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Flay's Pencil Flailings: Animation and Reanimation [NSFW/NSF56K]
Posts
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Crits?
Did a bunch of these today:
When drawing gestures, the key is that less is more! Remember to draw in verbs first, nouns second. This will help you capture the energy and flow of a model's action better!
EDIT:
Your cast shadow is not strong enough here. Also, remember that the closer an object is to light, the harder the shadow will become, while the reverse proves true! In this case you've made the entire shadow one singular dominant edge, when it should really only be that way at the center. Near the top and bottom of the shadow line you should soften the hardness of the shadows.
This is a pretty good way to describe it, I'm working on reducing the number of lines that I use and not just outlining the form. Haven't got the hang of it yet, but I'll keep practicing.
I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here. Do you mean that the only place the cast shadow would have such hard edges would be in the center?
I have a few examples in my thread, both on line/gesture quality and shadows!
I drew a bunch of these tonight. Unfortunately we're having a thunderstorm at the moment and a power surge took out most of them.
I think I'm starting to understand this a little more.
Things I learned: A little bit of perspective or faux-perspective, it adds a lot of three-dimensionality to the form. Also, pay attention to the vertical and horizontal stresses of the circles within the sphere, they help define where the axes are.
This is a sphere I drew a few days back to test the painting capabilities of this newfangled program I purchased from the DS app store. I apologize for how tiny it is; apparently this is the standard image document size, and it is actually the first time i'm looking at it!
I built this from my imagination so it's by no means perfect, but my knowledge of basic lighting really helps make this ball pop out. If you save the image and zoom in using any photo viewer, you'll notice everything looks rather 8-bit. That's just how the program is (I have no control over it), but it will really help you understand blending better! You'll notice that the sharper the shadow edge, the less the color scheme blends together. At the top and very bottom of the sphere, the shadow line between the light and dark is soften/"blurred" a bit, giving the illusion of depth.
An important thing to remember: Make sure your darkest light and your lightest shadow shade do no merge. They should never meet, and if they do the illusion of depth is lost!
I wasn't sure what to draw tonight so I quickly sketched up an Asaro head. Any suggestions for where I could continue my learning from here?
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Progress, not perfection.
Those head constructions, for example, are definitely on the right path (it's how I construct the head myself!), but if you really want to get the idea all you need to do is simply draw a lot of them, in different angles and plane changes. Don't feel pressured to post everything you draw! Personally I would find a balance between finished work and more construction/concept drawing. To explain the latter; many days i'll spend hours upon hours just drawing ass-ugly sketches exploring muscle groups, balance, box forms, proportions, etc. I've gone weeks doing nothing but that, and to the outsider it may look a bit silly!
But my knowledge of the human form and lighting have tripled in that time frame, so that whenever I do decide to muscle down and draw a completed project, i'll have already solved a lot of the issues I had before. Go on, give it a try!
AC: Thanks.
Suggestions?
This last one is old, but I cleaned it up a bit.
Progress, not perfection.
You can totally see improvement overall in this thread, which is awesome, flay. I hope you keep up with the studying!
This is a very late reply, but yeah the last one is a rehash of an old one so the colours are very different. And thanks for the encouragement, although it still feels like any progress I'm making is at a snails pace.
I'm really terrible with updating this thread with the things that I'm working on, but here are some personal branding things I'm working on for uni:
I also did a sphere study tonight. I heard some advice that when learning digital painting you should avoid using opacity too liberally, so I made things difficult for myself and tried to draw it without any opacity at all:
Reference:
Oh, I also never posted the final shield thing, which hasn't been used yet anyhow.
What do you mean by that? If there's no opacity, that means the digital paint isn't visible at all!
There are a lot of kinks here to be worked out. All of this was done in flash, but I plan to transfer it over to After Effects next and add some better effects.
I'm personally perturbed by the fact that his feet & hands are different colors, since it doesn't look like he's wearing gloves or shoes ... so wouldn't they be the same color?! (Ultimate nitpick).
EDIT: Uploaded a better version.
Been a while since I updated this guy:
I still think his feet look stupid, any chance I could get a paintover?