Amazing looks! Noble characters like this are always impressive.

Wow stunning, the painting and rendering is gorgeous!

Good god this is wonderful

Mindblowing <3

Handsomely sexy, good pose, well-done work.
Thanks, BubbleWolf.

Great update! You love flowing clothing and wraps. Is the insect a reference to Beastars?

Man, admittedly I haven't seen Beastars yet, so nope! I just like bees :¬)

Oh, this is excellent! Beautiful form and colors!

Your art is just.... *__* We need to hire you for book illustrations at some point.

Ah thank you Bagheera, always appreciate your support :¬)!

You're best of the best ^^"

An awesome picture

In a way, it makes me think of The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern because of the bees. Nice work!

Thank you! I hadn't heard of that book til now, I'll have to check it out!

This is really gorgeous. It's delightful whenever you post!

Magic

He must be sweet like a flower for that bee to just sit there like that.

Really awesome work.

INCREDIBLE

how I would love to just sit and converse with him...

V.

I'm sure he'd love that :¬)

Totally. ...And he says with a deep calm but inquiring tune while playing with the bees on his hand "so what was it that you wanted to talk with me?"

It would be a very fun scene to write. XD ...and he pic gives a ton of space to elaborate an interesting chat.
Gorgeus art.

Looking like true royalty. Such an awesome detailed piece 👌

Fantastic!

He's got an affinity for bees, huh? They seem to like him back :)

Really stunning! Good to see him after so long. Maybe because of all the vertical strokes or striations in the environment, it has a very rainy feel without leaning too much on an obvious rainfall effect. It makes the reflective ground look wet and perfectly smooth, which I adore. A beautiful piece.

You know, I find it so strange I didn't see how it could be interpreted to be somewhat rainy, especially with the reflective floor. It makes me see the picture somewhat differently, fascinating!

And thanks Kal, always totally loving your work so your support means alot :¬)

Very majestic. He comes across as impressive and cunning. 😮😎

Magnificent as always

Really great artwork, well done!

Ha that's surely welcome :¬)

Handsome and noble af!

I cannot even find compliment worth of this.

But, i realise many small details, an ankh, phisophia's symbol, the bees.... wine also but that may be too far... very nice.

Aha, I appreciate your comment very much, thank you :¬)!

Looking at the previous version from nine years ago, it's beautiful, but this just blows it away in depth and perspective and accuracy and maturity. There's plenty of artists who'd have been happy to plateau where you did nine years ago. It's wonderful that you didn't. Long may you have that certain little itch to scale new heights. :)

I remember uploading that, crazy to think it's been 9 years! And thank you :¬)! I still have very far to go, so we'll see where that leads!

I believe it's the insatiable hunger for growing and a humility towards your work what sets apart artists who will become masters.

"If you're not trying to get better, you're going to get worse." - Steve Huston

I'm actually less troubled by people who get worse. That's fine; we can all move on to other things and leave a previous journey behind. I actually find it more of a pity when someone shows incredible promise and development for some years, and then just... stays there, so that over a decade later they're still active, but doing work that's technically, stylistically and thematically pretty much indistinguishable from what they were doing then.

Or maybe I'm just projecting my own inexorable slide towards the stagnant lukewarm pond of middle-aged complacency. :)

That's the same thing really. What Huston means here is that if you don't constantly try to improve and just keep doing the same thing, because it sells/works, then first you will stagnate and eventually you will start to get worse. I noticed those stagnating artists too, and after a while they always turn from stagnation to slow decline, even if they are still active and spending a lot of time drawing.

Ever had to do some really monotonous but simple task for a long time? You will notice that after a while you start to make mistakes, simply because monotonity will cases your brain to not pay attention anymore and you will screw up even where you had no problem before. This is what's happening with artists too just on a longer scale.

And it saddens me too, because I refuse to believe that any of these artists consciously decided to stop improving. When I bring this up others often go defensive for those artists saying things like "maybe they are happy whit what they achieved", and such, but this just makes no sense to me. If someone, at any point in time, were enthusastic enough about art that they kept working on improving and getting better and better, I can't believe that they would genuinely want to stagnate, or if I asked them when they are still improving if they would be OK with stopping improving a year from now they would say "yes". I feel the people who take it up on themselves to defend the stagnant artists are just trying to excuse the fact that they themselves are stagnating or not developing as fast as they would like to.

This is stunning. The highlight on the toe, and the tilt of the glass, WOW

I hope you get to make prints of this <3

Hopefully within the next few weeks I'll have prints for most of my work available :¬)! and thank you!

Such a handsome character! I love all the details of his outfit. I'm very fond of the light and shadows. The addition of the little bee friends is too cute!

Geez this is amazing work.

i adore the gesture, and the little bees element is adorable!

the textures and lighting are ♥

Your handling of values in a narrow scale and being able to clearly define form while using low contrast just keeps blowing my mind. I see what you are doing and still can't figure out how to do it. Could you give me some advice on how to approach it? I keep ending up overdoing contrast in an attempt to bring out form.

I also love the super limited color palette and use of neutrals, it reminds me to Sargent and makes me wonder if he is a direct inspiration for you?

Hey thank you! I've had a think about your question as it's a really good one. I often overcook contrast to bring out form too but I find I get better results if I just stop myself playing too much with an image and trust that the viewer can see what it is I'm trying to portray. It also depends on the area of the picture too: if it's a focal point then contrast like that can be great, but using it on areas that aren't so important can take away the value of the contrast used within that focal point. In the picture above I've pretty much kept all of the contrasting parts on the character, in areas I want to bring attention to or I feel give the best sense of form and composition.
Anyway, these aren't rules of any sort as anything can be amazing done right, just ways I happen to be working in! I think Sargent is an inspiration to all artists really, alot of peeps seem to be talking about him more than usual recently so that's really great to see!

Thank you for your reply!!! And sorry for my slow reaction, the past days were hectic.

Yeah, I get the idea of reserving high contrast for focal points, and I'm trying to do it but I end up with too much contrast everywhere. I'm starting to think that where I mess up is that I'm trying to define too much within the light and the shadow areas respectively, so I should compress the value range within each.

I converted this pic to graycale via perceptual conversion as well as a one of my own works, and I noticed something interesting: the overall distribution of the histogram is actually very similar in the two, with a large column-like peak in the near blacks and then a reverse exponential curve from there towards the lighter values. However, my histogram has lots of small spikes everywhere, while yours is extremely smooth. It really surprised me, that a painting can even have such a smooth and even histogram curve.

And that lines up with my suspicion above: You keep local contrasts within any particular area low with smooth transitions. Even the metal jewelry, which in real life would have high contrast everywhere due to full specularity, is kept low contrast compared to its surrounding. In tighter rendering style this would cause them to look like plastic but when you keep it loose it actually works. Fascinating!

So, hmmm... I assume I need to pay more attention to the overall value composition and not get focused onto the specific area I'm working on because I can get away with local contrasts being technically incorrect if the global contrast feels right.

Oh and, Sargent is definitely one of the masters I want to learn from. I'm kinda trying to get the old school oil painting quality from Caravaggio (also love tenebrism), Velázquez, with main inspirations being the Dutch Golden Age portrait and genre painters, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jan Steen, etc. but also the loose, limited pallet style of Sargent, the glow and softness of Bouguereau and the kind of epic and atmospheric paintings of modern industry artists like Craig Mullins, Theo Prins, James Gourney, or you.

Your epic city scapes and Indian/oriental architectural styles remind me of Mullins, BTW, and it's also something I personally want to make part of my art. I'm in love with ancient empires, and especially oriental cultures. I had the luck of being able to travel to India and to Ladakh or "West-Tibet" in the Himalayas and that trip had a pretty big impact on my artistic vision.

Ha don't worry about slow replies, here I am two weeks later! Yeah that's pretty interesting regarding the histogram. I'm not sure if a smooth histogram curve is something to be pursued or not, but whatever it looks like is all good with me as long as I'm happy with the picture!

On overall composition, I would suppose focusing detail on important areas whilst considering the picture as a whole is a good direction to go. I'm not entirely sure I stick to this myself and there's hardly a rule that it guarantees a picture that works anyway. I often find that just playing around with something if you're not happy with it can lead to some new and surprising results! This is probably the only rule I find myself going by, just trying new methods! Well, and spending plenty of time doing so too.
Yeah the middle east has some very beautiful architecture, I would certainly like to go to India and Tibet at some point too! And yes much like Sargent, it would be very difficult for an artist to not be influenced by the work of those you mentioned!

Thank you for the tips! :)

If you can afford, a trip to such places as India or Tibet can be amazing. Especially if you do what I did, and make absolutely no arrangements or reservations ahead, just a plane ticket and then let things just happen. I've met some truly amazing people and had some unbelievable experiences only because I went this route. This is what I call being an adventurer instead of a tourist. I just wish I spent time sketching during the trip, and had a less shitty camera. Still took two thousand pictures that I'm using sometimes as reference now, combined with my memories.

At this point I feel what I would really need is a mentor. I spend a lot of time on resources like Marco Bucci's videos or some classes at schoolism.com (Sam Nielson's two classes are great, and he re-worked one of them, so want to go through it again once I can afford to pay my monthly sub, LOL), but no matter how much I do that, I feel I would really need someone to actually look through my recent works with me and point out and discuss my specific issues because my main problem is not the lack of theory (even though there is still tons to learn) but not being able to see where I go wrong in my own work. I would be happy to pay for mentorship but it's unlikely I'll be able to do that in the foreseeable future. :(

There's nothing here that isn't top notch!

Hey thank you :¬)!!

Shit, amazing.

Ha thanks man

Ya welcome, such a unique artstyle, and it's saying something nowadays

This looks amazing... Nice art and work.

Magnificant!

In 50 years time-pieces like these will be the measure by what one thinks of by ANTHRO ART!!!
Stunning !!!