The Shred Pile[NSFW]?

Failing_Forward

I'm not terribly good at introducing myself to new people, even on the strange and mysterious internet, so I'll start with that questionnaire from the rules.

Tell us what your goals as an artist are.

Primarily, I want to draw and design characters and creatures. I want to be able to do this well, so that I don't get the polite and awkward smile when I show my attempts to my friends and etc. I've had the urge to draw and doodle since I've been around 11-12, but I would always run into the "this looks like garbage" wall and cease any further efforts. Age has tempered my self hatred into a poker I use to motivate myself to try harder.

Are you a hobbyist looking to learn to draw landscapes for fun?

I'm a hobbyist, yes. At some point in the future when I "get good" (maybe sometime in the next century, hah), I want to pick up the occasional commission or fulfill a request that actually makes the requester happy.

How long have you been practicing this form of art?

I started my most recent run at "getting good" 2 years ago. I went through the Betty Edwards book, Loomis' fun with a pencil, Norling's perspective made easy, some of Robertson's drawing manual, Vilppu's drawing videos, and Hampton's constructive anatomy. I work primarily in pencil and digital via an ancient intuous 3.

Who are some artists or styles that you admire who you strive to be like in your own work?

ReiQ, Genzoman, whoever put that towergirls meme together, frazetta's sketches(the ink and pencil stuff, I'd need two lifetimes to even start on the painting).


I don't know if the path I've been moving on has been in the right direction, so I'm reaching out for critique, direction, suggestions. I mean, even if all I get here is "this isn't for you, find a new hobby" that would be more than I get anywhere else. I have a deviantart and tumblr, but in 2 years I've received 1 piece of feedback that was anything more than "good effort" or "better than what I can do".

So anyway. These are less than good, so I apologize ahead of time. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Iruka

First off, welcome to the AC! You don't have to spoiler your images, this is your thread and we are here to look.

Second, your drawings aren't bad. You have a pretty good sense of volume, though your line quality is a bit shaky and feathered. You aren't some lost cause who could never be good at art, those cases are more rare than people think, really. As a hobbyist, you basically have to decide a few things about what you want to be and how far you want to push it. If you can, try and schedule out some time each week for studying, and if you can, maybe try an online course. Move yourself into productive activities and try to think positively of your work. The more you learn to like the learning part of it, the easier it will be to push yourself and feel good about doing it.

Is the anatomy from reference or imagined? If you can post the references it would help us identify proportional problems.

Theres a list of helpful anatomy books in this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/196617/anatomy-resource-masterpost#latest along with some website links.

If you want to "get serious" but don't have much direction, I sugges checking out the resolutions thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/202615/enrichment-resolutions-2016#latest, doing that worksheet will give you some good things to reflect on.

If you want to consider classes, we have a list over here: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/196620/online-art-class-reviews-and-masterpost#latest and some reviews. I suggest looking into proko, personally. It looks like you like anatomy and are actually trying to gain a solid understanding of it. This is a noble pursuit and I think at least watching through prokos free videos will at least be beneficial. There's also a review of his primo content in that thread.

If you have more work, it'd be good to see what happens when you try to apply studies to a more fun or exploratory drawing, if you've attempted that.

Anyway, welcome again, and I hope you post some more!

Failing_Forward

Thank you for the response.

The anatomy is all referenced. In the future i'll add the ref into the base image to see.

I spend most of my time on studies, or going through lessons. I have a hard time letting my mind wander and create. I usually set an objective or have an endpoint in mind; "X character doing X" for example. Those usually turn out even worse than my studies, so i go back to studies to fix the mistakes I see.

Proko was one of my launching points 2 years ago. I'll have to review his videos and try to retain them this time, heh.

I have the following books available to me; Atlas - Stephen Rogers Peck, Jack Hamm's figure drawing, Bridgeman's complete, Sarah SImblet's Anatomy for the artist, Hampton's analytical book. I usually just copied the plates from the books and tried to figure out how the information could be applied to a living figure.

I'll put something creative together for my next post.

Thank you again.

Angel_of_Bacon

First off, you seem pretty down and unsure of yourself, and looking at your drawings- that attitude is not all justified; especially if you're saying you've just started at making a serious effort at drawing 2 years ago. I'd say for 2 years, it's some pretty dang good work, so there's no need to be so hard on yourself. You're looking at the right books, you're looking up the right videos, you're putting in the time and effort. Does that mean you're where you want to be yet, or that you should be at that point yet? Of course not, this stuff takes a lot of time- so more important than any technical advice I can give you is to keep at it- you'll get there.

(Well, it's more accurate to say that you'll get to the point where the person you currently are now would say you've succeeded, while the person you will be then will probably have raised their standards to a point where they're still dissatisfied- that's just the lot of an artist.)


As for technical advice, you've got a good sense of solidity going for you in most places, and that's great to see. I might suggest spending a bit more time nailing down the proportions on some of the figures- I feel like the legs are tending to be a little short, and the head a little big- could be you're deliberately going for proportions that are just that little bit cartoony, in which case that advice can be ignored.

I realize that I am only seeing a portion of your efforts, so maybe you're well ahead of me here, but I might also suggest seeing what you can do with a longer study- how far can you get putting in 3, 6, 15 hours into a single figure study, testing just how accurate you can get when you really hold yourself to that kind of standard. That's certainly a point that's easily missed when you're just learning from books and videos, is just how much time should be put in when learning. You might watch a video of someone who's been drawing for 30 years do an amazing 5 or 20 minute sketch- what you don't see is that at the start of those 30 years they had to do a lot of arduous drawings that took hours and hours to do, in order to acquire that skill that allows them to do that quick sketch so well.


And if you've got a hard time figuring out what you want to draw from imagination, well, I'd suggest not worrying too much about it. You don't have to be a brilliant innovative super genius to be a great artist- you just have to draw well, and if you're studying all the time, you're making progress.

If it really concerns you- you said you wanted to do commissions someday, so hey- just do one. Even if it's not a paid thing and it's just you saying to a friend, "hey, give me something to draw" or "what character do you think is cool that I could try to draw", and you want to give a bunch of disclaimers about how you don't think it'll turn out well and you reserve the right to throw it away if it doesn't turn out, having another party give you a starting off point so you can just focus on how to solve the drawing issues involved with executing it, can be a good motivator to stick with the drawing to a completion. It's much easier to give up, not start, or second-guess your own ideas than it is if an idea is handed to you.

(Believe me, I'm right there with the same issue- I go to work, I get handed an assignment, I'm good at breaking down that assignment, working out the issues and the problems, doing all the sketching and going through feedback rounds and coming up with a result most people seem to be happy with...but I sit down at my own computer on my own time and try to think of what to draw and I'm still like, "WHAT DO I DO I CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING". I wish I had that genius personal idea that filled me with enough confidence to get me to produce some personal masterpiece- but until that happens, turns out I can get paid pretty well simply by being good at executing. If you're spending your time getting better at executing, that's not going to be a waste of time.)

Failing_Forward

I tried a couple of different things. The first is just random wanderings with no real goal. The second is, i don't even know, Moth lady, i think? I used traditional scribbling for the moth, thing, because my scanner was accumulating a nice layer of neglect.

I tried focusing on bringing the heads to a more proportional size, and less crummy lines. 1 hour to 1 hour and a half per image. Went till I hit a "I have no clue what to do with this thing" wall on all of them.

Failing_Forward

Some practice poses. More monster than people, lol. Colors are nice i guess.

Failing_Forward

Two and half hours in an I realized I was working on the wrong layers, urgh. There's no saving this trainwreck, but at least the frog looks kinda like a frog.

Iruka

Angel_of_Bacon wrote: »

I realize that I am only seeing a portion of your efforts, so maybe you're well ahead of me here, but I might also suggest seeing what you can do with a longer study- how far can you get putting in 3, 6, 15 hours into a single figure study, testing just how accurate you can get when you really hold yourself to that kind of standard. That's certainly a point that's easily missed when you're just learning from books and videos, is just how much time should be put in when learning. You might watch a video of someone who's been drawing for 30 years do an amazing 5 or 20 minute sketch- what you don't see is that at the start of those 30 years they had to do a lot of arduous drawings that took hours and hours to do, in order to acquire that skill that allows them to do that quick sketch so well.

And if you've got a hard time figuring out what you want to draw from imagination, well, I'd suggest not worrying too much about it. You don't have to be a brilliant innovative super genius to be a great artist- you just have to draw well, and if you're studying all the time, you're making progress.

Just wanted to highlight this advice again and suggest longer studies, Even if cartooning is your goal, your figures being so disproportioned makes them feel gangly and broken up.

Proko has really been ramping up the quality of his videos, I watch the free youtube stuff, but he has some relatively cheap packages for anatomy courses. I Think the directed assignments would really be good for you, as it would force you to reign in your focus and hammer in some foundation skills while probably also giving you some confidence in your knowledge.

Giving us structure and reference will also better enable us to help/critique you. Nitpicking these figures without knowing what you are working with will only get us so far in terms of what sort of knowledge we can drop.

I would also suggest not using such a soft brush for your sketches, the blurry lines make everything just seem out of focus, and it's probably not helping you see forms as you draw them. Your pencil drawings look like they were put down with more confidence, try to keep that going in your digital studies.

Failing_Forward

Ok. I did my best to consolidate the advice i've been given so far, thank you all. I spent three hours on the following image. Five minutes on gesture, basic blocks shapes. I spent two hours on line / proportion / blocking things in, and the last hour on trying to make the face look like a face + tone. Updating as a "process image" to help pinpoint error points. Used a harder brush on this one. My CTRL and Z keys are almost worn out, lol.





Things I notice: Face needs overhauled, the model's is tilted down, didn't capture that well at all, and the features. Oh man the features.

Made the torso swing out too much, rib cage is too small? The rib cage looks weird to me. Chest region is... something else, model actually has hair, etc.

Shading / tone are difficult for me to grasp. I know what I see, but have a very difficult time bringing the subtleties into my work.

Thank you for your patience, I'll be working on my next study.

Iruka

This sort of self assessment is exactly what you need to be doing, so that's awesome.

That's probably not the clearest reference you could be using, the light is vague and so you made things up as you went to try and describe the form. These guys post reference with nice, clear light:
http://artmodelsphoto.tumblr.com/

And so do these guys, in video form:
www.youtube.com/user/onairvideo/videos

Angel_of_Bacon

[For clarity, if I say 'left' or 'right' I'm talking from the viewer's perspective, not the model's]

I'm glad you spent the additional time on this, because now I have a much clearer understanding of what sort of principles are going to help you going forward- which is a harder thing to glean from shorter studies.

Couple of things I'd suggest- firstly, try not to get married to your initial gesture early on; some things like swinging the rib cage out a bit far as you mentioned), and the exaggerated wideness of the pelvis/hips have carried through from that first step to the end without much change. Gesture drawings can be seductive because they tend to be very lively and inspiring in their raw forms, but in taking a drawing to a finish you have to look at them more almost a reminder of things you don't want to lose in the finished piece, as you go ahead and work on the form and structure- rather than taking them as the structure itself.

So you might look at your gesture and say, "yes, I want to keep that feeling of having that weight on the right leg, I want the feeling of that hip thrusting out to the right, that stretch and sweep up from the bottom of the ribcage up through the elbow on the left, I want the feeling of weight pressing down on those forward toes". Doing the loose gesture and thinking of ways to emphasize those points- subtle exaggeration, how you design your line weights, etc. will help ensure that the finished, measured drawing retains that initial sense of life, while still being accurate and believable- but if you take all the aspects of that initial gesture wholesale, you can end up with some odd things happening unintentionally.


Now, in doing a longer study with accuracy in mind, a major component of checking your work comes down to point-to-point angle measurement. If you've ever seen an artist in a movie, you've probably seen them holding out their pencil at arms length held vertically. What this is, is using the side of the pencil as a straight edge to check where two points fall in relationship to each other.

So applying this idea to the drawing at hand, if I were to draw a vertical line from the base of the crotch upward, I'd see that the resulting line lines up roughly with the right nipple, the point of the nose, and the upper right corner of the eyelid. Draw the line downward from that point, I see it aligns roughly with the right side of the foot. On your drawing, you've got the nipple, point of the nose, and eyelid mostly aligned, and you've got the base of the crotch and the right of the foot mostly aligned, but there's that disconnect between the crotch and the nipple where the drawing's been thrown off. Catching that early would have fixed your ribcage swinging out issue, because you'd realize you'd need that ribcage placed more to the right, otherwise that nipple would be hanging in midair.
Similarly, I can line up the top of the pelvis crest on the right and see it aligns with the side of the forward knee. Looking for these sort of measurements wherever you can will help you hone in on being more accurate in your drawing- but more importantly, will help train your eye to be critical and analytical when doing both referenced and imagined work in the future.

Another measuring tool to use is triangulation- the basic premise of which is, if you have 2 correctly placed points in a drawing, you can find the location of any other point by finding the angle from each point to desired point you want to place, and drawing a line to find where those lines intersect. That may sound like a mouthful, but as a concept it's pretty simple once you get used to it (not to say it can't be frustrating to apply in execution.)

Animated .gif example I did of someone else's work, comparing a measurements done with triangulation versus when not done with triangulation:



Also a Proko vid that goes over both these points and more probably a lot more clearly and usefully than I can manage (and if you haven't checked out his other videos, I'd highly recommend them):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzDGO0LssEM


Now, you mentioned you felt the ribcage was off, and there are a few things contributing to that.

First, as mentioned it's swung out a bit much, which some measuring will help correct for.
Second, you've indicated the ribcage as being a lot shorter than it actually is- if you look closely on the left side contour of the torso, at that little point where it's curved inward in between the pelvis and the torso, you can follow the line of the bottom of the ribcage up to the sternum. In your drawing you've made that angle a bit shallower, making the ribcage overall feel too small. It's a pretty common mistake, and something that helps me remember that the ribcage is actually pretty long is to take your fingers and use them to poke against your side- measure that distance between the top of the pelvic crest and the bottom of your ribcage and you see it's really only a palm-length or so- it's a distance that gets wildly exaggerated a lot of the time.
Third, you've expanded the ribcage and breasts to take up a bit more space than they actually do; and it's easy to see why, because it looks like the ribcage is wider than it is in the ref. The reason is that because the arms are raised, the mass of the latissimus dorsi muscles being stretched from the mid-back region, to in between the bicep and tricep, is adding on a good deal of mass to the sides. This amount of mass isn't that noticeable on pose with the arms down, which why it can be easy to not account for. Looking at the drawing, you've made the left side of the left breast press right against that far left torso contour- looking at the ref and accounting for the additional muscle mass, you can see that line of the breast needs to be knocked inward a bit to be correctly placed.
These things might all seem pretty small issues by themselves, but it's the little things like this that can a separate an merely ok drawing from a really good one.


Sorry if this is a bit long-winded/overwhelming- it's hard to abridge some of these concepts and still be descriptive enough to be useful. And even though this seems like a ton of stuff to fix (spoilers: there always is a ton of stuff to fix on EVERY drawing), you spending the time to go as far as you can go is really helpful- and I hope you continue to do so, because it's when you're spending that time to press against the bounds of your current knowledge that you're going to make breakthroughs, and that's the point at which we can see what knowledge you'll need to make those breakthroughs. Hope this helps.

Failing_Forward

Thank you both for taking the time to crit and knowledge dropping. I'll be going through prokos figure drawing vids as I go. For my next effort I'm going to spend a lot more time on measuring.

Failing_Forward

3 hours, focused all on measuring. Reviewed Proko's video on proper measuring techniques. Attempted to apply them here.

Issues: Feet are misaligned, bend in the torso(where the arm is reaching) wasn't captured, other arm too low or short, facial features, tilt of the upper torso. Really the whole thing is just one big mess.

BUT, when I superimposed the ref over the drawing, it was closer than my previous attempt. So, progress(?) there. Also, I need to focus more on landmarks of the body before I start scribbling in the bits.

Going to review Proko's video on landmarks before I start my next one.

Failing_Forward

Not sure why I'm posting this, other than it's the only thing I've spent time on the past week. It's not a study, but I tried to apply some of the things I've learned so far. Failed to, obviously. It was fun until I looked at the results. It's not digital because recently my hand has been going numb while using my tablet, something that doesn't happen with my traditional "art".

Failing_Forward

Mucha "studies". Mostly focusing on measuring. I spent 2 hours each on the single page "figures", the collection of mush in the bottom right was me poking at a page with a graphite stick. There's no way I can even get close to replicating what that man did over a hundred years ago, so i'll settle for aping the content. Purple vomit top left is me trying out watercolor.

Failing_Forward

Had a friend get me a month's sub to watts atelier. In an effort to not waste this gift, I've been going through the fundamentals section and doing the assignments to the best of my ability. I don't have access to some of the materials that the instructor recommends(smooth newsprint and the conte sketching pencils), would you believe I drove to three separate art stores and they all thought smooth newsprint wasn't a real thing?

Required materials aside, I have stuff shipping in soon. I've been trying the assignments in the Phase I section using the graphite pencils and stuff I have.

Curved surfaces confuse me, but I feel like I'm getting more control over the pencil.

I'll be doing a lot more of these, I wanted to post what I had to see if I was on the right track.

lyrium

It looks like you're off to a good start! It's exciting that you'll be doing the Watts atelier, just remember to go slow and do your best
Even while doing these simple studies, have the mindset that you are doing a fine, technical craft. So even though your focus in these is drawing shapes in the right proportion and perspective and how the light hits them, give some care to how you lay down your pencil. I would go for either more of a flat even tone, or otherwise have your strokes follow the form of what you are drawing. Keeping things clear is so important in the beginning because it simplifies what is going on and what you need to fix.
Drawing even lines and curves may be hard now, and they do take practice, but based on your earlier drawings in the thread (which are a great start!) I know that you can observe better than what you have as the base of that cylinder, for example. When something is wrong or even just not your very best, suck it up and fix it. Not to sound harsh, but you improve by setting your standard high. Even a simple object deserves to be drawn the best you can, otherwise why bother doing it?
You're off to a good start, keep at it! Will be looking forward to seeing your progress in the thread

Failing_Forward

These were done on the suggested / required newsprint pad. Cube and Cylinder need more work, so I'll have to redo those. Nothing too exciting. 18x24 newsprint scaled down in gimp.

Failing_Forward

More practice, nothing too exciting. Working on curved surfaces. The construction lines I couldn't erase are way noticeable even under the rendering, blagh. Something to work on.

lyrium

Hey, these are getting better! You were having this tendency to straighten out the part of the curved bases that is in shadow, and in this last batch you avoided doing that, which is a big improvement. In general the curves look more even and the lines look more straight and confident. Great progress

Ziggymon

Theres a great exercise I do with my students that you could try.

On the solid shapes studies you have been doing try them again and have a time set that usually gets the study complete to a high standard. Then repeat the drawing but half the time you are allowed to complete it but you have to try and keep the drawing to the high standard and actually finish it. Then repeat again halving the time again and again until you only have a very short amount of time to complete the study. Once you have done enough of these look back on all the drawings you have done and look at what changes from the long study to the short one. It's a great exercise to loosen yourself up and become more free flowing with your work.

Failing_Forward

@lyrium Thank you. I'm just waiting to see if these were good enough to pass the fundamentals 1 section over at watts. There are parts of these that still bug me, so I'll be reworking them again.

@Ziggymon Thank you for the suggestion. Every time I've drawn the basic forms, I find I'm getting a bit quicker at a few things. I haven't tried your approach yet but I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

Failing_Forward

Made it past phase 1 and I am headed into phase 2 fundamentals. So far it's been negative shapes and value scales. Just trying to get these looking right. The base of the Buddha head is all kinds of wonky and wrong, plus the shapes of the shadows on the head itself bug me, so i'll end up redoing that one before I submit.

Lamp

Nice to see a thread with someone really focusing on fundamentals first. Good stuff, definitely seeing improvement. Stick with it!

Ziggymon

You might think its wonky if you are going for absolute realism with the Buddha head but sometimes its good to look beyond realism to give the drawing more emotion and effect.

However, if you want realism in the head then looking up a few videos on perspective will help to get you setting up 2 point perspective drawings on the subject. Use the technique on some basic 3D shapes to gain an idea of where to go with it.

Failing_Forward

The Buddha head is from the value scale - light shadows exercise over at Watts. I'm trying to get as close as possible to what the videos and workbooks are asking for. Even if I can't get 100% Jeff Watts quality, I'm just trying to understand and internalize the concepts. I need to measure more closely and get the pos / neg shapes to jive. Thank you for the comments.

Ziggymon

Failing_Forward wrote: »

The Buddha head is from the value scale - light shadows exercise over at Watts. I'm trying to get as close as possible to what the videos and workbooks are asking for. Even if I can't get 100% Jeff Watts quality, I'm just trying to understand and internalize the concepts. I need to measure more closely and get the pos / neg shapes to jive. Thank you for the comments.

Do you have an example of the original image you are trying to achieve?

Failing_Forward

Here is the redo with the source image. I think the face got a little better, but I dinged up the base again. The corners tell me it's turned to the side in the source image, but I can't see the sides that should show up if it is turned. \(o.O)/ Maybe I'm just seeing things that aren't there.

Ziggymon

Cheers for the original image . On a separate piece of paper, to practice the shape of the base try using a ruler on the front and back lines of the base, even if you trace over the source image it should help to show what angles you need to be looking at. To get that particular viewpoint is quite difficult, I know its frustrating but keep up what you are doing as you are making some great progress each time and you will soon start nailing it.

In the meantime have a look at adding a further darker shade to the shadows It will help to add an extra layer of depth to the image.

Failing_Forward

Not dead yet! Still practicing when work leaves me some leftover energy. Working on faces / skulls / head regions because it's the next area of study on the watts site, and i feel its my weakest area(among many, lol).

Just to vent a bit; getting graded on the watts site takes far longer than they stipulate in the submit area. I know they're real people with a lot of student work to go over, but argh.