Painting the 'leaning girl'... (sighs)

I despise my own painting skills. Like I said earlier, I can 'copy' others skills, but I cannot 'create' something new without full understanding. My 'style', is simply a combination of styles i've seen.
This meaning, I cannot fuse manga with what I currently have, especially the face. I've seen others drawings, but I cannot understand how.
(My learning process: External stimuli -> Reverse / break down -> Analyze -> Reconstruct)

And I have a tendency to use too much colors.

So, I gave up on the background.

(Flips table), fuck this. I'm not painting for a while again.

The life of a fucking perfectionist. (sighs)

Line-art: Leaning girl?

This finishes most of the line-art, though I am still unsure what the clothes will look like (which probably means I need to edit it). This is by far one of my most cleanest ones yet.

This alone took me 1.3h to 'finish'. Mainly getting the face proportions to look right (though the nose still annoys me a bit).

Color scheme:

Scarf: Red
Hair: Blond? Remains to be seen
Shirt & pants area: brownish or blueish, giving contrast to upper area.
Background: Something dark or abstract

Also, this is how I do guides for painting, but can't do any painting due to PS being an ass and crashing the graphics driver for who knows why. Probably some crap with Win 8 compatibility. And all that means that I have to restart to get it back working. Can't be bothered. I'd rather see if I can get The Witcher 1 working. Great game, but man, 3'rd is way too high spec'd. :(

Testing out SAI

Much MUCH better for line-art than PS, though lacks in painting capabilities. No worries. It's good that it supports PSD format, which basically allows me to jump back and forth between the two.

Something I did earlier (had to clean up a bit now, so took time :/ ):

It was supposed to be somewhat like "Noblesse"-style, but he's drawing style is quite unique. Eyes developed from rhombus and the drawings he makes are incredibly detailed for a manga, or should I say 'manwha' (korean comic, basically). Mine turned out somehow a mix of Fullmetal Alchemist and his.

So yeah, Sketch (PS) -> Line art (SAI) -> Shading (PS).

And I got to get rid of the stupid habit of using random lines to "generate" a complete imagination of the object. Way too messy and takes too long to clean up.

But without doubt, I'm taking leaps in learning to draw. Might as well keep going until I have the motivation.

Update of 3.06.2015

Was searching for a crack for SAI 1.2.0 for the past 4 hours. No luck. Could take a look with OllyDBG, but at this point, i'm too buzzed to do it.

Aside that, SAI seems like a great tool for line-work. Like seriously, you could get nowhere near that with Photoshop. In fact, I'm considering moving over to SAI, once I get the hang of the workflow.

Had to make a new ... I don't know what you can call it? I guess a "plank" will do. Don't exactly fancy the idea of laptop on lap without any ventilation. Anyways, had to give the damn "plank" a coating, so the laptop won't be running away, which of course rendered most of my day empty. Well, not that empty. I had the time to swear at the clouds for not bringing any thunder lol (even though, the clouds were very low in altitude and blue-ish. There were high altitude clouds as well, earth is fairly warm, so wtf?). Though, seems the coating was too thin and uneven. Probably going to sand it and recoat. More time for nonsensical stuff.

(Most of the time, while staring at the clouds, went something in the melody of Thunderstruck while in mind yelling "Thund'ah!" lol. This is exactly the reason I should, by all means, NOT be bored. :D )


Oh well. Time to hit the hay.

Testing out IOGraph

Wanted to try out IOGraph (software that follows and creates a map of mouse movements). Spent 45 minutes on this (Certainly an overkill):

... and my pattern recognition sees a damn pentagram in there. Though I have heard or seen something about using a pentagram as a human model. (shrugs).

Well. One thing is certain. I need to get a much better at creating straight and curved lines.