at that fucking sea.

If you're going to have any hope of making good art then you need to know what good art looks like, which involves looking at a lot of good art. At first, assume that the collective wisdom is mostly correct and the artists that other artists say are good are, in fact, good.

I never had to deal with many people stealing my work or ripping me off and sometimes I worry that it's because my art sucks.

Never paint a tree trunk just brown. There's yellow and red and green and purple and, of course, a bunch of gray in these trunks. Brown is bad, hue variety is beautiful.

Truly gifted artists rarely make the best teachers because they often breeze through the difficulties that trip most of us up.

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If you cropped most of the foreground in this piece, it wouldn't have nearly the sense of depth that it has. The gentle sweeping lines of the foreground and its massive weight in the composition is so powerful.

You can get away with a darker sky when you've got a scene like this looking up a hill. The sky gets darker towards its zenith and away from the sun. So in a side-lit scene like this and looking uphill, you're getting a pretty dark sky.

Maybe getting into Krita. I tried it years ago and the brushes sucked ass but it seems like they've improved the brush engine? The default brushes are still horrendous but I've managed to make some good ones now.

See the blues in the water?. That's not blue. If anything, most of it is a fairly warm brown. It's just that everything else in the painting is extremely warm. So just a desaturated brown looks blue here.