Gothic Update 3 + CGMW lecture notes

A little progress. Its just entered into the slow rendering phase so this will take a while :P Made a few tiny tweaks like shortening the girl's arms to normal proportions, changing the perspective on the guy's legs to push for something more dynamic, lightening her coat some more and general rendering.
Some links: Babe Lab is a very useful blog full of tutorials on drawing stylized girls. Always a good thing!
Ive also been watching the CG Masters Workshop. They are pretty good but I think you reach a point where after you've seen a good few you've seen most of them. Its pretty cool to see how these guys work though the techniques I've seen so far are things Im aware of already. But here are some notes someone asked for:
Flip your image horizontally on a regular basis to keep a fresh eye on things, using the smudge tool to push paint around makes for a nice change from the paintbrush, using radial gradients on overlay to add pockets of colour and values, work in big shapes to small ones (still got to remember to do this more), warp transform can be used to slightly alter the composition, lasso tools to make shapes to paint in and keep a sharp edge, Kekai Kotaki likes to paint in greyscale and then add colours via colour balance and then add extra colours with soft light layers before flattening it down and painting over it normally, copy and paste an old painting you have over the top of your current one and fiddle with the blend option to get some textures or happy accidents, keep in mind the overall temperature of your piece and how it balances (applies to composition shapes and values), maybe make ready made fogs and clouds paintings you can drop into any painting to use as a basis.

OK thats some of my notes from Kekai's workshop. I've also made notes that just apply to myself. Watching someone else paint I tried to image how I would work on his image and try to paint the next steps ahead of him in my head. So I noticed little things like how he lays in rough marks to suggest an element (like a helmet) and then move on and come back to it later, I probably would have stayed on the helmet to keep working on it too early and thus get too tunnel visioned. More to come!