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What the heck; here I am and here's a picture of a guy and a bee thing
PeriSoft
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
After following PA since 1998 (yes, really) I finally signed up to the forum so I could make a snarky comment about bathrooms. Having gone to all the work to make myself a login, I figured I should check and see if there was any place where I could shamelessly promote my art things, and holy hell, look at that!
So anyway, here's a thing I just drew. It's, uhh... well... yeah.
There's a bigger version here if you feel like being more thoroughly disturbed.
So, anyway, I have no idea what to expect but thanks in advance for any comments!
So anyway, here's a thing I just drew. It's, uhh... well... yeah.
There's a bigger version here if you feel like being more thoroughly disturbed.
So, anyway, I have no idea what to expect but thanks in advance for any comments!
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Generally this isn't a place to get backslaps if you make your own thread (if you just want to share your work that's generally what the doodle thread is for). Your own thread typically would be a place to post a goodly number of works for folks to help you grow and develop.
Also: Welcome to the Artist's Forum!
SO MANY QUESTIONS
Right now it's a hobby, but I'm working at it fairly seriously and with the idea that I get myself into a position where if people want to work with me on a professional level, I'm capable of doing so. Right now I'm not there, I don't think.
One of the things I'm kind of working on at the moment is figuring out what direction to push myself in, style-wise. I gravitate toward bizarre, illustrationy stuff like above, but I don't know how other people feel, so getting a sense of whether other people are seeing value in my style and direction is something that interests me. And I'm also aware that it's very, very difficult to self-judge one's level of professionality; when I do new work I think it's great and when I look at old work I see how it sucks, so getting feedback from people who aren't me interests me.
OK, so this is a long-lived-thread kinda forum. I'm not used to that! I can try to figure it out, though.
Yeah, so, basically, I'm trying to figure out where my style fits, where my technical progress fits, and see if I can find people who are interested enough in the general style I do to offer advice about where to take it.
Another thing that would be cool is to find people who need illustration in the style I do; while I don't necessarily feel like I'm working at a pro level, I'm drawing anyway so if someone says, "Hey, I love your stuff; can you make me a [whatever] for [whatever]?" it'd be fun to have a whack at doing commissions without the pressure of being paid for it.
So given that, what would you recommend? Post some of my other stuff in this thread so people can see it, or...? Like I said, I'm new to the long-thread thing so advice is appreciated!
What you've posted has a nice value range, so you're clearly comfortable with a pencil, and I love the feet on the bee. Wonderfully knobbly. It looks like you could have spent some more time blending the larger shaded areas, like the nose - if graphite work is something you're interested in polishing, I'd suggest studying some artists like Marco Mazzoni (http://marcomazzoni.tumblr.com/) who are really great at getting that smooth, blended look without losing texture.
Take a spin around the other active threads to get a feel for how things are and typically how the flow goes.
At the top of the artist's forum there is a subforum for art resources you may want to check out.
Perfect! Yeah, I kinda realized after I put this one to bed that the nose basically wasn't finished. It wasn't the most interesting area of the drawing so I ended up basically forgetting about it! So that criticism is spot-on. And also I think the bee feet are close to my favorite part of the drawing, too; I'm not even sure how they turned out like that but it ended up being just right. If I can learn to draw hands like I draw feet I'll be a happy dude. Seriously, hands, what the hell?!
FYI, this was done on a Cintiq Companion in Painter 15, with the 'real 6b pencil'. It's all pretty much one layer and I never changed the size or settings on the brush, though, so it's as close as you can get to doing straight pencil digitally (I did 'cheat' a bit by switching it to white for some of the wrinkle highlights... shh).
Thanks for the advice, guys; I appreciate it. Are there any rules of thumb on image size for inline posting? Most of my self-hosted stuff is ginormous (~2k pixels wide) so that's probably a bit much...
Also wow that's Painter? dang, I didn't even realise, I thought you'd done it in pencil and just painted in the background digitally.
I haven't used any Corel stuff in years but their brushes have always been great for mimicking traditional work, I really should get my hands on a copy at some point!
I'm going to start at the beginning, which in this context means 2013, when I started drawing again for the first time since high school. So most of the next few things will have been done on a Lenovo tablet in Painter X3, which was technically a significant challenge to work with compared to the Cintiq!
I'm going to put smallish versions up, but if anyone is interested I can link big ones.
So, here's number one, the first thing I did on the Lenovo after 15 years of not drawing. It actually holds up fairly well but it's still mildly horrifying to see again after a couple of years of progress.
At the time I wasn't really comfortable with ears.
I'm also feeling like there is a lack of construction beneath these, which make them feel flatter than your excellent shading and detail work should have. What sort of preplanning and shape development do you do? Is it just by eye over time?
In a lot of cases I don't preplan at all. Like, for the top image (my most recent one) I drew a line, and that line ended up being a nose, and I just kinda went from there. I was in a bad mood and just screwing around with no intent to actually do anything 'real', and then built the image off that. So yeah, it totally makes sense that it's flat, because the whole thing was done almost deliberately as an exercise to see what happens if you take a 3-second crappy sketch and then make it super detailed.
The ninja dude *was* pre-planned, and figured out geometrically, as I mention. The blockheads before that, again, not really. I just kinda winged it. And I'd say you've hit on one of the things I need to work on; I tend to just eyeball stuff, or even put myself on autopilot and whatever ends up there is what I draw. I think it's as much a matter of discipline as anything. I tend to approach stuff in an ad-hoc way.
If I bother to plan I can do this:
...I just don't happen to try that often, which is something I probably need to work on!
...yeah. And then there's this guy. He's old. Unlike almost everything else, this was done based on a reference photo - though obviously it was a bit of a loose interpretation:
Best bit: Eyes. Worst bit: Forehead; half-assed, ugh. I was still feeling strange about ears, but this was an improvement after a couple of false-ear-starts.
Shockingly, it also happens to be one of the ones I pre-planned! Funny how that works...
This was quite a lot of work, as it happened...
You are going to find that it maybe difficult to get feedback on your work as it is now. Its interesting, its not very academic and so it has a sort of charm to it that in itself can be hard to reproduce. We generally ask people what they want to do with their work because it makes it very easy to point them in a specific, technical direction. "Oh you want to do concept art, well you're anatomy sucks, learn to draw people" "Oh you want to go into graphic design, well your composition is terrible" that kind of thing. When you are in a more "general fine arts" category, where you aren't aiming for a very commercial avenue for your art, you need more self direction for improvement. You wont have an industry telling you pretty specifically what technical skills are the most valuable to you, so you need work more generally on them, and then as you go the relevant ones will reveal themselves.
Two suggestions:
Work on your very basic observation skills. Set up a still life, try some simple shape studies (http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/172670/feb-monthly-enrichment-simple-shapes-light-and-form/p1") Pick up scott robertsons "how to draw". These will give you a lot more flexibility to execute your ideas with confidence.
List out your favorite artists. Who do you admire? What do you see in their work that you'd like to see in your own. What are they doing with their work that makes it successful and visible? If you find you cant really list out some artists, its a good time to commit to looking at more art. Check out the resolution thread for some ideas on goal making: http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/186005/enrichment-set-your-resolution#latest
You can probably stop posting old art now. Show us what you are working on and developing. I'd suggest doing some studies and posting those. Its alot easier to dole out some helpful critiques when you are pursuing something more technical, for the simple reason that it takes out the guesswork of "artistic intent". When you push your basics it gives you a lot foundation and insight for building new work.
This is excellent advice and I've completely ignored it.
Actually, it's more that I haven't been drawing much, and what I *have* done is more of the same. I'm posting it, though, because I *do* think it addresses some of the flatness of a lot of my previous stuff, and I'm curious to see whether other people agree with my assessment there. It's not great on that count, but it's progress, I think.
...and you'll have to wait for the actual pic, because I accidentally clicked the 'post' button. Today is not my day.