So, teaching myself Blender has to be probably the single most rewarding art education step I've taken in years. Just plotting out little mock ups of my figures and scenes and being able to move the camera and light sources is so easy, and it feels like it's opening all kinds of compositional doors that I would have never found on my own. And I think I'm actually learning all kinds of things -- particularly when it comes to perspective, spacial awareness, and more than anything else, lighting -- that I can apply to drawing from imagination. It's great. If anyone has ever been on the fence, I can't recommend it enough. And it's a lot easier to learn than I expected! I felt relatively comfortable using the program after maybe two weeks of just going through random tutorials, maybe 30 minutes a day.
And I also have had to search for specific videos about functions that I couldn't figure out as I went along.
One thing I'll say is that it's definitely worth it to do more than one "introduction to blender" tutorials. Everyone forgets to mention some basic function or fact about the interface, and that can be really frustrating when you can't figure out why the program is suddenly no longer functioning the way you're used to because you accidentally ticked some little box somewhere.
Also, http://www.blendswap.com/ is a GREAT site for finding models to work into your scene mock-ups. You can find all kinds of people and animals that are pre-rigged and fully poseable out of the box. Not to mention props, weapons and the like. All free, though there is a limit to the number of downloads per month unless you're a paid member.
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
So apparently the Canson Biggie XL newsprint pads are rough newsprint when the recommendation for the Watts training is smooth newsprint. That might explain why it feels like I'm working hard to keep my pencil sharpened and to work my shading into the paper...
Angels, innovations, and the hubris of tiny things: my book now free on Royal Road! Seraphim
Yeah, the materials really do make a big difference there, smooth newsprint takes charcoal like down like butter, rough newsprint just makes a mess IMO. I've also found that different brands of smooth newsprint can feel very different so I'd recommend trying a couple of different kinds over time. The best combo IMO (and the one that I've seen Jeff Watts using) is smooth newsprint with Conte penciles. I like them a LOT more than most charcoal pencils because they're a bit softer, so they blend better and they also aren't as brittle. The Conte 2B Pierre Noire pencil goes down onto smooth newsprint VERY smoothly. They're kind of pricey but you can buy them from Blick online if there's no good art store near you: http://www.dickblick.com/products/conte-sketching-pencils/
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
Dick blick is my go to for supplies. I've had good luck with them so far. I tested out the smooth newsprint last night and found that I could suddenly manage a six step gradient for tone instead of 3. Conversely, the paper feels slippery as a seal under my palm after a year of rough newsprint.
Swerving topic, I find that the various anatomical abstractions really have not helped me at all with learning figure fundamentals. Instead, I have been taking chunks off Simblet's Anatomy and mannequinizing them myself. After absorbing that, suddenly the associated chunk of abstraction becomes much more clear. I wonder if that is a manifestation of me being an engineer and thus overly analytical or a normal bump in the road.
Angels, innovations, and the hubris of tiny things: my book now free on Royal Road! Seraphim
I learned relatively recently that the way I process light in my 2d rendering is strongly influenced by the convergence between my interests in comics art and sculpture-- I struggle with more liefelike styles of rendering in 2d even though I focus on portraiture from life in my sculpture stuff, and I think it's in part because translating from one "language" to the other loses a lot of information, for me.
I imagine it's quite possible that it's similar with taking one knowledge set and applying it to a different setup?
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Hi! I have a little question, I am making an animation for the company I work for and for this animation I need more props than I usually make. So I went looking for somewhere to buy 3D models!
I've been pointed at a site called turbosquid where you can buy models (license to use is more accurate I guess). I wanted to check if anyone here is familiar with the site, I'd like to know beforehand that it's not a place that scams people or fences stolen artwork. I haven't found anything suggesting they're not legit, but nothing to suggest they are either.
PSN: Honkalot
0
21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
Really intimidated by the amount of talent here, but i'll jump in.
As some of you know, I do Pixel Art. I try to spend about an hour a day doing it during the week with a couple more during the weekends.
i have two questions of varying technicality that i hope you could help me with:
Firstly, i did these two animated sprites:
First one i'm super satisfied with, second one, less so, but I can't put my finger on what makes it feel disjointed to me (I also have not finished shading that one). I'm trying to keep the animations consistent (so both 27 frames long, with a long pause for the start and end poses). I'd love to have your feedback on that little WIP.
Secondly, i want to improve my mastery of the craft, but i'm not sure where to go. Do i keep working on mostly doing poses from reference? Do i try to do more landscapes? Light and Shadow studies? Something else?
After i'm done animating the sprites i made fro this project, i wanna start a new one and study light and shadow, but i don't know what subject(s) to use for that or even where to start. What would be good to draw to study light and shadow? i prefer doing projects with a clear endpoint that can be expanded, but I'm willing to do anything.
Pixel art is still drawing, so all the basic advice applies. If you want to get good at drawing characters you should learn construction and anatomy, light and form. My recommendation would be to not do that exclusively with pixel art and try some normal drawing, because you will be fighting an extra level of challenge with pixels. Pixels require great design and efficiency.
It's not going to be possible to tell you exactly what you should be doing. You need to work on your fundamentals. Some people do that digitally, in their preferred medium, but you can't do that with pixels if it's going to prevent you from actually getting to the meat of the process. It means doing observation studies, pushing yourself to replicate what you see, and not moving on from the basics as soon as you try it once.
When you look at a dude like paul robertson, he's got deceptive drawing skills. It's all stylized and that appears to be all he's ever done, but he's been doing it for a long time and his improvements are subtle. It's hard to know if he was drawing other stuff before he got started, but he's clearly got a knack for motion that some people just have out the gate.
The animation game mostly requires extreme patience. The best animators I've known really love the process and would do it all day everyday without much prompting. If you care so much about getting it right that it doesn't matter if it takes you 80 hours to animate a hand, you are going to get good. I ended up leaving animation mostly behind because I enjoy the results of illustration more. I still want to pursue animation but motion is not the same for me as telling stories, so comics are a more economical use of my time. Those kinds of insights into what you want from your art are not something we can make, but they should be considered.
If you want crits on your particular animations, please stick them in your thread, thats what its for. Otherwise, I suggest engaging with the AC at large. Learning to look at other peoples art and comment about what you actually like will help you improve your vocabulary for your aesthetics. You'll also be reading tons of critiques that also apply to you, and learning how to take general advice and apply it to your work is a needed skill. Believe it or not, I encourage community engagement because it's easily the thing that pushed my work the farthest forward over the years.
Pixel art is still drawing, so all the basic advice applies. If you want to get good at drawing characters you should learn construction and anatomy, light and form. My recommendation would be to not do that exclusively with pixel art and try some normal drawing, because you will be fighting an extra level of challenge with pixels. Pixels require great design and efficiency.
It's not going to be possible to tell you exactly what you should be doing. You need to work on your fundamentals. Some people do that digitally, in their preferred medium, but you can't do that with pixels if it's going to prevent you from actually getting to the meat of the process. It means doing observation studies, pushing yourself to replicate what you see, and not moving on from the basics as soon as you try it once.
When you look at a dude like paul robertson, he's got deceptive drawing skills. It's all stylized and that appears to be all he's ever done, but he's been doing it for a long time and his improvements are subtle. It's hard to know if he was drawing other stuff before he got started, but he's clearly got a knack for motion that some people just have out the gate.
The animation game mostly requires extreme patience. The best animators I've known really love the process and would do it all day everyday without much prompting. If you care so much about getting it right that it doesn't matter if it takes you 80 hours to animate a hand, you are going to get good. I ended up leaving animation mostly behind because I enjoy the results of illustration more. I still want to pursue animation but motion is not the same for me as telling stories, so comics are a more economical use of my time. Those kinds of insights into what you want from your art are not something we can make, but they should be considered.
If you want crits on your particular animations, please stick them in your thread, thats what its for. Otherwise, I suggest engaging with the AC at large. Learning to look at other peoples art and comment about what you actually like will help you improve your vocabulary for your aesthetics. You'll also be reading tons of critiques that also apply to you, and learning how to take general advice and apply it to your work is a needed skill. Believe it or not, I encourage community engagement because it's easily the thing that pushed my work the farthest forward over the years.
Drawing on paper... I tried that and i just didn't enjoy it. i mean, i'm not doing this professionally, just as a hobby and last time i went with "traditional" drawing (Figure sketches, mostly) i ended up stopping drawing altogether because i was not enjoying myself at all. i mean, i know i don't really have what it takes to do art professionally and that's really not my goal here. I'm not sure if it's worth it to trade out enjoyment for skill when i'm just doing this for fun, you know.
Guess there's no choice, gotta do it right, right? Thanks for the advice.
To some degree, you'll just have to decide what sort of level you want to go for. Being a hobbyist that just does it for fun is great, but receiving critiques is a bit all or nothing. We cant really separate advice from "I don't know, do what you feel like!" and what you actually have to do to improve. In the end, you'll decide how far you want to take it.
As a person who currently doesn't do art "professionally", I don't feel like the desire to get good is at all separate. For the most part all hobbies require some parts that are boring or painful or grueling. You can do yoga for fun, never teach it, but the only way to become excellent at it is to push past limits and try new, more difficult poses. The only difference between a hobbyist and a professional is the exchange of cash, and there's no reason to consider that as the guideline for how seriously you take yourself and your art.
If you are seeking advice on how to move forward, its clear that you want to do more than what you are doing now. Pushing the fundamentals does not actually mean you need to drop what you do now and start oil painting. It just means you need to think really critically about your work and try to give yourself a pathway to reach your goals. But you need to actually set some of those, for your own sake. If you went strait from pixel art to a life drawing class, it probably killed it for you because its a bit of a leap. I'd look at our monthly enrichments for shape and construction and try to apply those to your work. The more you try to draw what you see, the easier it is for us to give you completely objective advice on it.
If you want to just keep doing stylized pixels and nothing else, you will have to do a lot of self assessment, which can be difficult. Art is such that we cannot determine a failure state for you.
To some degree, you'll just have to decide what sort of level you want to go for. Being a hobbyist that just does it for fun is great, but receiving critiques is a bit all or nothing. We cant really separate advice from "I don't know, do what you feel like!" and what you actually have to do to improve. In the end, you'll decide how far you want to take it.
As a person who currently doesn't do art "professionally", I don't feel like the desire to get good is at all separate. For the most part all hobbies require some parts that are boring or painful or grueling. You can do yoga for fun, never teach it, but the only way to become excellent at it is to push past limits and try new, more difficult poses. The only difference between a hobbyist and a professional is the exchange of cash, and there's no reason to consider that as the guideline for how seriously you take yourself and your art.
If you are seeking advice on how to move forward, its clear that you want to do more than what you are doing now. Pushing the fundamentals does not actually mean you need to drop what you do now and start oil painting. It just means you need to think really critically about your work and try to give yourself a pathway to reach your goals. But you need to actually set some of those, for your own sake. If you went strait from pixel art to a life drawing class, it probably killed it for you because its a bit of a leap. I'd look at our monthly enrichments for shape and construction and try to apply those to your work. The more you try to draw what you see, the easier it is for us to give you completely objective advice on it.
If you want to just keep doing stylized pixels and nothing else, you will have to do a lot of self assessment, which can be difficult. Art is such that we cannot determine a failure state for you.
I guess another problem i have is my lack of a goal, haha. I wanna be as good as i can be, but there's no limit to that.
I'll start setting some time aside every week for pencil practice again and check the enrichment threads. thanks for the tip.
I think you've got a pretty clear enough goal, "get better at animating". For the purpose of animating sprites, but the principles are identical whether your character is 32 pixels tall or is taking up the size of a movie screen.
So cool, goal set.
Now on the issue of 'learning fundamentals'- everyone suggests it, it's a great idea, indeed it really is a necessary idea. However, often people just starting out, trying to give a legitimate effort towards the idea of 'getting good', run into issues in trying to actually do this, as you seem to have.
First reason for this, is that it can be difficult and tedious and repetitive and frustrating- sorry, it comes with the territory.
But another issue is that the beginner, being a beginner, does not have the breadth of experience to know, "is this actually teaching me the skills to do what I am trying to do?" And, in taking on a course or tutorial of something generically labelled, "art fundamentals", often the beginner is indeed correct in their suspicions that the exercises given are not the most direct and useful ones towards their particular goal- spending 40 hours shading a still life basket of flowers will do you no harm, but it doesn't translate all that directly towards say, drawing that Astro Boy fancomic you've had in mind. An exercise in perspective may be an necessary thing to learn to do achieve that goal, but may seem equally non-essential to someone who hasn't the knowledge or experience to appreciate this fact.
So in this confusion, your reaction is not uncommon- it feels dissatisfying and disconnected, because these lessons may not be drawing those lines from A to B in your mind. It may seem an endless amount of effort for little immediate, tangible reward.
So how do you avoid that? How do you know you're getting the most out of your time and effort?
Well, I might suggest starting, instead, at the deep end of the pool.
Animating well requires knowledge of construction, gesture, perspective, anatomy, design, etc., in addition to animation's unique requisite skills- and you can study all these things for years and years and years. But you may find it hard to keep your motivation up for studying those things, if you say, "hey, I'm going to learn all those things- all those fundamentals- and then I'll get around to actually animating again." You might just give up right in the middle of a lecture about the origin of the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
So instead of just leaping in blind, let's first take it backwards. Let's look at the animations you've done here- just briefly, what stands out is that there's a definite lack of anticipation, easing into poses, overlapping animation and overall sense of weight, and the pose design being hampered because it feels like each part of the body is being moved around individually, rather than being designed in a cohesive way using a 'line of action' principle, by having a broad overarching gesture behind each pose.
So in tackling these issues, the first stop I would go to is Richard Williams' Animator Survival Kit, being probably the best book on animation written, to my knowledge. (To make sure I hadn't already recommended it to you, I did a search for it- and was happy to find a post saying you already have this book. So I'd suggest giving the relevant sections a re-read.) I also might recommend rewatching the relevant 12 principles of animation videos (I'm pretty sure I posted one in your thread), or reading the section in The Illusion of Life about them (though admittedly it's irritating that for the price of a big 500+ page hardcover book, only 20 or so contain practical information on the principles.)
Now, in re-reading that book, you might solve some problems...but you'll probably run into another- line of action? gesture? exaggeration? These things aren't covered that well in the book, and in addition are really hard to figure out placing pixels down one by one- you've got to be able to move your hand, feel out that gesture, stretch and modify it and push it around quickly, to find that pose that's going to communicate the clearest, with the most energy and life and interest. Whether you do that by just drawing on a napkin with an old crayon, or using a pencil, or a bit of charcoal, or a tablet in photoshop, or scratching in the sand with a stick, the point is this: you're using that tool (whatever it is), you're using that exercise, to directly solve a concrete problem that you are invested in solving.
You are NOT doing it, just because someone said to, because it's a 'fundamental'. You should have an understanding of what you're doing, and why you are doing it, and the decision to do that, is your decision. The point is not even, "I want this to be a good drawing"- it's a means to an end, and how much you invest in that is up to you.
That may not seem like it should make a difference, but it does. "I want to solve this problem" is always going to be a more motivating than, "I guess I'd better put in some pencil time"- even if what you end up doing is exactly the same in both cases.
So in all likelihood you're going to wind up doing gesture study, to do what you're hoping with your animation, since one just naturally leads to the other. But how do you study gesture? It's going to be another frustration, if practiced blindly.
Plenty of life drawing classes can put you in front of a naked person and tell you to draw for minute-long intervals- but a good many may not be interested or qualified to instruct you to those goals- so on that front, Force: Dynamic Drawing For Animators and the Walt Stanchfield Drawn To Life books are great books covering the topic, written specifically with the goals of the animator in mind. So when you go to that life drawing session or pull up that piece of ref, you know how to get what you need out of it.
Then with all this drawing you're doing, well, gestures are great and all- but when you go to pull it all together into a finished drawing, or try to make it into a sprite? It's doing to fall apart a bit, because the structure isn't there, the construction now needs work. So you slide a copy of How To Draw The Marvel Way across the register and learn how to break figures and objects into cylinders, spheres, and cubes. But those volumes aren't turning out that great- you've gotta spend some time with Scott Robertson's How To Draw to get your perspective game up. Now things are feeling kinda solid but those figures are looking a bit outta proportion, ring up Loomis or Bridgman to get those proportion skills up.
At this point you've wound up back at "learning fundamentals".
But this time, it's informed by your own direct purpose, rather than having it forced upon you by a drawing teacher or us yahoos here. The exact same sort of exercises, but this time knowing the A to B, the logic leading from drawing this simple box to making that sprite animation you've been hoping for.
Is this a roundabout way of going about things, sure. Will that take longer, taking more trial and error, more mistakes than you would get by blindly taking a perfectly tailored and taught course in fundamentals, that takes everything in logical step-by-step towards your specific needs? Probably- but even in the fanciest art schools, few courses provide that, so there's little use worrying about comparing your efforts against a fictional hypothetical. After all, if all the artists out there only drew properly shaded spheres in kindergarten rather than crudely drawn Ninja Turtles, few of them would continue to be interested enough in art to get anywhere. Everyone patches their education together however they can, in reality. If you've gotta school of hard knocks your way down the chain to the bottom, before climbing back to the top a wiser man/woman, so be it- the important thing is to keep at it, keep going, keep learning, keep working.
Also, I mentioned a bunch of books in there, and that's for good reason. Spending the time and being diligent with practice is tough, but spending money and time on reading is (relatively) way easier. Better to buy a book and have the knowledge, and then realize you don't actually care enough to follow through with what it suggests, rather than spending months or years scrambling around in the dark hoping you'll trip upon improvement by random chance, to no avail. There's no avoiding the hard practice if you want to get anywhere, but you can at least avoid going down a dead end.
I think you've got a pretty clear enough goal, "get better at animating". For the purpose of animating sprites, but the principles are identical whether your character is 32 pixels tall or is taking up the size of a movie screen.
So cool, goal set.
Now on the issue of 'learning fundamentals'- everyone suggests it, it's a great idea, indeed it really is a necessary idea. However, often people just starting out, trying to give a legitimate effort towards the idea of 'getting good', run into issues in trying to actually do this, as you seem to have.
First reason for this, is that it can be difficult and tedious and repetitive and frustrating- sorry, it comes with the territory.
But another issue is that the beginner, being a beginner, does not have the breadth of experience to know, "is this actually teaching me the skills to do what I am trying to do?" And, in taking on a course or tutorial of something generically labelled, "art fundamentals", often the beginner is indeed correct in their suspicions that the exercises given are not the most direct and useful ones towards their particular goal- spending 40 hours shading a still life basket of flowers will do you no harm, but it doesn't translate all that directly towards say, drawing that Astro Boy fancomic you've had in mind. An exercise in perspective may be an necessary thing to learn to do achieve that goal, but may seem equally non-essential to someone who hasn't the knowledge or experience to appreciate this fact.
So in this confusion, your reaction is not uncommon- it feels dissatisfying and disconnected, because these lessons may not be drawing those lines from A to B in your mind. It may seem an endless amount of effort for little immediate, tangible reward.
So how do you avoid that? How do you know you're getting the most out of your time and effort?
Well, I might suggest starting, instead, at the deep end of the pool.
Animating well requires knowledge of construction, gesture, perspective, anatomy, design, etc., in addition to animation's unique requisite skills- and you can study all these things for years and years and years. But you may find it hard to keep your motivation up for studying those things, if you say, "hey, I'm going to learn all those things- all those fundamentals- and then I'll get around to actually animating again." You might just give up right in the middle of a lecture about the origin of the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
So instead of just leaping in blind, let's first take it backwards. Let's look at the animations you've done here- just briefly, what stands out is that there's a definite lack of anticipation, easing into poses, overlapping animation and overall sense of weight, and the pose design being hampered because it feels like each part of the body is being moved around individually, rather than being designed in a cohesive way using a 'line of action' principle, by having a broad overarching gesture behind each pose.
So in tackling these issues, the first stop I would go to is Richard Williams' Animator Survival Kit, being probably the best book on animation written, to my knowledge. (To make sure I hadn't already recommended it to you, I did a search for it- and was happy to find a post saying you already have this book. So I'd suggest giving the relevant sections a re-read.) I also might recommend rewatching the relevant 12 principles of animation videos (I'm pretty sure I posted one in your thread), or reading the section in The Illusion of Life about them (though admittedly it's irritating that for the price of a big 500+ page hardcover book, only 20 or so contain practical information on the principles.)
Now, in re-reading that book, you might solve some problems...but you'll probably run into another- line of action? gesture? exaggeration? These things aren't covered that well in the book, and in addition are really hard to figure out placing pixels down one by one- you've got to be able to move your hand, feel out that gesture, stretch and modify it and push it around quickly, to find that pose that's going to communicate the clearest, with the most energy and life and interest. Whether you do that by just drawing on a napkin with an old crayon, or using a pencil, or a bit of charcoal, or a tablet in photoshop, or scratching in the sand with a stick, the point is this: you're using that tool (whatever it is), you're using that exercise, to directly solve a concrete problem that you are invested in solving.
You are NOT doing it, just because someone said to, because it's a 'fundamental'. You should have an understanding of what you're doing, and why you are doing it, and the decision to do that, is your decision. The point is not even, "I want this to be a good drawing"- it's a means to an end, and how much you invest in that is up to you.
That may not seem like it should make a difference, but it does. "I want to solve this problem" is always going to be a more motivating than, "I guess I'd better put in some pencil time"- even if what you end up doing is exactly the same in both cases.
So in all likelihood you're going to wind up doing gesture study, to do what you're hoping with your animation, since one just naturally leads to the other. But how do you study gesture? It's going to be another frustration, if practiced blindly.
Plenty of life drawing classes can put you in front of a naked person and tell you to draw for minute-long intervals- but a good many may not be interested or qualified to instruct you to those goals- so on that front, Force: Dynamic Drawing For Animators and the Walt Stanchfield Drawn To Life books are great books covering the topic, written specifically with the goals of the animator in mind. So when you go to that life drawing session or pull up that piece of ref, you know how to get what you need out of it.
Then with all this drawing you're doing, well, gestures are great and all- but when you go to pull it all together into a finished drawing, or try to make it into a sprite? It's doing to fall apart a bit, because the structure isn't there, the construction now needs work. So you slide a copy of How To Draw The Marvel Way across the register and learn how to break figures and objects into cylinders, spheres, and cubes. But those volumes aren't turning out that great- you've gotta spend some time with Scott Robertson's How To Draw to get your perspective game up. Now things are feeling kinda solid but those figures are looking a bit outta proportion, ring up Loomis or Bridgman to get those proportion skills up.
At this point you've wound up back at "learning fundamentals".
But this time, it's informed by your own direct purpose, rather than having it forced upon you by a drawing teacher or us yahoos here. The exact same sort of exercises, but this time knowing the A to B, the logic leading from drawing this simple box to making that sprite animation you've been hoping for.
Is this a roundabout way of going about things, sure. Will that take longer, taking more trial and error, more mistakes than you would get by blindly taking a perfectly tailored and taught course in fundamentals, that takes everything in logical step-by-step towards your specific needs? Probably- but even in the fanciest art schools, few courses provide that, so there's little use worrying about comparing your efforts against a fictional hypothetical. After all, if all the artists out there only drew properly shaded spheres in kindergarten rather than crudely drawn Ninja Turtles, few of them would continue to be interested enough in art to get anywhere. Everyone patches their education together however they can, in reality. If you've gotta school of hard knocks your way down the chain to the bottom, before climbing back to the top a wiser man/woman, so be it- the important thing is to keep at it, keep going, keep learning, keep working.
Also, I mentioned a bunch of books in there, and that's for good reason. Spending the time and being diligent with practice is tough, but spending money and time on reading is (relatively) way easier. Better to buy a book and have the knowledge, and then realize you don't actually care enough to follow through with what it suggests, rather than spending months or years scrambling around in the dark hoping you'll trip upon improvement by random chance, to no avail. There's no avoiding the hard practice if you want to get anywhere, but you can at least avoid going down a dead end.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. I kinda wish i had the money (and, in fact, time) to get all those books now. i just want to stress something, my problem with doing the fundamentals exercises isn't my lack of purpose or the idea that it's not paying off. I know it paid off and I know it was super useful the first time i tried it. The problem is that it was not pleasant to do. Which, yeah, I get that it probably won't be at first. I'm going from a medium where i'm at a level that i feel is pretty good to one where i'm extremely bad. Of course i'll be more frustrated than anything. i just need to figure a way to not stop entirely.
I think one of the reasons I did stop pencil practice was related to mental health issues that have been dealt with since. Also, it will probably help if i alternate between Pixel art and pencil art instead of choosing one exclusively over the other.
I think the best thing i was told (not in this thread) is that hobbies will often reach a point where they end up being like work for a while if the person wants to become much better at them. I guess that's where i am now.
So this weekend (not today because i'm actually busy), i'll get started on the fundamentals again, read up on the enrichment tasks and overall re-try to improve my pencil game.
I figured it might be better to post here than H/A at first
if I wanted to get back into drawing, but didn't necessarily want to draw on paper.. what should I look to invest in? I used to sketch a lot as a kid (I am really bad at drawing in general), but I don't want to have a ton of paper and invest in pencils and all that (especially since I might be moving soon, less bulk is better).
I figure tablets for drawing? I don't really have an upper bounds on what I can spend, my PC is really good, but if possible I'd like to keep it under $200. I'm trying to expand my skill set into 3d modeling since I'm a programmer I'd like to be able to make some rudimentary things, but I should start small before I tackle 3d modeling. This was probably 10-15 years ago but back when I was looking to get a tablet for my PC to draw with they were all hyper expensive and I found them difficult to use since it wasn't like drawing on paper (you couldn't see anything on the tablet?)... I'm not sure if this has changed either, maybe I'm wrong!
Do they attach with USB or am I going to need to invest in some weird dongle technology like serial or anything like that?
Also software, what are my options here? Photoshop? What's the skill level needed to actually draw on that? Is there some good tutorials for beginners?
Thanks ahead of time!
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
+1
HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
@bowen about tablets there are much more diverse price ranges now than just 5+ years ago. Different brands too though I've always kept to Wacom out of habit, I don't actually know which brands or products are considered best now.
USB mostly, some wireless ones exist. It took me a gooooood long while to learn how to use a tablet effectively, for me there was some weird disconnect between drawing on a surface but looking on the computer monitor. Just a habit thing, got okay after a while. If you just want to try it out I'd probably go for a Wacom Bamboo or something in that lower price bracket, since the bigger ones still get pricey pretty quickly.
I don't consider tablets especially useful for 3D modeling, with the exception of sculpting software, where the analogue to having a tool in hand that responds to pressure sensitivity and such is more obvious. There are lots of great tutorials everywhere now, if I'm wondering something about 3D modeling it's often a specific feature in a specific program so I just google that and end up with numerous youtube videos. Many people still mention Lynda.com, I bet they have tutorials that are aimed at starting up 3D stuff.
Blender is a free 3D software you could check out without putting any money down. I got scared off by it, learning a new UI for stuff like that is a pretty steep learning curve. It seems very mod-able, they front function names in all button tooltips, which made me scared but might appeal to you as a programmer.
Learning any modeling program may seem super intimidating thanks to the interfaces being what they are, but if you go by a good tutorial and put in time it's very doable.
@bowen about tablets there are much more diverse price ranges now than just 5+ years ago. Different brands too though I've always kept to Wacom out of habit, I don't actually know which brands or products are considered best now.
USB mostly, some wireless ones exist. It took me a gooooood long while to learn how to use a tablet effectively, for me there was some weird disconnect between drawing on a surface but looking on the computer monitor. Just a habit thing, got okay after a while. If you just want to try it out I'd probably go for a Wacom Bamboo or something in that lower price bracket, since the bigger ones still get pricey pretty quickly.
I don't consider tablets especially useful for 3D modeling, with the exception of sculpting software, where the analogue to having a tool in hand that responds to pressure sensitivity and such is more obvious. There are lots of great tutorials everywhere now, if I'm wondering something about 3D modeling it's often a specific feature in a specific program so I just google that and end up with numerous youtube videos. Many people still mention Lynda.com, I bet they have tutorials that are aimed at starting up 3D stuff.
Blender is a free 3D software you could check out without putting any money down. I got scared off by it, learning a new UI for stuff like that is a pretty steep learning curve. It seems very mod-able, they front function names in all button tooltips, which made me scared but might appeal to you as a programmer.
Learning any modeling program may seem super intimidating thanks to the interfaces being what they are, but if you go by a good tutorial and put in time it's very doable.
Yeah in particular the disconnect would bug me, I'd be okay with paying a bit more for a drawing tablet that I could see what I'm doing on it if it's reasonable.
The tablet is mostly just to stretch my legs again, it's been a long time since I've drawn anything, and I've got the creativity of a potato.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
@bowen about tablets there are much more diverse price ranges now than just 5+ years ago. Different brands too though I've always kept to Wacom out of habit, I don't actually know which brands or products are considered best now.
USB mostly, some wireless ones exist. It took me a gooooood long while to learn how to use a tablet effectively, for me there was some weird disconnect between drawing on a surface but looking on the computer monitor. Just a habit thing, got okay after a while. If you just want to try it out I'd probably go for a Wacom Bamboo or something in that lower price bracket, since the bigger ones still get pricey pretty quickly.
I don't consider tablets especially useful for 3D modeling, with the exception of sculpting software, where the analogue to having a tool in hand that responds to pressure sensitivity and such is more obvious. There are lots of great tutorials everywhere now, if I'm wondering something about 3D modeling it's often a specific feature in a specific program so I just google that and end up with numerous youtube videos. Many people still mention Lynda.com, I bet they have tutorials that are aimed at starting up 3D stuff.
Blender is a free 3D software you could check out without putting any money down. I got scared off by it, learning a new UI for stuff like that is a pretty steep learning curve. It seems very mod-able, they front function names in all button tooltips, which made me scared but might appeal to you as a programmer.
Learning any modeling program may seem super intimidating thanks to the interfaces being what they are, but if you go by a good tutorial and put in time it's very doable.
Yeah in particular the disconnect would bug me, I'd be okay with paying a bit more for a drawing tablet that I could see what I'm doing on it if it's reasonable.
The tablet is mostly just to stretch my legs again, it's been a long time since I've drawn anything, and I've got the creativity of a potato.
I don't know about you, but i think potatoes can be pretty creative. So many different dishes!
About tablets, how do they work? Like, I assume it's not a 1:1 analogue of the screen, right? So How do you know where the lines are gonna be when you draw?
About tablets, how do they work? Like, I assume it's not a 1:1 analogue of the screen, right? So How do you know where the lines are gonna be when you draw?
@21stcentury: It is basically a 1:1 analogue of the screen- touch the pen to a spot on the tablet, the cursor pops to the corresponding location on the monitor. You draw by just looking at your monitor and where the cursor is, rather than looking down at your hands.
@bowen:
General run-down of your options, though my personal experience is mainly with Wacom Intuos/Cintiq products:
Wacom Cintiqs: Pros: Draw directly on the screen, well supported by major programs, is the mainstay of professional concept artists/animators/etc. Cons: Expensive as hell, $1000-$2500 depending on size.
Yiynova tablets: Pros: Also lets you draw directly on the screen, is significantly cheaper than a Cintiq. Cons: I've heard iffy things about the actual quality of these tablets, and issues with getting drivers/software to work with it seems to have plagued a lot of people's experiences with them.
Microsoft Surface Pro: Pros: Draw directly on the screen, is a whole computer as well. Cons: Cost like a whole computer, I'm not sure if it has some of the nicer Intuos/Cintiq features like pen tilt/high pressure sensitivity. Also I'm not sure what the form factor is like RE:using hotkeys when drawing, which for me would be a big issue. And I think they changed the digitiser type after the Pro 2s, and I haven't kept up with how the newer ones compare.
iPad Pro + iPad Pro Pencil: I've heard good things about this combo with people using Procreate, but Procreate doesn't exactly have feature parity with something like Photoshop. Also having not used it, I'm still skeptical about it because....
iPad Air + Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus 2: I bought these and I thought it was garbage as a drawing solution, because of the pen lines 'snapping' to a grid rather than drawing where I wanted the lines to go. Maybe things have improved, but I haven't touched it in a year or so because I thought it was so dreadful.
Wacom Intuos tablets: Pros: Solid, well-supported, reasonably priced for someone looking at art as a semi-serious hobby/start to a career. Cons: No screen. Hasn't stopped a lot of people from making a lot of really great art on them, most people I know either got started on them or continue to use them. (Some people where I work refuse to move from them to a Cintiq, even though they could get one with a word, citing feel/ergonomic reasons).
Other digitizers: May be had cheaper than a Wacom tablet, but I can't attest to quality/driver/software support.
As to software:
Photoshop: Most widely used and fully featured drawing/painting software, but is quite expensive.
Manga Studio: I haven't used this, but a lot of comic people love it for its inking tools
Paint Tool SAI: Also has nice inking tools, seems to be used a lot by Japanese manga/anime types. It's cheap, but is also kinda low-rent and poorly supported/updated.
Painter: Focused on natural media simulaton. Not sure how many people use it or where it stands today- I think a lot of would-be users of it just resort to hacking together natural-media looks in Photoshop instead.
ProCreate: Currently seems to be the king of the hill of mobile art software. Lot of people seem to love it, and it seems really good, I just personally would have to try it with the iPad Pro Pencil first and see if it's as good as people are saying before buying into it as a replacement for a desktop software/tablet solution.
Now, that's all the information. Now time for opinions.
If money is no object, sure you're going to want the greatest and best. But for most people, spending $2500 on the best Cintiq and $600 (or whatever the ongoing subscription price is) on a copy of Photoshop and god knows how much on the kind of RAM-monster, SSD drive rig and multi-monitors and all that to really have the best of the best...well, it's a big price tag to scratch an "I'm kinda interested in getting back into drawing, kinda" itch. Even as a professional I hesitate to lay down that sort of cash.
Now, the "I am super serious about art and will now give you the super serious hard answer" answer to this is, an ill-proportioned stick figure is going to be an ill-proportioned stick figure whether you've drawn it on a top of the line rig that cost you a small fortune to assemble, or if you drew it with an old golf pencil on a piece of paper you grabbed out of your printer tray.
So if you're saying you're 'bad at drawing in general', and presumably the hope is to make your drawings better rather than just more expensive to produce, I'd take whatever your initial budget you are willing to spend is, and divide it up so you are spending a significant proportion of that money on education instead. Books, tutorials, classes- these are the things that will actually make a meaningful difference. Too many people starting out get wrapped up with getting the best toy to play with and give little thought or investment toward how they're actually going to acquire the knowledge to actually use it well- it's sort of a child's attitude who thinks that the main and most important difference between themselves and an NFL linebacker is the ownership of a uniform and full set of football pads. It's absurd how many people will spend tons of money on things that make little difference, but will be the cheapest, most miserly bastards when it comes to things that make all the difference. They'll spend $3000 on a computer and then balk at spending $20 on a book, it's crazy.
That said, I was starting out once too and I as well wanted to get my mitts on Photoshop and a tablet ASAP, and I can't say that I got no value out of the experience (though I picked up a lot of bad habits in the process), or that I didn't use these things a whole lot; just that in retrospect, a better decision might have been to spend that money on a really good class first, and saved the tablet for a later date. IMO the main benefit is less for drawing and more for painting, just because it's easy to deal with just stacking up a bunch of sheets of paper, while dealing with physical paint on a consistent basis can be difficult in a small apartment/dorm, so the tablet offers more opportunity to get practice in.
So having had this sort of conversation many times before and my own experience, I doubt I'm going to be all that convincing in dampening your enthusiasm for buying the sexy cool shit. So I'll just assume you're going to buy said shit regardless, and just hold out hope that maybe you'll heed some of my advice and consider being generous to your education budget in addition:
A decent-sized Intuos is probably your best bet as far as balance price/'I'm just getting into this, not sure of my level of dedication' factors go. Yes it takes some getting used to, yes you can in fact get used to it, I wouldn't concern yourself too much about it (even Cintiqs take some getting used to, with the slickness of the surface and the distance between the glass surface and the monitor). Yes the Cintiqs are a bit to nicer to work with (IMO, not everyone's)- but probably not nearly as much as you'd think, and the cost makes them a hard sell for anyone who's not already a professional, or simply very well off. The other options are too unproven to me to give an unqualified recommendation, though if they interest you you may want to see if there's any way you can try them out before spending money on them.
I am constantly on a move now
I splurged on getting a sexy Pentel graphgear 1000 and an A5 notebook for drawing on the go
Worth it man
Also does anyone have any advice on studying anatomy stuff in the public? I basically spent 90% of my time outside now and i always feel kinda embarrassed/ self conscious reading up anatomy books or websites.
I'm not necessarily looking into taking art classes, I don't have that kind of time or money (I'd have to pay out of pocket thanks to shitty school loans). I will definitely invest in books, I love books. But I also like gadgets, but yeah $1k+ is out of my range for the hobbyism of what I'm doing. I've already got some shit bookmarked from way back on youtube, and I guess you guys have a subform for art stuff? Eh I'll look around some more.
This is what I think I'm going to get based on the recommendations. I mean I still have sketchpads and shit from way back when, but yeah, I really want to get into digital vs paper just as a personal thing. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010LHRFM2/
Computer is already beefed up anyways, no worries here for that one. I assume photoshop is a ram hog? (they do that $20 a month nonsense right?)
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
For painting/drawing, Krita is free and decent. They basically looked at Photoshop and said "what if it was only the painting stuff?"
+1
Red Raevynbecause I only take Bubble BathsRegistered Userregular
@m3nace gave me permission to print the awesome christmas painting he did for me and I finally got a frame and had it done. Thanks again, lighting is rough for a photo but it looks awesome in person!
Speaking of prints, I'm thinking about making a mini poster out of my Canadian Pokemon. Does anybody know of any printing services that handle fulfillment? I could handle getting them printed locally but I don't really want to have to deal with the logistics of shipping out a couple hundred posters.
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited August 2016
Hey guys, my surface pro 3 reset to factory defaults and now I cant figure out how I got it so that only the pen was sensed by the touch screen and google has failed me. Anyone remember how to do this?
Speaking of prints, I'm thinking about making a mini poster out of my Canadian Pokemon. Does anybody know of any printing services that handle fulfillment? I could handle getting them printed locally but I don't really want to have to deal with the logistics of shipping out a couple hundred posters.
We have a local company that's franchised out through these people:
@Angel_of_Bacon@bowen also Autodesk Sketchbook has an iPad version which is really nice, I haven't tried it with a proper stylus but even with a non-pressure sensitive one I found it was ok for sketching and rudimentary painting.
That said, for me the ipad is definitely a travel device, not my primary drawing tool, I don't know if I'd like it that much if I had no other options.
Speaking of prints, I'm thinking about making a mini poster out of my Canadian Pokemon. Does anybody know of any printing services that handle fulfillment? I could handle getting them printed locally but I don't really want to have to deal with the logistics of shipping out a couple hundred posters.
We have a local company that's franchised out through these people:
@Angel_of_Bacon@bowen also Autodesk Sketchbook has an iPad version which is really nice, I haven't tried it with a proper stylus but even with a non-pressure sensitive one I found it was ok for sketching and rudimentary painting.
That said, for me the ipad is definitely a travel device, not my primary drawing tool, I don't know if I'd like it that much if I had no other options.
I'm seeing more and more people using Procreate on the iPad for actual finished work. It's making me reconsider my decision not to pick up an iPad Pro.
I ended up not using my surface much for drawing because, as it turns out, I'm not actually all that on the go. Even when on the couch, if I try to draw on my surface I end up just deciding to go over to my monster computer.
I bought the surface primarily for my job, so whatever, but after 2 years of having the thing, I've drawn on it maybe a dozen times.
I wouldn't use my Surface at all if I didn't take it to figure drawing every week. For that it 's totally worth it for me. But then again, I used to draw on it at my desk before I got my Cintiq. It's a pretty good alternative for people who hate drawing on an Intuos (me) but don't want to shell out for something bigger. Then again, It seems that there are some decent Cintiq alternatives out there these days. I believe Iruka has one of those.
also Autodesk Sketchbook has an iPad version which is really nice, I haven't tried it with a proper stylus but even with a non-pressure sensitive one I found it was ok for sketching and rudimentary painting.
That said, for me the ipad is definitely a travel device, not my primary drawing tool, I don't know if I'd like it that much if I had no other options.
I'm seeing more and more people using Procreate on the iPad for actual finished work. It's making me reconsider my decision not to pick up an iPad Pro.
I quite liked procreate but I didn't spend a lot of time with it. It's a neat little program though.
@tynic I've used the Sketchbook app and it shares the same problem with every other iPad/iPhone drawing app I've tried (ProCreate, Brushes, Wacom Bamboo, some animation app I got, etc.), which is just that the hardware is not set up for precision- and getting decent linework out of it depends on the app's ability to try to fill in the blanks on all the information it's not getting- which may work ok sometimes, but I've found it infuriating to try to put up with, personally- if you're fine with it, more power to you.
Again, maybe the new iPad Pro/iPad Pencil takes care of these problems, I can't say because I haven't used it.
Because this is a difficult thing to communicate to people in just words, I put together a comparison on paper, on a Cintiq, and on my iPad with ProCreate with 2 different styluses (not using Sketchbook here because when I tried opening it today, it kept crashing out on the load screen).
Writing the same words with the same handwriting, and it's really clear just how much more wobbly and imprecise the iPad options are- for drawing on the go, I'd much rather just deal with a regular cheap paper sketchbook than try to wrestle with this hardware the whole time. (I really wish that wasn't the case because man this dumb thing was expensive, and why I'm hesitant to leap onto the iPad Pro. Of course, I also have Iruka's issue with her Surface, in that I go nowhere and do nothing, so I'm in front of a computer with a Cintiq 90% of the time anyway.)
@tynic I've used the Sketchbook app and it shares the same problem with every other iPad/iPhone drawing app I've tried (ProCreate, Brushes, Wacom Bamboo, some animation app I got, etc.), which is just that the hardware is not set up for precision- and getting decent linework out of it depends on the app's ability to try to fill in the blanks on all the information it's not getting- which may work ok sometimes, but I've found it infuriating to try to put up with, personally- if you're fine with it, more power to you.
Again, maybe the new iPad Pro/iPad Pencil takes care of these problems, I can't say because I haven't used it.
Because this is a difficult thing to communicate to people in just words, I put together a comparison on paper, on a Cintiq, and on my iPad with ProCreate with 2 different styluses (not using Sketchbook here because when I tried opening it today, it kept crashing out on the load screen).
Writing the same words with the same handwriting, and it's really clear just how much more wobbly and imprecise the iPad options are- for drawing on the go, I'd much rather just deal with a regular cheap paper sketchbook than try to wrestle with this hardware the whole time. (I really wish that wasn't the case because man this dumb thing was expensive, and why I'm hesitant to leap onto the iPad Pro. Of course, I also have Iruka's issue with her Surface, in that I go nowhere and do nothing, so I'm in front of a computer with a Cintiq 90% of the time anyway.)
oh, I agree completely, the precision is not even close to ideal. I think the reason I didn't mind it for a brief period was that I was mostly doing speedpaints, where misstrokes can become more 'happy accident' than 'super frustrating bullshit'. Ultimately I think if you absolutely have to go digital, just get a bamboo/small intuos and sidestep all the bullshit that comes with a cheap screen solution. (fake edit: ah I see that decision's been made already)
I mean, I'd rather carry a small sketchbook around than any electronics, but if I had to think of a niche, I'd say ipad would be a good fill-in for doing value and colour studies in the field (if I didn't want to bring a paint set). Beyond that it's more of a novelty than a real art tool.
Posts
What tutorials were you using?
And this one:
And I did some of the walk-through tutorials from this guy:
And I also have had to search for specific videos about functions that I couldn't figure out as I went along.
One thing I'll say is that it's definitely worth it to do more than one "introduction to blender" tutorials. Everyone forgets to mention some basic function or fact about the interface, and that can be really frustrating when you can't figure out why the program is suddenly no longer functioning the way you're used to because you accidentally ticked some little box somewhere.
Also, http://www.blendswap.com/ is a GREAT site for finding models to work into your scene mock-ups. You can find all kinds of people and animals that are pre-rigged and fully poseable out of the box. Not to mention props, weapons and the like. All free, though there is a limit to the number of downloads per month unless you're a paid member.
Swerving topic, I find that the various anatomical abstractions really have not helped me at all with learning figure fundamentals. Instead, I have been taking chunks off Simblet's Anatomy and mannequinizing them myself. After absorbing that, suddenly the associated chunk of abstraction becomes much more clear. I wonder if that is a manifestation of me being an engineer and thus overly analytical or a normal bump in the road.
I learned relatively recently that the way I process light in my 2d rendering is strongly influenced by the convergence between my interests in comics art and sculpture-- I struggle with more liefelike styles of rendering in 2d even though I focus on portraiture from life in my sculpture stuff, and I think it's in part because translating from one "language" to the other loses a lot of information, for me.
I imagine it's quite possible that it's similar with taking one knowledge set and applying it to a different setup?
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
I've been pointed at a site called turbosquid where you can buy models (license to use is more accurate I guess). I wanted to check if anyone here is familiar with the site, I'd like to know beforehand that it's not a place that scams people or fences stolen artwork. I haven't found anything suggesting they're not legit, but nothing to suggest they are either.
As some of you know, I do Pixel Art. I try to spend about an hour a day doing it during the week with a couple more during the weekends.
i have two questions of varying technicality that i hope you could help me with:
Firstly, i did these two animated sprites:
First one i'm super satisfied with, second one, less so, but I can't put my finger on what makes it feel disjointed to me (I also have not finished shading that one). I'm trying to keep the animations consistent (so both 27 frames long, with a long pause for the start and end poses). I'd love to have your feedback on that little WIP.
Secondly, i want to improve my mastery of the craft, but i'm not sure where to go. Do i keep working on mostly doing poses from reference? Do i try to do more landscapes? Light and Shadow studies? Something else?
After i'm done animating the sprites i made fro this project, i wanna start a new one and study light and shadow, but i don't know what subject(s) to use for that or even where to start. What would be good to draw to study light and shadow? i prefer doing projects with a clear endpoint that can be expanded, but I'm willing to do anything.
TIA in Advance. (TIAA)
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
It's not going to be possible to tell you exactly what you should be doing. You need to work on your fundamentals. Some people do that digitally, in their preferred medium, but you can't do that with pixels if it's going to prevent you from actually getting to the meat of the process. It means doing observation studies, pushing yourself to replicate what you see, and not moving on from the basics as soon as you try it once.
When you look at a dude like paul robertson, he's got deceptive drawing skills. It's all stylized and that appears to be all he's ever done, but he's been doing it for a long time and his improvements are subtle. It's hard to know if he was drawing other stuff before he got started, but he's clearly got a knack for motion that some people just have out the gate.
The animation game mostly requires extreme patience. The best animators I've known really love the process and would do it all day everyday without much prompting. If you care so much about getting it right that it doesn't matter if it takes you 80 hours to animate a hand, you are going to get good. I ended up leaving animation mostly behind because I enjoy the results of illustration more. I still want to pursue animation but motion is not the same for me as telling stories, so comics are a more economical use of my time. Those kinds of insights into what you want from your art are not something we can make, but they should be considered.
If you want crits on your particular animations, please stick them in your thread, thats what its for. Otherwise, I suggest engaging with the AC at large. Learning to look at other peoples art and comment about what you actually like will help you improve your vocabulary for your aesthetics. You'll also be reading tons of critiques that also apply to you, and learning how to take general advice and apply it to your work is a needed skill. Believe it or not, I encourage community engagement because it's easily the thing that pushed my work the farthest forward over the years.
Drawing on paper... I tried that and i just didn't enjoy it. i mean, i'm not doing this professionally, just as a hobby and last time i went with "traditional" drawing (Figure sketches, mostly) i ended up stopping drawing altogether because i was not enjoying myself at all. i mean, i know i don't really have what it takes to do art professionally and that's really not my goal here. I'm not sure if it's worth it to trade out enjoyment for skill when i'm just doing this for fun, you know.
Guess there's no choice, gotta do it right, right? Thanks for the advice.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
As a person who currently doesn't do art "professionally", I don't feel like the desire to get good is at all separate. For the most part all hobbies require some parts that are boring or painful or grueling. You can do yoga for fun, never teach it, but the only way to become excellent at it is to push past limits and try new, more difficult poses. The only difference between a hobbyist and a professional is the exchange of cash, and there's no reason to consider that as the guideline for how seriously you take yourself and your art.
If you are seeking advice on how to move forward, its clear that you want to do more than what you are doing now. Pushing the fundamentals does not actually mean you need to drop what you do now and start oil painting. It just means you need to think really critically about your work and try to give yourself a pathway to reach your goals. But you need to actually set some of those, for your own sake. If you went strait from pixel art to a life drawing class, it probably killed it for you because its a bit of a leap. I'd look at our monthly enrichments for shape and construction and try to apply those to your work. The more you try to draw what you see, the easier it is for us to give you completely objective advice on it.
If you want to just keep doing stylized pixels and nothing else, you will have to do a lot of self assessment, which can be difficult. Art is such that we cannot determine a failure state for you.
I guess another problem i have is my lack of a goal, haha. I wanna be as good as i can be, but there's no limit to that.
I'll start setting some time aside every week for pencil practice again and check the enrichment threads. thanks for the tip.
Check out my site, the Bismuth Heart | My Twitter
[long post follows]
So cool, goal set.
Now on the issue of 'learning fundamentals'- everyone suggests it, it's a great idea, indeed it really is a necessary idea. However, often people just starting out, trying to give a legitimate effort towards the idea of 'getting good', run into issues in trying to actually do this, as you seem to have.
First reason for this, is that it can be difficult and tedious and repetitive and frustrating- sorry, it comes with the territory.
But another issue is that the beginner, being a beginner, does not have the breadth of experience to know, "is this actually teaching me the skills to do what I am trying to do?" And, in taking on a course or tutorial of something generically labelled, "art fundamentals", often the beginner is indeed correct in their suspicions that the exercises given are not the most direct and useful ones towards their particular goal- spending 40 hours shading a still life basket of flowers will do you no harm, but it doesn't translate all that directly towards say, drawing that Astro Boy fancomic you've had in mind. An exercise in perspective may be an necessary thing to learn to do achieve that goal, but may seem equally non-essential to someone who hasn't the knowledge or experience to appreciate this fact.
So in this confusion, your reaction is not uncommon- it feels dissatisfying and disconnected, because these lessons may not be drawing those lines from A to B in your mind. It may seem an endless amount of effort for little immediate, tangible reward.
So how do you avoid that? How do you know you're getting the most out of your time and effort?
Well, I might suggest starting, instead, at the deep end of the pool.
Animating well requires knowledge of construction, gesture, perspective, anatomy, design, etc., in addition to animation's unique requisite skills- and you can study all these things for years and years and years. But you may find it hard to keep your motivation up for studying those things, if you say, "hey, I'm going to learn all those things- all those fundamentals- and then I'll get around to actually animating again." You might just give up right in the middle of a lecture about the origin of the sternocleidomastoid muscle.
So instead of just leaping in blind, let's first take it backwards. Let's look at the animations you've done here- just briefly, what stands out is that there's a definite lack of anticipation, easing into poses, overlapping animation and overall sense of weight, and the pose design being hampered because it feels like each part of the body is being moved around individually, rather than being designed in a cohesive way using a 'line of action' principle, by having a broad overarching gesture behind each pose.
So in tackling these issues, the first stop I would go to is Richard Williams' Animator Survival Kit, being probably the best book on animation written, to my knowledge. (To make sure I hadn't already recommended it to you, I did a search for it- and was happy to find a post saying you already have this book. So I'd suggest giving the relevant sections a re-read.) I also might recommend rewatching the relevant 12 principles of animation videos (I'm pretty sure I posted one in your thread), or reading the section in The Illusion of Life about them (though admittedly it's irritating that for the price of a big 500+ page hardcover book, only 20 or so contain practical information on the principles.)
Now, in re-reading that book, you might solve some problems...but you'll probably run into another- line of action? gesture? exaggeration? These things aren't covered that well in the book, and in addition are really hard to figure out placing pixels down one by one- you've got to be able to move your hand, feel out that gesture, stretch and modify it and push it around quickly, to find that pose that's going to communicate the clearest, with the most energy and life and interest. Whether you do that by just drawing on a napkin with an old crayon, or using a pencil, or a bit of charcoal, or a tablet in photoshop, or scratching in the sand with a stick, the point is this: you're using that tool (whatever it is), you're using that exercise, to directly solve a concrete problem that you are invested in solving.
You are NOT doing it, just because someone said to, because it's a 'fundamental'. You should have an understanding of what you're doing, and why you are doing it, and the decision to do that, is your decision. The point is not even, "I want this to be a good drawing"- it's a means to an end, and how much you invest in that is up to you.
That may not seem like it should make a difference, but it does. "I want to solve this problem" is always going to be a more motivating than, "I guess I'd better put in some pencil time"- even if what you end up doing is exactly the same in both cases.
So in all likelihood you're going to wind up doing gesture study, to do what you're hoping with your animation, since one just naturally leads to the other. But how do you study gesture? It's going to be another frustration, if practiced blindly.
Plenty of life drawing classes can put you in front of a naked person and tell you to draw for minute-long intervals- but a good many may not be interested or qualified to instruct you to those goals- so on that front, Force: Dynamic Drawing For Animators and the Walt Stanchfield Drawn To Life books are great books covering the topic, written specifically with the goals of the animator in mind. So when you go to that life drawing session or pull up that piece of ref, you know how to get what you need out of it.
Then with all this drawing you're doing, well, gestures are great and all- but when you go to pull it all together into a finished drawing, or try to make it into a sprite? It's doing to fall apart a bit, because the structure isn't there, the construction now needs work. So you slide a copy of How To Draw The Marvel Way across the register and learn how to break figures and objects into cylinders, spheres, and cubes. But those volumes aren't turning out that great- you've gotta spend some time with Scott Robertson's How To Draw to get your perspective game up. Now things are feeling kinda solid but those figures are looking a bit outta proportion, ring up Loomis or Bridgman to get those proportion skills up.
At this point you've wound up back at "learning fundamentals".
But this time, it's informed by your own direct purpose, rather than having it forced upon you by a drawing teacher or us yahoos here. The exact same sort of exercises, but this time knowing the A to B, the logic leading from drawing this simple box to making that sprite animation you've been hoping for.
Is this a roundabout way of going about things, sure. Will that take longer, taking more trial and error, more mistakes than you would get by blindly taking a perfectly tailored and taught course in fundamentals, that takes everything in logical step-by-step towards your specific needs? Probably- but even in the fanciest art schools, few courses provide that, so there's little use worrying about comparing your efforts against a fictional hypothetical. After all, if all the artists out there only drew properly shaded spheres in kindergarten rather than crudely drawn Ninja Turtles, few of them would continue to be interested enough in art to get anywhere. Everyone patches their education together however they can, in reality. If you've gotta school of hard knocks your way down the chain to the bottom, before climbing back to the top a wiser man/woman, so be it- the important thing is to keep at it, keep going, keep learning, keep working.
Also, I mentioned a bunch of books in there, and that's for good reason. Spending the time and being diligent with practice is tough, but spending money and time on reading is (relatively) way easier. Better to buy a book and have the knowledge, and then realize you don't actually care enough to follow through with what it suggests, rather than spending months or years scrambling around in the dark hoping you'll trip upon improvement by random chance, to no avail. There's no avoiding the hard practice if you want to get anywhere, but you can at least avoid going down a dead end.
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Thanks for taking the time to write this. I kinda wish i had the money (and, in fact, time) to get all those books now. i just want to stress something, my problem with doing the fundamentals exercises isn't my lack of purpose or the idea that it's not paying off. I know it paid off and I know it was super useful the first time i tried it. The problem is that it was not pleasant to do. Which, yeah, I get that it probably won't be at first. I'm going from a medium where i'm at a level that i feel is pretty good to one where i'm extremely bad. Of course i'll be more frustrated than anything. i just need to figure a way to not stop entirely.
I think one of the reasons I did stop pencil practice was related to mental health issues that have been dealt with since. Also, it will probably help if i alternate between Pixel art and pencil art instead of choosing one exclusively over the other.
I think the best thing i was told (not in this thread) is that hobbies will often reach a point where they end up being like work for a while if the person wants to become much better at them. I guess that's where i am now.
So this weekend (not today because i'm actually busy), i'll get started on the fundamentals again, read up on the enrichment tasks and overall re-try to improve my pencil game.
Thanks for the good words.
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I figured it might be better to post here than H/A at first
if I wanted to get back into drawing, but didn't necessarily want to draw on paper.. what should I look to invest in? I used to sketch a lot as a kid (I am really bad at drawing in general), but I don't want to have a ton of paper and invest in pencils and all that (especially since I might be moving soon, less bulk is better).
I figure tablets for drawing? I don't really have an upper bounds on what I can spend, my PC is really good, but if possible I'd like to keep it under $200. I'm trying to expand my skill set into 3d modeling since I'm a programmer I'd like to be able to make some rudimentary things, but I should start small before I tackle 3d modeling. This was probably 10-15 years ago but back when I was looking to get a tablet for my PC to draw with they were all hyper expensive and I found them difficult to use since it wasn't like drawing on paper (you couldn't see anything on the tablet?)... I'm not sure if this has changed either, maybe I'm wrong!
Do they attach with USB or am I going to need to invest in some weird dongle technology like serial or anything like that?
Also software, what are my options here? Photoshop? What's the skill level needed to actually draw on that? Is there some good tutorials for beginners?
Thanks ahead of time!
USB mostly, some wireless ones exist. It took me a gooooood long while to learn how to use a tablet effectively, for me there was some weird disconnect between drawing on a surface but looking on the computer monitor. Just a habit thing, got okay after a while. If you just want to try it out I'd probably go for a Wacom Bamboo or something in that lower price bracket, since the bigger ones still get pricey pretty quickly.
I don't consider tablets especially useful for 3D modeling, with the exception of sculpting software, where the analogue to having a tool in hand that responds to pressure sensitivity and such is more obvious. There are lots of great tutorials everywhere now, if I'm wondering something about 3D modeling it's often a specific feature in a specific program so I just google that and end up with numerous youtube videos. Many people still mention Lynda.com, I bet they have tutorials that are aimed at starting up 3D stuff.
Blender is a free 3D software you could check out without putting any money down. I got scared off by it, learning a new UI for stuff like that is a pretty steep learning curve. It seems very mod-able, they front function names in all button tooltips, which made me scared but might appeal to you as a programmer.
Learning any modeling program may seem super intimidating thanks to the interfaces being what they are, but if you go by a good tutorial and put in time it's very doable.
Yeah in particular the disconnect would bug me, I'd be okay with paying a bit more for a drawing tablet that I could see what I'm doing on it if it's reasonable.
The tablet is mostly just to stretch my legs again, it's been a long time since I've drawn anything, and I've got the creativity of a potato.
I don't know about you, but i think potatoes can be pretty creative. So many different dishes!
About tablets, how do they work? Like, I assume it's not a 1:1 analogue of the screen, right? So How do you know where the lines are gonna be when you draw?
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Can't stop looking at this.
@21stcentury: It is basically a 1:1 analogue of the screen- touch the pen to a spot on the tablet, the cursor pops to the corresponding location on the monitor. You draw by just looking at your monitor and where the cursor is, rather than looking down at your hands.
@bowen:
General run-down of your options, though my personal experience is mainly with Wacom Intuos/Cintiq products:
Wacom Cintiqs: Pros: Draw directly on the screen, well supported by major programs, is the mainstay of professional concept artists/animators/etc. Cons: Expensive as hell, $1000-$2500 depending on size.
Yiynova tablets: Pros: Also lets you draw directly on the screen, is significantly cheaper than a Cintiq. Cons: I've heard iffy things about the actual quality of these tablets, and issues with getting drivers/software to work with it seems to have plagued a lot of people's experiences with them.
Microsoft Surface Pro: Pros: Draw directly on the screen, is a whole computer as well. Cons: Cost like a whole computer, I'm not sure if it has some of the nicer Intuos/Cintiq features like pen tilt/high pressure sensitivity. Also I'm not sure what the form factor is like RE:using hotkeys when drawing, which for me would be a big issue. And I think they changed the digitiser type after the Pro 2s, and I haven't kept up with how the newer ones compare.
iPad Pro + iPad Pro Pencil: I've heard good things about this combo with people using Procreate, but Procreate doesn't exactly have feature parity with something like Photoshop. Also having not used it, I'm still skeptical about it because....
iPad Air + Wacom Intuos Creative Stylus 2: I bought these and I thought it was garbage as a drawing solution, because of the pen lines 'snapping' to a grid rather than drawing where I wanted the lines to go. Maybe things have improved, but I haven't touched it in a year or so because I thought it was so dreadful.
Wacom Intuos tablets: Pros: Solid, well-supported, reasonably priced for someone looking at art as a semi-serious hobby/start to a career. Cons: No screen. Hasn't stopped a lot of people from making a lot of really great art on them, most people I know either got started on them or continue to use them. (Some people where I work refuse to move from them to a Cintiq, even though they could get one with a word, citing feel/ergonomic reasons).
Other digitizers: May be had cheaper than a Wacom tablet, but I can't attest to quality/driver/software support.
As to software:
Photoshop: Most widely used and fully featured drawing/painting software, but is quite expensive.
Manga Studio: I haven't used this, but a lot of comic people love it for its inking tools
Paint Tool SAI: Also has nice inking tools, seems to be used a lot by Japanese manga/anime types. It's cheap, but is also kinda low-rent and poorly supported/updated.
Painter: Focused on natural media simulaton. Not sure how many people use it or where it stands today- I think a lot of would-be users of it just resort to hacking together natural-media looks in Photoshop instead.
ProCreate: Currently seems to be the king of the hill of mobile art software. Lot of people seem to love it, and it seems really good, I just personally would have to try it with the iPad Pro Pencil first and see if it's as good as people are saying before buying into it as a replacement for a desktop software/tablet solution.
Now, that's all the information. Now time for opinions.
If money is no object, sure you're going to want the greatest and best. But for most people, spending $2500 on the best Cintiq and $600 (or whatever the ongoing subscription price is) on a copy of Photoshop and god knows how much on the kind of RAM-monster, SSD drive rig and multi-monitors and all that to really have the best of the best...well, it's a big price tag to scratch an "I'm kinda interested in getting back into drawing, kinda" itch. Even as a professional I hesitate to lay down that sort of cash.
Now, the "I am super serious about art and will now give you the super serious hard answer" answer to this is, an ill-proportioned stick figure is going to be an ill-proportioned stick figure whether you've drawn it on a top of the line rig that cost you a small fortune to assemble, or if you drew it with an old golf pencil on a piece of paper you grabbed out of your printer tray.
So if you're saying you're 'bad at drawing in general', and presumably the hope is to make your drawings better rather than just more expensive to produce, I'd take whatever your initial budget you are willing to spend is, and divide it up so you are spending a significant proportion of that money on education instead. Books, tutorials, classes- these are the things that will actually make a meaningful difference. Too many people starting out get wrapped up with getting the best toy to play with and give little thought or investment toward how they're actually going to acquire the knowledge to actually use it well- it's sort of a child's attitude who thinks that the main and most important difference between themselves and an NFL linebacker is the ownership of a uniform and full set of football pads. It's absurd how many people will spend tons of money on things that make little difference, but will be the cheapest, most miserly bastards when it comes to things that make all the difference. They'll spend $3000 on a computer and then balk at spending $20 on a book, it's crazy.
That said, I was starting out once too and I as well wanted to get my mitts on Photoshop and a tablet ASAP, and I can't say that I got no value out of the experience (though I picked up a lot of bad habits in the process), or that I didn't use these things a whole lot; just that in retrospect, a better decision might have been to spend that money on a really good class first, and saved the tablet for a later date. IMO the main benefit is less for drawing and more for painting, just because it's easy to deal with just stacking up a bunch of sheets of paper, while dealing with physical paint on a consistent basis can be difficult in a small apartment/dorm, so the tablet offers more opportunity to get practice in.
So having had this sort of conversation many times before and my own experience, I doubt I'm going to be all that convincing in dampening your enthusiasm for buying the sexy cool shit. So I'll just assume you're going to buy said shit regardless, and just hold out hope that maybe you'll heed some of my advice and consider being generous to your education budget in addition:
A decent-sized Intuos is probably your best bet as far as balance price/'I'm just getting into this, not sure of my level of dedication' factors go. Yes it takes some getting used to, yes you can in fact get used to it, I wouldn't concern yourself too much about it (even Cintiqs take some getting used to, with the slickness of the surface and the distance between the glass surface and the monitor). Yes the Cintiqs are a bit to nicer to work with (IMO, not everyone's)- but probably not nearly as much as you'd think, and the cost makes them a hard sell for anyone who's not already a professional, or simply very well off. The other options are too unproven to me to give an unqualified recommendation, though if they interest you you may want to see if there's any way you can try them out before spending money on them.
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I splurged on getting a sexy Pentel graphgear 1000 and an A5 notebook for drawing on the go
Worth it man
Also does anyone have any advice on studying anatomy stuff in the public? I basically spent 90% of my time outside now and i always feel kinda embarrassed/ self conscious reading up anatomy books or websites.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
I'm not necessarily looking into taking art classes, I don't have that kind of time or money (I'd have to pay out of pocket thanks to shitty school loans). I will definitely invest in books, I love books. But I also like gadgets, but yeah $1k+ is out of my range for the hobbyism of what I'm doing. I've already got some shit bookmarked from way back on youtube, and I guess you guys have a subform for art stuff? Eh I'll look around some more.
This is what I think I'm going to get based on the recommendations. I mean I still have sketchpads and shit from way back when, but yeah, I really want to get into digital vs paper just as a personal thing.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010LHRFM2/
Computer is already beefed up anyways, no worries here for that one. I assume photoshop is a ram hog? (they do that $20 a month nonsense right?)
Nevermind, found the script again!
We have a local company that's franchised out through these people:
http://www.minutemanpress.com/store-search.html
That said, for me the ipad is definitely a travel device, not my primary drawing tool, I don't know if I'd like it that much if I had no other options.
Hmmm... I'll have to look locally. It would be nice to be able to actually see the prints before selling them.
I'm seeing more and more people using Procreate on the iPad for actual finished work. It's making me reconsider my decision not to pick up an iPad Pro.
I bought the surface primarily for my job, so whatever, but after 2 years of having the thing, I've drawn on it maybe a dozen times.
I quite liked procreate but I didn't spend a lot of time with it. It's a neat little program though.
Again, maybe the new iPad Pro/iPad Pencil takes care of these problems, I can't say because I haven't used it.
Because this is a difficult thing to communicate to people in just words, I put together a comparison on paper, on a Cintiq, and on my iPad with ProCreate with 2 different styluses (not using Sketchbook here because when I tried opening it today, it kept crashing out on the load screen).
http://www.artofkevinoneill.com/webfiles/OtherPeopleStuff/writing-comparison.gif
Writing the same words with the same handwriting, and it's really clear just how much more wobbly and imprecise the iPad options are- for drawing on the go, I'd much rather just deal with a regular cheap paper sketchbook than try to wrestle with this hardware the whole time. (I really wish that wasn't the case because man this dumb thing was expensive, and why I'm hesitant to leap onto the iPad Pro. Of course, I also have Iruka's issue with her Surface, in that I go nowhere and do nothing, so I'm in front of a computer with a Cintiq 90% of the time anyway.)
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oh, I agree completely, the precision is not even close to ideal. I think the reason I didn't mind it for a brief period was that I was mostly doing speedpaints, where misstrokes can become more 'happy accident' than 'super frustrating bullshit'. Ultimately I think if you absolutely have to go digital, just get a bamboo/small intuos and sidestep all the bullshit that comes with a cheap screen solution. (fake edit: ah I see that decision's been made already)
I mean, I'd rather carry a small sketchbook around than any electronics, but if I had to think of a niche, I'd say ipad would be a good fill-in for doing value and colour studies in the field (if I didn't want to bring a paint set). Beyond that it's more of a novelty than a real art tool.