How to make your own references… 

Thank you

Thank you. I wish I found more time on the side to practice. I used to practice all the time but since I started uploading to RU-vid I usually spend the bulk of my extra time editing, something that makes me very happy to hear is appreciated. Efficiency is something I’m going to be addressing in my workflow soon. I haven’t decided on anything yet but I am considering changing up my art style to something less time-consuming but still impactful. Meanwhile, I think I’m going to change up the structure of my RU-vid videos, because as of now the channel is just not gaining much traction on my longform formula. I’m hoping I can punch it up some by making the video more streamlined and entertaining… of course I don’t want to lose the teaching elements I have, so I am aiming to keep those. I’m working on scripting the painting segment of this artwork right now with a new approach. When I get the episode uploaded, don’t hesitate to give me your honest feedback. I appreciate your opinion. As far as helping you with your artwork goes, there’s only so much I can do without seeing the work for myself, but if you’re comfortable with some constructive criticism you can DM me on Instagram and I’ll be happy to give you some pointers. However, and pardon me if this guess is wildly off, it does sound like you might be suffering from overuse of soft shading. Soft shading can be useful to encourage a smooth look to a surface, whatever that surface may be, but be warned, crispness of details comes from the use of sharper brushes. Ultimately, there are balances that can be struck between the two, but next time you’re watching a painting process keep an eye out for how often the artist looks like they’re painting with a hard brush compared to a soft brush. You might be surprised to see how many times a soft texture is actually painted with a hard brush and then only partially smoothed out afterwards. Smoothing can be done with either a feather touch with a pressure sensitive stylus when the brush stroke is initially made or coming back in with a smudge tool later, but either method aims to leave some of the sharp texture behind to build up a crispness of detail that will show in the final product. As far as using references go, a lot of that comes down to practice. One tip I could give that has helped me use references efficiently is: pay extra attention to spacing. Of course the contents of the reference still matter, but I’ve seen many people overlook the importance of properly gauging the distances placed between different elements. I hope this helps, of course if you have any follow up questions I’m more than happy to answer them too, so don’t hesitate to ask.

@@JRsJunkDrawer Long ass wall of text incoming. Thanks for the offer to look over some of my stuff. I might actually get back to you on that once I've pushed my next painting further. I've decided that I want to finish the paintings no matter what and then move on to next projects. But since I'm a beginner and a perfectionist (which is like the most self-destructive combination you can get) I always get discouraged. Still, I hope that I'll improve with each painting and arrive at final results which leave me somewhat satisfied - in a couple of years hopefully. I don't have much time for art next to a full time job. The funny thing however is, that since I've decided to create 3-4 different paintings for one single project, I have to finish work quickly. And I feel like I've arrived at a conclusion as to how my process could look like. I'm going to be doing rough sketches until the idea is presentable. Then I'll fill everything out with flat colors on different layers and then shade those with clipping and alpha masks. And then I'll do a final pass to bring everything together with cleaned up edges and stuff like that. I don't enjoy line art whatsoever and I don't even want my art to have line art in it since that looks too stylized. I'm eager to see how my style will develop over time. But it also seems as if that process could be very, very quick. Maybe that's something you could try out as well? You could watch some Astri Lohne painting process videos here on RU-vid. She seems to be doing more or less the same thing. Very rough sketch and then she immediately jumps into the painting process. But she is skilled enough to work without endless layers and clipping masks. I hope I'll arrive at that point as well. Can't do it with few layers just yet because it feels like I'm constantly having to lasso tool absolutely everything. With layers I can just generously paint behind, over or within certain layers and that way save a lot of time. And last but not least... Let me leave you with some serious advice. And I should have started off with this: The videos will make will cultivate the audience that watches you. No matter if those are 2.620 people or 26.200 or 260.000 or 2,6 million people. And when I say "the videos you make" I mean "the content you make". Currently the company I work for, we're kinda having a little bit of an identity crisis on our RU-vid channel. Gonna keep that one anonymous for privacy reasons. But mostly focused on very short videos with a very specific topic and we grew fast and we grew a lot. But that resulted in hundreds of thousands of subscribers who are only interested in that type of content. And that audience is... a very specific audience. Now we tried branching out with longer videos and despite way more work, effort and more importantly passion being put into these videos, people watch them less. Now it looks like we bought our subscribers when you look at the amount of subs we have compared to the views our new videos get. The old style videos all get massive views, but it's not something we enjoy. If you now start chasing trends and changing your format to reach a wider audience - just do me a favor and make sure that you continue to enjoy what you're doing. You'll grow in either case. But if you grow in a direction you're just taking to get bigger, it will get stale over time and you'll have trouble finding the motivation to make new stuff. At the end of the day, you're in all of this for you. I'm not even going to comment on how I think about your content because it doesn't matter. I like to think that on RU-vid individual voices matter a lot in the big picture... And yes, they do. A friendly comment or response can make ones day, that's for sure. But it's still about sharing what you love with as many people as possible. As I said, just make sure that you love what you do. I recently watched a video from a RU-vidr who burnt himself out putting on a show in every video he did. And when a video underperformed he was crushed. That's where he decided to just take it easy, one step at a time and do and upload what he loves and enjoys. I think that's truly the formula to succeed on RU-vid: You have to be passionate and consistent with what you create and upload. And now last but not least: From what I've gathered from all of your videos, you seem to love to share your knowledge. That's why I watch you. There is tons of great information in these videos which sometimes answers questions I didn't even know I had. Have you considered sprinkling in some shorter painting tutorial videos in between your big uploads? Like when you work on a big project and need to figure out how a candle lights a room, you make a study of it and share your findings with your viewers. And you try to come up with catchy titles who want to learn how to draw and paint. I think painting tutorials work always well on RU-vid. What you could do is to go to big RU-vid art channels and look at what their most popular videos are. And then maybe try to snag a slice of that. And don't make the mistake some of the people in my company are making. They think many ideas are immediately bad because they have been done before. Like certain topics or whatever. But I think that there are classic ideas and questions that need to be answered that can't be answered enough. You ask 10 different artists to draw you something and you'll get 10 results. And when I consume an artists content I watch it mainly for them and how they find solutions to the big problem that is art. And if they share how they arrived to those conclusions and solutions that's even better. Because to me that's the beauty of art on RU-vid.

thank you for the advice. I’ve definitely been bouncing around between some different RU-vid art channel formulas I’ve seen out there. You know, trying to figure out what might would work best for me. At this point I’m looking into switching my formula from a “ let’s paint an artwork together“ to “here’s a common art problem, let’s address it during this painting process”. The shift in structure allows me to skip over the more boring parts of the painting where people click out and focus in on the most informationally dense parts of the process… at least in theory, I’ve still yet to actually finish the next script, but if it doesn’t work out I’ll try something else and just keep moving forward. in that way, RU-vid is just like learning to paint… refinement and learning through trial and error… I just wish scripting an informational 10 to 15 minute video was a bit easier for me… you know, so I can get back to actually painting and attempt that new art style I want to experiment with.