Help! I Need Honest Opinions.
By
Blood_Wolffe,
Posted on: 2009-01-15 17:04 in Multi-Media Fan Creations
Very nice work in general.
I think you may want to take more from real-life pictures, you're on DA, so take a look through the stock art accounts so that you might find some models to use.
Hand and arm size compared to head and face size, is the one thing that I see can still use a bit of improvement. The hands and forearms can stand to be a little bigger in general, and the faces a little smaller (though that's individual, not every one is 'too big for the head').
Very nice inking though, nice bold lines. I think some of the 'shiny' lines would be easier to understand when it's in color, but it still gets the point across nicely.
Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
Repurposed
I'm saying this as someone who is trying to improve as well, so please take it the right way. My intent is not to bash your work.
1. Anatomy. More than anything else you need to improve your understanding of the human form. In general the eyes are too big in the head, waists too small, heads too big, limbs too short in relation to the torso. Overall, a couple of the older pieces, while still having issues, are in better proportion than a lot of the newer stuff. A lot of the musculature looks stock, like its placed there out of convention or copying other stylized works rather than really understanding where things go.
2. Rendering volume. The big thing you seem to be striving for in the later pieces is line quality. It definitely gets more confident in the newer stuff but it's progressing in what imo is a bad way.
Solid black lines, if you're going to use them, should be used for the outside contours of objects. If you have a contour on the inside of a silhouette that needs a black line--the inside line should be lighter than the outside edge lines. Heavy floating black lines tend to flatten an object and the effect is really bad when you switch to color. The color shading should be rendering the volume but then there's this weird black line there that doesn't mesh.
This is a great example of how linework relates to rendering.
Blacklisted
"I'AM SATANS FAVORITE CHILD!!"
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I'm saying this as someone who is trying to improve as well, so please take it the right way. My intent is not to bash your work.
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Im not looking for idle praise I know that I need improvement thats why I want the honesty, everything you said was constructive.
about the lines. is what your saying that I should have thicker lines on the outside and thinner on the inside?
sorry Im a little thick sometimes. just want to clarify so I can get a better idea of what I need to change
You might want to ask some of the artists here to ink one of your pencils, to show you the thinking behind their approach... it' not just thick outside, thin in... some ink heavily on the side where shadows fall, away from the light. Some ink heavily down the middle, if the final color will have two light sources, one on each side.
I could show you some examples, but in the end, I think the best inkers develop a kind of organic approach to their style. That can be entirely brushwork, or a combination of pens.
It really is a choice, some pieces work better with minimal inkwork, some are works of art without any color. If you are trying to achieve either of those goals, you might want to do two versions of each piece and see which you like best...
Good luck to you in any case.
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You might want to ask some of the artists here to ink one of your pencils, to show you the thinking behind their approach... it' not just thick outside, thin in... some ink heavily on the side where shadows fall, away from the light. Some ink heavily down the middle, if the final color will have two light sources, one on each side.
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I think that would be incredibly benneficial, I dont really know any inkers though.
So the best i can do is chuck out an invitation to any inkers out there to give me a shot. i got a
pencil picture on here and if there are any takers id be happy to draw you something for your time (if you'd want it) and/or ive got a fair amount of influence floating around liberty server id be happy to pay.
Your improvement is incredible. It looks like your early work and later work are done by different artists, the improvement is so drastic.
In order to fix the anatomy and scaling issues, I would suggest finding the books by Andrew Loomis, especially Drawing the Head and Hands and Figure Drawing for All It's Worth, and Burne Hogarth's books, especially Dynamic Anatomy, Dynamic Figure Drawing and Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery. These are two of the greatest illustrators of the human figures in the past century and will help you immeasurably.
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As others have alluded, primarily you seem to be struggling with anatomical proportions between multiple parts of the same body. Not that you're off by that much on any body part as compared to any other part. In your pieces you seem to be randomly enlarging the head or the eyes or the thighs or randomly shrinking the forearms or the lips or the thighs.
But! You would be getting off on the wrong foot to start thinking you're being bad in your current style. I would strongly suggest you begin any approach to improvement by building confidence in your ability by reminding yourself how strong your vision seems to be. You're realizing some very nice posework and staging, good penwork, some excellent details (for example with the flowing hair), getting a nice balance between softness and strength in the curves of your women, etc. You've got a good thing going there, and you shouldn't get too distracted and/or discouraged over any bits that aren't quite as practiced yet.
To improve your skills in anatomical proportions, I would suggest setting aside your art for now, and clear your mind as much as possible. I would suggest that you need to come from a fresh mindspace to learn this subject, as it's basically a medium of subtleties that your preconceptions built from your own experience will end up getting overrun.
I would suggest you seek out books, commonly comic book drawing books, that talk about how to space out an average human body in terms of head lengths. My vague recollection of books I've read is that for comic book males the head is one head high, then the neck from the chin to the collarbone is a partial head, then the collarbone to the base of the pecs is one head high, from there to the belly button is another head, from there to the base of the groin is another head, another two heads to the knees and another two heads to the ankles. Or something like that.
Facial details are also spaced by various elements, like across the eyes the width of the head should be roughly five eyewidths, with one eyewidth between the two eyes and one eyewidth on either side. Hm, I should probably go back and review all that myself.
Once you get some good reference in this way, start practicing with just vanilla standing poses. Draw a page full of stances. Draw a couple pages. Ignore visions of great drawings for now, just work through dumb uninteresting drawings for a bit.
Next there should be some discussion in those books about how to set up dynamic poses with the faintest of initial skeletons. These skeletons should be of good assistance to you because it allows you to set and lock in good initial proportions right at the start, before you get caught up in the fun detailing of the bodies. You just place your head circle first, then a simple sweeping line or two depicting the general flow of the body for the pose, add in a line for the shoulder-to-shoulder cross, some lines for the arms, some circles for the hands, a line for the pelvic cross, some lines for the legs, all proportioned out to roughly the correct head lengths.
You can get a lot of value at that point. You can often tell whether or not you like the pose and do alterations when the amount of detail already committed to is low.
You might also want to consider that if you do jump into a lot of research like this, you'll be in a good position to start looking at drawing other kinds of subjects like animals or trees or buildings or cars or whatevers. How to draw spheres and cubes and cylinders and then how to approximate world objects with combinations of those elements, whereby all that would remain is a pass of simple detail filling.
This kind of research could take a while, and you'd probably be shut out of the fun part of your art for that time, but I have to believe you could find yourself very much improved after it all. On the other hand, this is just one approach, and there are many others that can work just as well if not better.
I will leave the constructive criticism to the pros. I just wanted to tell you that I LOVE that last pic and the way her hands and arms are running through her hair and the swagger of her walk.
That is the perfect description without words of my main and the type of character she is. *jealous*
Nice work!
To help with anotomy... get an anatomy book. Seriously. Go find a good muscular diagram reference book in the medical section. Dynamic Anatomy is good for "superhero" proportions (which are slightly different than regular person proportions) but I suggest getting an actual anatomy book that is heavy on the musculature and learn to do "real" proportions first. It will be eaiser than trying to unlearn your superhero proportions should you move on to other subjects.
Examples: Learn to do This and This (NSFW body study) before continuing to do This.
(yes those are all by me, but they serve as good examples for both male and female anatomy)
Since it was my idea to ask people to ink your work, I thought I would follow suit and do an example for you as well...
In this new post... for you to look at.
LJ
As far as anatomy is concerned I think you have the majority of it down. Anatomy books are great, but I don't think you NEED them. Just the tricks to remember certain things would help, such as a hand is usually as big as the character's face, etc.
Draw your weak areas. Over and over. Make them the focal point of the picture. Reference pictures or even better, real life when you do it. You will make noticable improvements faster.
Wow! i didnt expect such a large response! ive made 2 pages!
thank you all so much for your Help. I think I have a better picture now of the changes I need to make. You've given me alot of ideas of how to start. but, I think ill take things back a bit to start and get the basics down like my proportions and then im going to look into illustrator. thanks again everyone for the constructive criticism. if theres anything i can do for you guys just let me know.
Ive taken up drawing seriously now for about 7 months. In that time ive made some serious inprovements.
From my early work:
Here
Here
web page
and Here
a whole mess of pictures inbetween.
and where im at now:
As seen here
here
here
here
and Here
oh and here
and finally here
I color also but I already know certain things I need to change about that. (waiting on my bamboo to be shipped in) so if you guys could find the time to browse through these pictures or have a look at my deviant art (link in my sig) and give me some constructive criticism I would be incredibly appriciative.