Hey there!
I'm the guy on instagram that shares his process, ramblings and 'sketch notes' and I want to thank you so much for taking interest in the content and for the support.
It really means a lot.
I've finally had a moment to sit down and write to you and kick off this newsletter.
Now, for the important part. What's in it for you?
These emails will contain weekly curated resources, thoughts, 'aha moments' and announcements directly from my brain to yours!
Including topics but not limited to...
- Drawing, painting and illustration
- Learning how to learn and productivity
- Books (mainly non fiction)
- Articles, videos and tutorials
- My blog post announcements (Yep! I'm starting a blog)
- Artists that inspire me
- Course/product announcements
- My experiences with building a following online
And anything that I've found useful since the last email!
So let's kick this off with some resources I've found useful and thoughts I've been pondering recently shall we?
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What I'm reading
āScott Robertsons - How To Renderā
It's one of my all time favourite books on rendering form and understanding light and how it interacts with objects.
Some call it 'The bible of rendering'.
My copy has a tonne of post-it-notes for quick reference and I'm currently going back through it and picking out the nuggets & learnings from it.
I'm toying with doing a book summary and documenting the parts that really resonated with me so stay tuned for that!
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Aha moments / insights
Following on from Scott Robertson 'How To Render', I've been diving deep into understanding colour and light more and more.
It's a never ending adventure and it's a load of fun, can get a little dry sometimes theory wise, but it's all worth it if it means my paintings are going to come out better!
One of many key take aways that confused me for too long is...
"The passive highlight on an object, is not the same as the active highlight"
If you don't understand this already you're probably thinking..."Ben, what in the world does this mean?"; basically it's one of the most important principles of how to make things look 3D when you render them.
This also has a lot to do with something called Lambertian Reflection. Here's a deep dive for the nerds out there
This key principle is a big part of me beginning to understand how to...
- Make things look 3D
- Hit those juicy little highlights on objects and have them look believable
- Understand how/why materials look the way they do
- Break away from reference and invent different lighting scenarios
I'll be writing my own way of thinking about this as a blog post (again, blog launching soon) but the following videos touch on this principle:
Dorian Iten's
ā'Mind blowing realistic shading tricks' ā
Marco Bucci's
āHighlights: How much do you really know? Drawing essentialsā
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Videos
Ahem Aldoori's: Avoid even spaces when designing, unless it's intentional (clip from class #18)ā
This was a great little insight into design. And how keeping everything even can make the piece look...well...boring. Check it out!
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Bookmark worthy tweets
- This one was a great one to visualise values by @Gazedsoulā
- Beautiful line work by @foretbwatā
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Thoughts and ponderings
'Bad' drawing days
I've had a couple of them recently and I'm trying to find a systematic approach to combating these annoying, motivation draining, frustration inducing, want to throw your iPad, tablet, sketch book through the damn window days.
I sometimes manage to get out of them, which is great! I'm documenting the process when this happens and will have a blog post about this soon.
What have you done to combat these days? Sometimes I find it better to sleep on it, then try again tomorrow.
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Well, that's all from me! Until next week, stay consistent, use reference, have fun with it and remember; it's only pixels baybee!
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Cheers,
Ben
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Have any questions or just want to say "hey"?
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Email me at b.eblendesign@gmail.com or simply reply to this one.
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