that one, or this one?

Second one - omission of the arm is a wise choice for the body on body design, plus the cut edges have a quirkier shape that can more easily be associated with Calavera. The world needs more Grim Fandango merchandise.

I never played grim fandango......it's a blight on my otherwise stellar game playing career.

thanks, guys! thanks also to trillian, who deleted her post for some reason before i could respond to it. i think no arms is the way to go, if only because it makes the visual a lot easier to grasp - as you said, tripwire.

and it's printed. thoughts?

just updating this. cthulhu stuff: Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler logo stuff: Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler opencanvas stuff: (i'm on the left) Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler and the current thing, a black and white self-portrait: Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler i'm really trying to work on my painting/illustration skills here. i'm still working on the portrait. nothing here is really finished. i should work on that.

good, old-fashioned pencils: scanning really brings out the lines, doesn't it also, looking at it, i need to focus more on other areas - i was trying to do the eyes especially, but the side of the face is relatively unconsidered

I think you need to take a step back and really take it easy and slow with your observations. A lot of your work seems pretty rushed. While that's ok for getting proportions and contours down, it's not ok for shading. You can se how hard and fast your pencil strokes are and that's going to give you problems when trying to get subtle and sharp values. Your self portrait paintings way back are more along the lines of good observation. They have clear shapes and you can see a bit of that in the OC self portrait too. I'd suggest doing some smaller but more involved observation pieces. Do just an eye, nose, mouth, ear, or hand. It looks like you're getting impatient with the portrait as a whole and it's coming off rushed. Specific things in the latest one, the contour of your nose, you don't actually have a line like that on the edge of your nose. You have the contrast between values of your nose and cheek, but there is nothing on your cheek at all, just white. That could be ok, but your nose is also white on the tip aside from the contour. How were you able to see that contour there anyways? There is a difference of values obviously, but you're not showing that here.

I'd give you crits like you asked for in the chat thread...but I think bombs and AoB pretty much summed up what I would say. The random/harsh way that you're shading is really the most obvious problem, right now.

Orikae, I think you should spend some time doing a long grid study. You will learn a *lot* about markmaking and rendering with pencils, or digitally you will learn a lot about photoshop brushes and painterly rendering, as well as general accuracy and observation. I've lost track how many times I'm recommended this to people and nobody has yet to actually do one, but I still think It would help you a lot.

I am completely willing and able to do that. The next three days are Art Days. However, I don't know what the hell that is.

Brief summary on grid drawing: 1. Get a photo. 2. Draw a grid on it; not too small, but not huge either. (You can also draw a grid on a window/sheet of plastic, or make one out of wires and use this method with live subjects, you just have to be able to keep your head really still for long periods of time.) 3. Get a piece of paper. Draw the a grid on it, with the same number of squares per side as the photo grid. (The photo and drawing don't have to be the same scale for this to work- in fact, this is also a good method for upscaling study drawings to larger final paintings and such.) 4. By paying close attention to where the contours on the photo intersect the grid lines and the negative space, you can map out the contours with much more precision than just eyeballing the whole subject at once. 5. With the contours done, you can move on to shading. By looking at each individual grid square on the photo one at a time, you can hammer down on the actual tones that appear rather than the ones you think would be there (ie: shadow=black! light = white!). Here's another attempt to explain it, which is half-assed but at least it has pictures. http://drawsketch.about.com/od/drawi...riddrawing.htm

Decide whether you want to work in pencil or digitally. Pencil will take much longer most likely. Follow these steps -Find a high quality reference portrait with a full range of values and good balance between light and dark. Portraiture works good for this exercise since inaccuracies are very easy to spot on the human face, and you will be working on a subject where habitual "symbolizing" is pretty common but in a situation where you will be forced to observe. Convert reference to grayscale if it isn't already -If working in Pencil: Print out the reference as big as you can, and get some decent quality working paper for the actual drawing that is the same aspect ratio, or find paper that is close enough and draw a frame so that the working area within the frame will be the same aspect ratio as the printed reference. Digitally: Open a new document with the same aspect ratio as your reference image. The easiest way to do this is to open the reference and right click the frame and duplicate it, raising the resolution as necessary since you will probably want to work at higher resolution than the reference. I find working at twice the pixel size of the ref to work best, unless the ref is super high rez. -Assemble a grid of squares covering the entire surface of your reference. The finer the grid, the more accurate the drawing will be. How fine is up to you. If you print the reference on a standard 8.5x11 sheet of paper 1" squares would be a reasonable size. Feel free to go smaller if you're up to it. In photoshop, you can build a grid on your reference easily by turning the ruler on and adding horizontal and verical guides to form squares. Duplicate this grid, keeping the sizes relative of course, on your new working surface/document. -You're ready to begin. Start with the contour. Go slowly. Your every fiber of being should be focused on getting the shapes down as accurately as possible. The idea of the grid is that you break the drawing down into tiny bits and you only need to worry about one square at a time. If you get all the squares right the whole image ends up accurate. Stand back/zoom out frequently to make sure things match your reference. Spending extra time in this first step to get it right will save you lots of time in wasted rendering later if you made a mistake and something needs to be redone. -Render render render. Working in photoshop is basically a battle of attrition. Regardless of medium your goal is to judge values as best you can and replicate them. Your goal is to produce an accurate form that DOES NOT DEPEND ON LINE, and instead reads entirely based on a contrast of values. Pencils are a bit tricky here. Your darkest possible value you can get out of your graphite should correspond to the blacks on your reference. I do not recommend 'smudging' techniques, or using mechanical pencils except in areas that require very delicate work (if you feel the need to use them). Be mindful of where your hand is and what it's resting on. It's a good idea to have a sheet of paper or some kind of buffer between your hand and the working surface to prevent your palm from smudging around work you've already done. Smudging will probably still occur regardless, so clean diligently with your eraser of choice where necessary. -Your final outcome should ideally be a photorealistic (or as best as you can muster) copy of your reference. It's gonna take a while. edit: beat'd by Bacon, but yeah, between our two posts you should have more than enough to get started.

awesome! that'll be my first order of business tomorrow.

I never played grim fandango......it's a blight on my otherwise stellar game playing career. You know.. I own this game and yet have never played it...

what the fuck is wrong with you people?

Well in my defence I do have incredibly itchy balls............wait....that's not right.

and it's printed. thoughts? Where the heck do you get a shirt printed up like that? Because that's a nice job.

there's a print shop called 'the ink shop' that claims to print directly onto tees, their stuff holds up pretty well although they actually fucked up that shirt by printing it too small it's still nice

You just had to post that battle again didn't you? That shirt turned out great though.

I'm still working on this grid study. I'm just going box by box and trying to render through value. It's going slowly, but I'm learning an incredible amount.

Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler this was supposed to be a warmup drawing! it didn't end up that way, because i'd just been reading about Dagon on wikipedia. how's my figure? EDIT: Chico reminded me of the existence of shadows and the moon.

Can I make a suggestion? Make this: And again, and again, until the gradation is smooth. Do it until you can barely see the strokes, *without* smudging. Then, draw this: Same thing. Do it over and over again until you can barely make out the individual strokes. Also, shade *along* the form, like in this example: It will look much better than if you shaded the sphere with the random strokes you typically use (or even one-direction strokes). Curve the strokes for the best effect. Final step - apply what you've learned to your drawings!

thanks, ND! i'll put that into use straight away. i was actually attempting to do the whole 'shade along the form' thing but i guess i just lapsed into bad habits.

Can I make a suggestion? Make this: Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler And again, and again, until the gradation is smooth. Do it until you can barely see the strokes, *without* smudging. Then, draw this: Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler Same thing. Do it over and over again until you can barely make out the individual strokes. Also, shade *along* the form, like in this example: Spoiler: show spoiler hide spoiler It will look much better than if you shaded the sphere with the random strokes you typically use (or even one-direction strokes). Curve the strokes for the best effect. Final step - apply what you've learned to your drawings! I can definately see the benefit here, but why oh why must it be SO BORING! Can we throw some pipe cleaners and glitter on it? Maybe jazz it up with some gold stars?