But if I decide to commit time to just studying, there will be very little done on my personal art and honestly I'm not happy with where my portfolio is.
Squirming and wiggling.
The path to a better portfolio is to become a better artist, not to just keep making more work and hoping that some magical spark is going to flutter in through the window and grace your next attempt with a heretofore unseen beauty and splendor. I mean, you can just keep trying the same things over and over again without ever directly working on your weaknesses, and maybe you'll be lucky and improve after some years time through sheer force of will and beating your head against the wall. Or, instead you could just do what any sane person would recommend, and study and practice so that you will improve much faster with much less pain. If you're looking for shortcuts to getting better, this is it.
"Study" is not some big scary thing that means you need to take a vow of silence and live in monastic seclusion while you do charcoal still lifes of fruit every day until your hands bleed, and aren't allowed to produce art for yourself. Study is time you set aside to do some work where the primary objective is to learn rather than to produce a finished or appealing piece of art. That's all. Part of becoming a better artist involves learning how to study on your own, because it's something you will need to be able to do for the rest of your life if you want to keep growing.
And it's going to be a little bit different for everyone, because everyone has their own preferred methods for learning and individual shortcomings. Broadly though, I would say that a solid approach to practice is that you should constantly be assessing yourself for what are your weakest skills. Is it Perspective? Anatomy? Light? Gesture? You've gotten a lot of feedback on things you need to work on and I'm sure you can probably think of a few. Portraiture springs immediately to mind for one, though it might not be the biggest shortcoming in your skillset. Once you know what your weakness is, then you divide and conquer. Let's say you want to work on portraiture, what do you do? Well, the answer to almost any question of how do I study X subject matter is to go to Nature. From nature springs forth all things. The real world is the closest thing we have to a shared objective truth, so if you want to convey to another person through drawing what the essence of a face is, then you need to spend a lot of time studying real faces. That means you look at it and then you try to draw it as accurately as you can. You try to understand how it fits together, its proportions, shapes, and all of its subtleties and nuance. It cannot be overemphasized that the way to do this is mostly just to draw the damn thing over and over again from every direction until it's engraved in your brain. You do need to also make an active effort to think and really try to understand what you're seeing and how it fits together, but study is almost invariably an exercise in repetition and labor rather than deep contemplation.
To boil it down even further and give you a concrete example, I'll reiterate a suggestion that I'm pretty sure I've given you in the past-- find reference material and just seriously draw like a hundred faces. No, really, a hundred, not two or five or twenty. Draw friends or family from life, cooperative strangers, yourself in a mirror, find images on the internet, whatever. Take your time and make a serious effort to capture the person's likeness accurately without injecting your personal style or abstracting too much. Don't be too precious, spend five to ten minutes on each one. Analyze and try to understand.
I guarantee that if you do a hundred face drawings from observation, even relatively fast ones, you will have learned something valuable by the end. You could do a dozen more character drawings of the same kind that you've been producing recently and I'm not sure that you would learn anything at all from it.
OK I'm going to change it up! I don't want to look back a year from now and be in the same position.
Where do I start? Face studies? I'm going to try to only do studies from now on, all day every day. I want to get really good!! Art is the only thing I got and I really do love to paint/draw, I don't know why I haven't been studying more. And eyecagers thread is INSANE. I wish I could be on that level.
It doesn't have to be *all* work and no play. You can still have fun! Just make sure that most of your energy goes towards learning. As I mentioned in the post above, faces are not necessarily your biggest problem but it's certainly one that we've talked about a lot and it would be a fine a place as any to start with.
That's really well said @Scosglen . I've got a lot to think about in terms of priorities.
"Study" is not some big scary thing that means you need to take a vow of silence and live in monastic seclusion while you do charcoal still lifes of fruit every day until your hands bleed, and aren't allowed to produce art for yourself.
I'm starting to see this. I was looking through @Ikage 's thread and he/she would do a page of random studies and each one isn't some week long thing. I guess a couple hours here and there goes a long ways?
I really appreciate the advice and I'm going to get to work, I think 100 faces will be a good way to kick off the new year.
I would even suggest that you don't aim to hit any kind of insane time/amount/etc goal right off the bat, you just don't stop studying. Bored of doing faces after doing on 10 of them? Do studies of hands. Feet. Torsos. Do drawings outdoors of buildings and trees. Find a dog to draw and pet. Spend a few days working on color master studies. Spend a few days working on black and white master studies of casts. Feel refreshed after 30 studies of something else? Get back to drawing faces.
Afraid you won't retain it all? Afraid you won't get any personal work done?
After drawing 20 faces, draw a SINGLE FACE on the same page from your imagination, using the information you just learned from drawing those 20 faces. Does it suck? Cool! Draw 20 more from reference.
Feel like you're rushing through 20 studies? Allow yourself to struggle through a few to figure out an issue. Still struggling a few hours later? Give up and move on. Try again a day or two later. Draw something else in the meantime.
Cut down on the mount of your gaming and smoking and try to turn over a new leaf. Studying isn't rocket science - are you bad drawing a Thing? Draw Thing over and over again. Figure out what makes Thing work. Figure out the major forms of Thing, by drawing Thing over and over. Analyze Thing. Find multiple examples of Thing, Thang, and Theng...i.e. don't look up 50 examples of "white girl in her late teens with brown straight hair in a ponytail" for reference. Look up the full variety of Thing that you can.
Yeah I definitely don't necessarily mean for you to sit down and start drawing 100 faces and not do anything else until you do them all.
You could, and that can be a valuable experience on its own, but if you take diversions and change it up and come back to it and consider it more of a longer term goal, then that works fine too. Juggle a dozen different subjects at the same time and do a bite size of each one every day if that's what it takes to keep you engaged. This goes back to what I said about everyone having their own preferences for how to study. It can be a very idiosyncratic thing.
@Scosglen@Night_Dragon Man thats all great advice, I'm glad you are around to balance out the critiques.
@F87 I just want you to know that we are all really rooting for you. If you put in the time and effort it will become fun on its own and you'll wonder why you ever treated it like pulling teeth in the first place.
How much time do you spend drawing every week? Cause if you don't have a job and live with your mom, I would suggest you be drawing/studying, at a bare minimum, for 40 hours a week. Treat it like a full-time job. If being an illustrator is your goal, then you have to illustrate, and you have to make many illustrations. There's no way around it. And if you're really dedicated, you should be spending 60+ hours a week on this.
If you don't have a job, you really have no excuse. I hate to bring my personal life into this, but I have a full time job, a wife, a mortgage, two kids (aged 1 and 2), and yet I still make time to finish scheduled comics every single week, on time, without fail.
It sounds like you have basically ZERO responsibilities in your life right now. To me, that means you have the opportunity to work your ass off and make something of yourself. Like you said, you don't want to be in the same position you are in right now a year from today.
I know I'm kind of repeating some of the stuff some other people have already said and that you just said you are committed to working hard, but I'm just trying to emphasize what a huge opportunity you could have here. No job and living with your mom means almost unlimited free time. Don't spend it gaming/smoking all day. Work your ass off so a year from now… five years from now… ten years from now… you can look back on this time and say, "I'm so grateful my mom let me live with her so I could work super hard on something very important to me."
It sounds like you have the time and opportunity to work towards your dream job. So do it. Work hard.
@NightDragon You are the dude, man. I totally gotcha and I think you know how quickly I can burn out on things :P
@NibCrom I do try to spend at least 40 hours a week just painting but sometimes when I'm being lazy it's only around 30 hours... I know I have no excuse, I'm going completely change my art habits and seriously push myself for full-time every week.
@Iruka You are awesome, thank you for always being so encouraging.
I really do appreciate all the advice and hard truths from you all. I will become a HARDCORE STUDENT! Studies every day all year!
Now it's easy for me to get excited and work hard for a couple days or a week, but I really gotta fucking bully myself to not give this up. Thing is, I did enjoy spending most of the day drawing these...
Agreed w/ Iruka. I'd say push for a little more complexity as well. Seek out the characteristics that make faces look different. Some of them look really similar to each other, and I can't be certain it's because it's the same person.
On that note...Where are those faces from? The guy in the middle row second to the left reminds me of Remy Danton from House of Cards.
Thanks guys! Had a busy weekend but I'm back at it now. I will go for more diverse faces and I got the references from GIS. I'm thinking today and tomorrow will be mechanical thingies, then back to faces.
I will say that the first two where fairly easy to work out, but the car gave me trouble.
I think next week I want to try some slightly longer, painterly studies of hands/feet and legs/arms.
Looking at the car, it's pretty easy to see where you've dropped down the point at which the windscreen meets the side, which is throwing everything off. Did you set up any perspective/vanishing points for these? Looking at the top two, it looks like you've ruled straight lines and that's helping you get an authentic look even if the proportions are slightly off. But it seems like with the car, you've just tried to eyeball it. Even with curved surfaces, fitting 3D objects into a perspective grid is really helpful, because it means you've got your major points correct relative to each other, and then the curves can just interpolate between them.
Yeah I just eyeballed it for some reason. I can see what you mean, the droop is bad. I'm going to do another set tomorrow with legit perspective grids!
It feels a bit like you are rushing through these, drawing a "shorthand" of the references, and making a lot of observational errors. Most of these are pretty complex refs to start with - but maybe for the next handful, really try to take the time to look at the reference and get your shapes/angles/negative space a bit more accurate? Allow yourself to study and spend time really making one or two accurate drawings, rather than creating lots of "shorthand" studies.
@NightDragon - I think I may be rushing them too... I will focus on the negative space more and aim for much higher accuracy. Maybe try a slightly less complex ref... Thanks.
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Edit: This is what I've been working on today. Trying to spend more time comparing negative space and the shapes but as I adjust some spots, others get out of whack. And the tires are hard... But is this more along the lines of a proper study? It certainly felt a lot better working it out.
good start! but keep going!
(unless this is a progress shot in which case that goes without saying! Ikage's thread has some great mechanical studies, if you want an idea for the kind of detail levels you could aim for).
One thing to note is that you've increased the dramatic-ness of the perspective pretty significantly, which could cause you scaling problems when you add more detail unless you consciously compensate. That could be one of the problems you're running into when trying to 'fix' off areas. And obviously there's a few proportions issues here and there. One way to catch these things is by periodically overlaying your drawing on the reference; I wouldn't do it too often because then it can become a crutch, but if you're still trying to train your eye in, and you can see things are wrong but you don't know where, that can help.
Ah man, you're right! It's not the same perspective wise... I'm not exactly sure how to set up perspective guidelines from a reference. I was planning on trying this jet next but I have no idea how to correctly match it's perspective...
For things without straight lines to base the grid on, do I just create a box around the object and go off it?
Do you know the pencil trick? It's used more often in studies from real life but you can do it with image references too. Hold up a pencil/ruler/something straight in front of your reference, and line up two useful points (or a straight line on the object). Then keep that pencil at the same angle as you bring it down to the page/near to the screen, and use that angle to draw a reference vector. You can build up a bunch of vectors from various points on the image; the actual intersection points then tend to take care of themselves. This is also a good way of checking the angle on a line you've already drawn.
You may want to start with a reference where the perspective isn't so skewed bu odd angles of the object itself. Use Carapace or manga studio to set up lines on your reference, you can then use that grid to aid you. Some times it may take a wile to just correctly see the perspective in the references you are looking at.
I set this up in carapace:
The grid here may not be exactly right, but you can drag around the vanishing points until they are. Doing this will put you in a better position to make measurements. You may do a few drawings of the same vehicle, setting up the grid and drawing on top of it directly, and then trying again while eye balling it, remember, this is observational practice. Experiment with different methods, the drawing that results is secondary right now.
OK, this is giving me the blues. I've tried a couple times and end up drawing on a perspective grid that isn't quite right... I think I will just trace it like you suggest and then eyeball it. But honestly I'm getting a bit burnt out on these vehicle drawings already. It's a really different way to draw... Maybe I will go back to some figure drawing next week and come back to these refreshed.
When you feel up to it again, you could also try drawing houses/buildings, or even stacks of boxes/blocks. IMO that would be much easier to handle than trying to do these military vehicles...and it would still help you get used to drawing that way.
I've noticed also that when I try to use a perspective grid, and I use 100% straight edges in my drawing, things immediately start to look off....because the razor-straight lines have to be perfect, or it's instantly noticeable that they're even slightly off. I've started to allow myself to draw the lines freehand, or do a very light straight line using the Shift key, and then go over it freehand...things can still look good, but it's not super recognizable if something is a half a degree off in angle, then.
to add to the above comment, check out /r/ArtFundamentals on reddit. There are two basic but impactful practices you can do for helping your perspective improve:
You might feel like they are TOO basic for you, but really, every artist can benefit from these practices. IMHO, you are using subjects that are a little too complex and it could burn you out. With simple geometric shapes, it's easy to take a break and get back into it if it starts to feel dull, compared to doing something super technical and complicated.
Thanks guys, I'm really digging all this awesome support and feedback! That art fundamentals reddit is nice for lot's of assignments! I think this week I will try a few. Here are some torso studies:
Hmm...I feel like your natural style is to have very clean linework, with minimal detail, and no sketchiness at all. I think that in order to get the most out of your studies, you might need to spend a little more time on them. There is so much more you can get from a good reference. Take a look at these for example (very mildly potentially NSFW):
You need to work on building the underlying structure of your references, rather than focusing solely on greatly simplifying the superficial details into only a few marks on the paper/canvas. You can even sketch the edge of the shadow, do give you a better sense of the form in 3D. Don't be afraid to end up with something that doesn't look as "clean", but teaches you more.
Those torsos are pretty clean looking, but be careful that you're not being too eager to see neat simplified shapes. Boiling things down to geometry when you're banging out a bunch of quick studies and trying to learn structure is fine, but it's important to be able to capture the more subtle shapes too. A video that Marko Djurdjevic made a long time ago springs to mind:
His comparison of schools is not necessarily relevant to your situation, but I think the demonstration is plenty clear. He's talking about constructive drawing but the idea applies just as much to observation. The anatomy studies you've posted have a quality to them that makes them feel a lot like more anatomically accurate versions of your drawings from imagination, if that makes sense. It suggests to me that you could stand to push the accuracy and detail a little bit more. I think some long-form studies of a single face or a single torso, or whatever, would be helpful here.
I really appreciate the feedback and I hope these 2 images doesn't make it seem like I ignored you guys. I will be reading this thread again and I should probably take notes...
Man, I can't do a wooden ball this morning to save my life! This is the third try and I need some tips...Should I just keep going on this one or am I not seeing the grain as it should be? I know there are different types of wood and finish but I was just trying to do a basic one.
Oooh, that makes sense. I will have to go back to that one next...
In the meantime, I did a few more...
Actually I guess what I'm doing is different from painting a real wooden ball? I'm studying what makes up different textures while trying to keep to a simple form. Does that make sense?
well, it depends on whether you're focused on creating a convincing image or merely representational. It looks like you're aiming for more of the latter, which is fine, but isn't really giving you a lot to render accurately.
I think you just need to spend a little more time being detail oriented. You are going to go in trying to find texture, so I would look for more references than two (I sort of just have six tabs of google searches opened because I'm scatterbrained, but making a Photoshop document tiled with like 5-10 references is ideal)
Note that, this is not a very good painting, but I think what I'm talking about gets across:
Wood, even with its particular grain can start to easily look like stone, and when wrapping it around a ball, it starts to look like marble. Part of that is simply because you know that wood is not going to be in a ball like that. Your brain just kinda knows. I like the woop in this one: http://lelek1980.deviantart.com/art/Material-study-454444771 because it gives you the context to know its wood. Thats one of the reason I did these as flaps, actually: http://iruka.iseenothing.com/flaps4.jpg
The added challenge of making the texture conform to a shape is certainly interesting, but it doesn't necessarily matter if the studies you do are quite as presentable as the ones you see floating around, you should be aiming for information first. When I did my studies I didn't spend much time on textures I rendered often (like, fur) but for the crystal I poured a decent amount of hours just looking at references and really trying to understand what was going on. That's what you want to be doing here.
As with what Iruka demonstrated, I'd suggest putting your sphere studies on a ground plane and having them cast a shadow. At the moment they're just sort of hovering in an off-white void with one strong light source and what looks like some sort of secondary light source to the lower left that acts as a bounce light. Which would happen if those spheres were on the ground anyway.
Here's a matte grey ball floating in a void.
Here's the matte grey ball sitting on a ground plane.
The bounce light has a source now. The cast shadow gives it solidity.
The importance of a ground plane and shadow will become even more apparent when you venture into rendering spheres composed of more reflective materials.
This is a chrome sphere floating in the void.
This is the chrome sphere sitting on a ground plane.
Another thing to remember about the void, or any environment really, is that it can itself be a source of light. That, accompanied by the strength of the primary light source will determine how wide ranging your values can be.
The terminator on the sphere is more visible and the cast shadow is darker and more dramatic. This is partially to do with the fact that I increased the strength of the light, but is in large part to do with the fact that the overall environment is now darker.
@Iruka Wow, thank you very much! I really tried to put your feedback to use... @ChicoBlue Thanks man, it looks a lot better and I will keep that in mind!
Spending all day on a study isn't bad! Its good. You have to stop mentally reinforcing the idea that you don't want to do this. You do want to do this. Think about how this is going to help you complete illustrations going forward. Write it down if you have to. Think about how I'm going to punch you in if you stop now, if that helps.
Anyway, good. They look better. Keep pushing yourself.
I feel like the the areas of weakness here are some of the problems you hit when trying to finish larger works. For studies this small you should be trying to get to the highest level of polish possible. You want them to look touchable and really different as well, If you can push yourself to do it here, it'll be easier to not make all your scifi scenes the same smoothed over rendering.
With hair/fur, take a softer approach going in, and then render out a few strands as you start working on your lighter shades, right now it has a shaggy anime look to it, but you want it to look legit.
The water kinda sucks, but if you observe some clear balls or droplets you'll get a better understanding of what needs to be happening there, The light needs to travel through it.
Remember that not every texture has the same value range. Some materials don't go very dark, or very light. Some go to both ends of the extreme.
Your colors also seem to suffer a bit of a pastel look to them...when you're grabbing references, don't bounce around too much with the materials. Your wood references are only two, and show completely different kinds of wood - and thus, texture. Are you going to go with old, dry, desaturated raw wood? Or are you going to go with lacquered wood with a deep grain? Your wooden sphere drawing doesn't look like either of those things, and it doesn't exactly say "wood" except for the grain, because it's a mishmash of two references that don't go together.
It may seem like cheating, but don't hesitate to look up, literally, "wooden sphere" or "wood ball". There are hundreds of relevant references out there.
Suggestion for the wood sphere texture: search for burl wood bowls. They are carved from stumpy parts and have a huge variation in texture and grain from all the branches growing in different directions.
Posts
Squirming and wiggling.
The path to a better portfolio is to become a better artist, not to just keep making more work and hoping that some magical spark is going to flutter in through the window and grace your next attempt with a heretofore unseen beauty and splendor. I mean, you can just keep trying the same things over and over again without ever directly working on your weaknesses, and maybe you'll be lucky and improve after some years time through sheer force of will and beating your head against the wall. Or, instead you could just do what any sane person would recommend, and study and practice so that you will improve much faster with much less pain. If you're looking for shortcuts to getting better, this is it.
"Study" is not some big scary thing that means you need to take a vow of silence and live in monastic seclusion while you do charcoal still lifes of fruit every day until your hands bleed, and aren't allowed to produce art for yourself. Study is time you set aside to do some work where the primary objective is to learn rather than to produce a finished or appealing piece of art. That's all. Part of becoming a better artist involves learning how to study on your own, because it's something you will need to be able to do for the rest of your life if you want to keep growing.
And it's going to be a little bit different for everyone, because everyone has their own preferred methods for learning and individual shortcomings. Broadly though, I would say that a solid approach to practice is that you should constantly be assessing yourself for what are your weakest skills. Is it Perspective? Anatomy? Light? Gesture? You've gotten a lot of feedback on things you need to work on and I'm sure you can probably think of a few. Portraiture springs immediately to mind for one, though it might not be the biggest shortcoming in your skillset. Once you know what your weakness is, then you divide and conquer. Let's say you want to work on portraiture, what do you do? Well, the answer to almost any question of how do I study X subject matter is to go to Nature. From nature springs forth all things. The real world is the closest thing we have to a shared objective truth, so if you want to convey to another person through drawing what the essence of a face is, then you need to spend a lot of time studying real faces. That means you look at it and then you try to draw it as accurately as you can. You try to understand how it fits together, its proportions, shapes, and all of its subtleties and nuance. It cannot be overemphasized that the way to do this is mostly just to draw the damn thing over and over again from every direction until it's engraved in your brain. You do need to also make an active effort to think and really try to understand what you're seeing and how it fits together, but study is almost invariably an exercise in repetition and labor rather than deep contemplation.
To boil it down even further and give you a concrete example, I'll reiterate a suggestion that I'm pretty sure I've given you in the past-- find reference material and just seriously draw like a hundred faces. No, really, a hundred, not two or five or twenty. Draw friends or family from life, cooperative strangers, yourself in a mirror, find images on the internet, whatever. Take your time and make a serious effort to capture the person's likeness accurately without injecting your personal style or abstracting too much. Don't be too precious, spend five to ten minutes on each one. Analyze and try to understand.
I guarantee that if you do a hundred face drawings from observation, even relatively fast ones, you will have learned something valuable by the end. You could do a dozen more character drawings of the same kind that you've been producing recently and I'm not sure that you would learn anything at all from it.
slow typer edit:
It doesn't have to be *all* work and no play. You can still have fun! Just make sure that most of your energy goes towards learning. As I mentioned in the post above, faces are not necessarily your biggest problem but it's certainly one that we've talked about a lot and it would be a fine a place as any to start with.
I'm starting to see this. I was looking through @Ikage 's thread and he/she would do a page of random studies and each one isn't some week long thing. I guess a couple hours here and there goes a long ways?
I really appreciate the advice and I'm going to get to work, I think 100 faces will be a good way to kick off the new year.
Afraid you won't retain it all? Afraid you won't get any personal work done?
After drawing 20 faces, draw a SINGLE FACE on the same page from your imagination, using the information you just learned from drawing those 20 faces. Does it suck? Cool! Draw 20 more from reference.
Feel like you're rushing through 20 studies? Allow yourself to struggle through a few to figure out an issue. Still struggling a few hours later? Give up and move on. Try again a day or two later. Draw something else in the meantime.
Cut down on the mount of your gaming and smoking and try to turn over a new leaf. Studying isn't rocket science - are you bad drawing a Thing? Draw Thing over and over again. Figure out what makes Thing work. Figure out the major forms of Thing, by drawing Thing over and over. Analyze Thing. Find multiple examples of Thing, Thang, and Theng...i.e. don't look up 50 examples of "white girl in her late teens with brown straight hair in a ponytail" for reference. Look up the full variety of Thing that you can.
You could, and that can be a valuable experience on its own, but if you take diversions and change it up and come back to it and consider it more of a longer term goal, then that works fine too. Juggle a dozen different subjects at the same time and do a bite size of each one every day if that's what it takes to keep you engaged. This goes back to what I said about everyone having their own preferences for how to study. It can be a very idiosyncratic thing.
@F87 I just want you to know that we are all really rooting for you. If you put in the time and effort it will become fun on its own and you'll wonder why you ever treated it like pulling teeth in the first place.
If you don't have a job, you really have no excuse. I hate to bring my personal life into this, but I have a full time job, a wife, a mortgage, two kids (aged 1 and 2), and yet I still make time to finish scheduled comics every single week, on time, without fail.
It sounds like you have basically ZERO responsibilities in your life right now. To me, that means you have the opportunity to work your ass off and make something of yourself. Like you said, you don't want to be in the same position you are in right now a year from today.
I know I'm kind of repeating some of the stuff some other people have already said and that you just said you are committed to working hard, but I'm just trying to emphasize what a huge opportunity you could have here. No job and living with your mom means almost unlimited free time. Don't spend it gaming/smoking all day. Work your ass off so a year from now… five years from now… ten years from now… you can look back on this time and say, "I'm so grateful my mom let me live with her so I could work super hard on something very important to me."
It sounds like you have the time and opportunity to work towards your dream job. So do it. Work hard.
@NibCrom I do try to spend at least 40 hours a week just painting but sometimes when I'm being lazy it's only around 30 hours... I know I have no excuse, I'm going completely change my art habits and seriously push myself for full-time every week.
@Iruka You are awesome, thank you for always being so encouraging.
I really do appreciate all the advice and hard truths from you all. I will become a HARDCORE STUDENT! Studies every day all year!
Now it's easy for me to get excited and work hard for a couple days or a week, but I really gotta fucking bully myself to not give this up. Thing is, I did enjoy spending most of the day drawing these...
On that note...Where are those faces from? The guy in the middle row second to the left reminds me of Remy Danton from House of Cards.
I will say that the first two where fairly easy to work out, but the car gave me trouble.
I think next week I want to try some slightly longer, painterly studies of hands/feet and legs/arms.
These treads are intense...
@NightDragon - I think I may be rushing them too... I will focus on the negative space more and aim for much higher accuracy. Maybe try a slightly less complex ref... Thanks.
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Edit: This is what I've been working on today. Trying to spend more time comparing negative space and the shapes but as I adjust some spots, others get out of whack. And the tires are hard... But is this more along the lines of a proper study? It certainly felt a lot better working it out.
(unless this is a progress shot in which case that goes without saying! Ikage's thread has some great mechanical studies, if you want an idea for the kind of detail levels you could aim for).
One thing to note is that you've increased the dramatic-ness of the perspective pretty significantly, which could cause you scaling problems when you add more detail unless you consciously compensate. That could be one of the problems you're running into when trying to 'fix' off areas. And obviously there's a few proportions issues here and there. One way to catch these things is by periodically overlaying your drawing on the reference; I wouldn't do it too often because then it can become a crutch, but if you're still trying to train your eye in, and you can see things are wrong but you don't know where, that can help.
For things without straight lines to base the grid on, do I just create a box around the object and go off it?
edit: similar advice, with helpful images
http://www.netplaces.com/drawing/drawing-techniques/judging-proportions.htm
I set this up in carapace:
The grid here may not be exactly right, but you can drag around the vanishing points until they are. Doing this will put you in a better position to make measurements. You may do a few drawings of the same vehicle, setting up the grid and drawing on top of it directly, and then trying again while eye balling it, remember, this is observational practice. Experiment with different methods, the drawing that results is secondary right now.
I've noticed also that when I try to use a perspective grid, and I use 100% straight edges in my drawing, things immediately start to look off....because the razor-straight lines have to be perfect, or it's instantly noticeable that they're even slightly off. I've started to allow myself to draw the lines freehand, or do a very light straight line using the Shift key, and then go over it freehand...things can still look good, but it's not super recognizable if something is a half a degree off in angle, then.
http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/2f20z9/optional_challenge_250_boxes/
http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/2s7xz1/optional_challenge_250_cylinders/
You might feel like they are TOO basic for you, but really, every artist can benefit from these practices. IMHO, you are using subjects that are a little too complex and it could burn you out. With simple geometric shapes, it's easy to take a break and get back into it if it starts to feel dull, compared to doing something super technical and complicated.
That said, there is another tutorial that uses those exact subjects for drawing practice: http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/2h0mua/lesson_6_hard_surface_objects/
KEEP! GOING! You're doing great.
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0b/5d/91/0b5d916dfa5abe35eefdd8c5bd7553cb.jpg
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/fb/b0/d0/fbb0d0daf61d2186622f9c65a6a561c3.jpg
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/02/00/7f/02007f9056a500ad65a57a441f5f42f1.jpg
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2d/a5/e4/2da5e4e9397c1a630e4c36ee6282e7cb.jpg
You need to work on building the underlying structure of your references, rather than focusing solely on greatly simplifying the superficial details into only a few marks on the paper/canvas. You can even sketch the edge of the shadow, do give you a better sense of the form in 3D. Don't be afraid to end up with something that doesn't look as "clean", but teaches you more.
Who do you think is more likely to be learning more about how to draw feet? The people who made these drawings:
https://cms-assets.tutsplus.com/uploads/users/110/posts/21733/final_image/exercize.jpg
http://imgs.steps.dragoart.com/how-to-sketch-feet-step-3_1_000000041827_5.jpg
...or the people who made these drawings?
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/230/1/3/feet_reference_by_kibbitzer-d5bklly.jpg
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/44/71/9f44710fc841f9b71fb3f2a6b675fa1d.jpg
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/175/e/6/hogarth_foot_studies_by_mantisazure-d6ahzm0.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhF4fBetN4Y
His comparison of schools is not necessarily relevant to your situation, but I think the demonstration is plenty clear. He's talking about constructive drawing but the idea applies just as much to observation. The anatomy studies you've posted have a quality to them that makes them feel a lot like more anatomically accurate versions of your drawings from imagination, if that makes sense. It suggests to me that you could stand to push the accuracy and detail a little bit more. I think some long-form studies of a single face or a single torso, or whatever, would be helpful here.
Here is some newer stuff.
NSFW Longer study:
I plan on producing a lot of studies this week. Some from this awesome imgur post I saw: http://imgur.com/a/Fyx0e?gallery
I really appreciate the feedback and I hope these 2 images doesn't make it seem like I ignored you guys. I will be reading this thread again and I should probably take notes...
More study pages:
but I grabbed this for color reference:
you should probably source more reference that directly does what you are trying to do.
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
In the meantime, I did a few more...
Actually I guess what I'm doing is different from painting a real wooden ball? I'm studying what makes up different textures while trying to keep to a simple form. Does that make sense?
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
I usually approach reference from multiple places, I try to find a photo of what I want, I try to find someone whos rendered something similar in a way I like, if its a pose I'll take reference myself. Notably, I found these on DA:
http://admiralwolf.deviantart.com/art/Material-Study-Snowy-Wood-335495081
http://lelek1980.deviantart.com/art/Material-study-454444771
Also this: https://www.pinterest.com/villa0425/texture-pattern/
Note that, this is not a very good painting, but I think what I'm talking about gets across:
Wood, even with its particular grain can start to easily look like stone, and when wrapping it around a ball, it starts to look like marble. Part of that is simply because you know that wood is not going to be in a ball like that. Your brain just kinda knows. I like the woop in this one: http://lelek1980.deviantart.com/art/Material-study-454444771 because it gives you the context to know its wood. Thats one of the reason I did these as flaps, actually: http://iruka.iseenothing.com/flaps4.jpg
The added challenge of making the texture conform to a shape is certainly interesting, but it doesn't necessarily matter if the studies you do are quite as presentable as the ones you see floating around, you should be aiming for information first. When I did my studies I didn't spend much time on textures I rendered often (like, fur) but for the crystal I poured a decent amount of hours just looking at references and really trying to understand what was going on. That's what you want to be doing here.
Here's a matte grey ball floating in a void.
Here's the matte grey ball sitting on a ground plane.
The bounce light has a source now. The cast shadow gives it solidity.
The importance of a ground plane and shadow will become even more apparent when you venture into rendering spheres composed of more reflective materials.
This is a chrome sphere floating in the void.
This is the chrome sphere sitting on a ground plane.
Another thing to remember about the void, or any environment really, is that it can itself be a source of light. That, accompanied by the strength of the primary light source will determine how wide ranging your values can be.
The terminator on the sphere is more visible and the cast shadow is darker and more dramatic. This is partially to do with the fact that I increased the strength of the light, but is in large part to do with the fact that the overall environment is now darker.
@ChicoBlue Thanks man, it looks a lot better and I will keep that in mind!
Wow guys I spent all day on these
What do you think?
Anyway, good. They look better. Keep pushing yourself.
I feel like the the areas of weakness here are some of the problems you hit when trying to finish larger works. For studies this small you should be trying to get to the highest level of polish possible. You want them to look touchable and really different as well, If you can push yourself to do it here, it'll be easier to not make all your scifi scenes the same smoothed over rendering.
With hair/fur, take a softer approach going in, and then render out a few strands as you start working on your lighter shades, right now it has a shaggy anime look to it, but you want it to look legit.
with the water, it just looks too solid. It took me a while to find a study that had that surface pattern, but this guy did it:
http://tatsuhiro-kun.deviantart.com/art/Material-study-448179855
The lava rock would benefit from a darker local color, and some more attention to the viscosity of lava. Its very thick stuff. A well observed study on that:
http://simondubuc.deviantart.com/art/Material-studies-491076267
some rough paint overs:
The water kinda sucks, but if you observe some clear balls or droplets you'll get a better understanding of what needs to be happening there, The light needs to travel through it.
Your colors also seem to suffer a bit of a pastel look to them...when you're grabbing references, don't bounce around too much with the materials. Your wood references are only two, and show completely different kinds of wood - and thus, texture. Are you going to go with old, dry, desaturated raw wood? Or are you going to go with lacquered wood with a deep grain? Your wooden sphere drawing doesn't look like either of those things, and it doesn't exactly say "wood" except for the grain, because it's a mishmash of two references that don't go together.
It may seem like cheating, but don't hesitate to look up, literally, "wooden sphere" or "wood ball". There are hundreds of relevant references out there.