I used something by Catman25 as inspiration, WAY out of my league!

[LiAM]

Here is Catman's work, blew me away at how clean and detailed it looked for something quite 'minimal'.

[spoiler='Catmans work'][/spoiler]

 

I would love to be able to do something like that and have the skills for it, but I really have no idea. I gave it a go,

you can see my HORRIBLE creation that took me 5 minutes in Gimp. My experience with graphic design

has only been building up for a week now, I've mostly only done stencils and the odd photo edit.

 

I know it's bad but any tips or tutorials or something?

 

Here's something more recent, more within my comfort zone and what I've been doing a lot of, except this time I used a little speedpainting for details on eyes + lips, my first time doing any king of 'painting'.

[spoiler='Speedpaint stencil of Hayley'][/spoiler]

[Catman25]

I can't say much about the speed painting, bc well I'd have no clue what to go on.

 

In regards to the main piece, I think you can start by making the effects clearer/stand out more. A lot of that I believe has to do with colors, at the moment your piece consists of mainly similar colors, except different shades. And when it comes to effects, whether you already do this or not, don't be afraid to erase. Whether things start to overlap or just become crowded, controlling where and to what degree each effect layer is incorporated helps a lot with the blending and fluidity of the piece. I say this, because at the moment you have a large rectangle of what looks like scan lines that doesn't seem to mesh all that well: it takes up quite a large amount of space and seems to overlap incongruously with some of the other layers.

 

I like the direction you;re going, hope to see more from you.

[LiAM]

I can't say much about the speed painting, bc well I'd have no clue what to go on.

 

In regards to the main piece, I think you can start by making the effects clearer/stand out more. A lot of that I believe has to do with colors, at the moment your piece consists of mainly similar colors, except different shades. And when it comes to effects, whether you already do this or not, don't be afraid to erase. Whether things start to overlap or just become crowded, controlling where and to what degree each effect layer is incorporated helps a lot with the blending and fluidity of the piece. I say this, because at the moment you have a large rectangle of what looks like scan lines that doesn't seem to mesh all that well: it takes up quite a large amount of space and seems to overlap incongruously with some of the other layers.

 

I like the direction you;re going, hope to see more from you.

 

Nice to hear from the artist themself. It's quite hard, especially with no prior experience and no tutorial to follow, I was mostly playing and if it kind of worked, I kept it, and yeah the 'scan lines' and other things were there to cover empty space and because similar styles usually have little details like that, but for 5 minutes work, I wasn't too fussed.

 

Also, in terms of the stencilling thing, I know it's simple and rather easy but I made another. To say that only a few days ago I was making really choppy black and white stencils to now a few days on making full colour with little details, I'm fairly happy with my progress. Still. I have a lot to compete with already!

I'd hate to be all self-promotional, but to really emphasise the progress, you can clearly see it here, within the last 10 images or so, there's a huge step-up. Too many to paste into the forum itself really, so if you're curious, feel free to look. No need to follow. http://bravelittlepixel.tumblr.com/