value/monocrome/superflat how to paint 'em

anyway, back in 2002 i wrote somewhere else on how i got started working in the style that i currently do (if i'm not mistaken, the hentai/anime highcolor, intentionally 2D format is now titled 'superflat' - although for sure, my interpretation of this influence is many spheres away from the current trend, so maybe it isn't 'superflat' ... i can't never tell these things, me no smartish enough.)

generally, i start working from photos i've taken. i do this mostly because the theory behind the idea of the majority of my art of the last three so years is 'collecting time and reverie of a common moment.' cameras capture time and make it static. i do study on live models, but in reality, i couldn't expect models, or friends, or babies or self to remain standing still for any more than a fraction of a second... to do so makes the moment contrived and purposefully situated longer than it should. in addition, some of my work depicting surgery simply would be impossible to render in person, so i have to rely upon actual photos taken by others (surgeons). sometimes i just carry around a camera and capture what is interesting, whatnot. often they're not very good photos, but the photo can be cropped, and the interesting bits exploited. example: the pict on the left. it was just your general 'oh, i'm on the road' pict, but with a bit of cropping, it has a more interesting composition, and will ultimately be a very interesting painting... if i ever get around to it that is...
fyi: i'm no great photographer by any stretch, thus the cropping afterwards.

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here's a more interesting photo that's been cropped to expose its more interesting bits. how very benetton of me, eh? anyway, two of my friends taken eons ago. (a good thing about working from photos is also you can forget about the image and find it later to work with again. the moment has been documented.)

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i render by hand/eye, but i thought i might bring up this little technique from history... and used by many a master, so no feeling bad about the idea that you might be 'cheating.' quite a useful tool too when you're unsure about your abilities to render something as perfect as you want too. some artists used to even draw grids on panes of glass and then look through it to capture a posed scene.

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the best advice i've got for this one is to think in terms of pools of color, not really lines. everything should be a solid outline so that if you were to fill it on the computer, none of your color would run into another section.
(if you're tracing, which is totally fine too, and a very good place to start. tip: make a copy of your picture, draw on copy all the value lines, lay tracing paper over your image and simply trace all your value lines. next transfer tracing using carbon paper.)

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even a low amount of values can render a fairly complete and visually stimulating work. try first in monochromes (one color painting with many values). it really is the most difficult to make clear, but it's probably important to get that skill established first before you start juggling with colors and their inherent problems.