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Chakan posted:Looking at them, the big issue seems to be that I'm not confident with them. I'm also afraid for body parts to touch, even when it's obvious they should overlap. I'd like to hear what people think I should focus on though, as that's just what stands out to me. My big advice for you is to focus on approaching your drawings as three dimensional masses with volume and spatial relationships, rather than attempting only to trace out the contour lines of the figure like a human laser-cutter. The challenge of representing a three dimensional shape on a page, and making one shape look like it's in front of or behind another shape, is incredibly important bedrock level stuff that is going to be the foundation of basically everything you ever do in drawing. Don't be afraid of the spots where the body parts connect or overlap-- these are actually the most important spots because they tell us something about how the big shapes fit together and their relative positions. Without overlapping and connected shapes, we get drawings that are very flat and unconvincing. I picked out one of the sketches that it looked like you struggled most with:  I should say first that It's important to pick good, clear reference to work from. This picture is heavily shrouded in shadow and cloth, and a lot of the figures is just plain not visible. It's a dramatic photo, but we really want to see the anatomy that we're drawing. Still, we can do better to find the big shapes in this figure. The cubes and boxes that you've been drawing are not just mindless drills! Boxes can be used to help break down and understand even very intimidating subjects. I've drawn a few of the major shapes that represent the head, torso, pelvis, and arms. Nobody's going to mistake this for a real person, but if we can master the proportions and placement of simple box figures, it puts us in a much more solid position to start understanding the complex fleshy stuff. Box figures are just one of a million ways to break down and abstract the body into major shapes or gestures. Learn as many as you can stomach. For sake of demonstration, and to show a more organic way of approaching the body than boxes, I also did 10 minute sketch on one of your other reference images.  The first stage is probably only 60-90 seconds of drawing, and I'm really bad at quick gestural stuff. My main goal here is to, as quickly as possible, establish the overall proportions of the body, and the gesture of the spine and limbs from head to toe. Establishing the full "length" of your figure immediately helps prevent you from running out of space on your paper as you work down or across the body. The first two lines I drew were the one from the base of the skull down to the groin, and the line that comes off the hip and extends down the leg to the end of the outstretched foot. Then I indicate the mass of the torso, the skull, the gesture of the arms, and I follow the shape of the hips around to find the other tucked in leg. I'm building a scaffold on which I can spend the next ten minutes hanging a more complex drawing. The next 9 minutes are just me working back across that blueprint to fill in the meat. The more you study the figure, the more you begin to understand how the big shapes of the body fit together, and how some muscles can be grouped and treated somewhat like a single mass. For example, knowing that the torso is made up of a rigid ribcage(yellow) and a flexible abdominal area (red) helps me know what to look for, and it makes it easier to see the big difference in the angle of the ribs from the angle of the hips/pelvis(blue). Anyway, I'm not a real teacher but I hope there's at least something helpful in here to either Chakan or Tayacan or anyone else.
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Aug 1, 2019 07:46
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Hellbeard posted:Probably mess with it some more later: A few thoughts~ I think the composition would have been helped here with a bit more contrast control to add gravity to your focal areas (the characters). Specifically, I think your background is fighting a little bit with your characters for attention. There are three compositional tools that come to mind here; value, density, and color. Your major palette is pretty limited (green, violet, cool gray) and is largely shared across both your characters and the environment, so we can't expect to lean on it too much for creating clarity. Working with a constrained or even monochromatic palette is totally possible, but it means that the other elements have to pick up the slack, and they are also a bit muddled. We have similar density of detail and similar middling value ranges across almost the entire canvas. As a tool for evaluating composition I often will pull out to a thumbnail view and look at my work in grayscale, and if doing this causes large swathes of the image to run together and become unclear, then I know there's Problems. When I view your piece in this way, the skeleton's spear arm is almost totally lost and much of the interior detail from the sternum down is a little hard to pick out. Almost the whole goblin character lacks for anything to draw the eye. I took the liberty of spending like a minute with a soft brush to push some background away and slightly lighten some foreground elements, just to demonstrate the difference in readability. This is creating not only value contrast, but it quieted down some of the busier background detail in order to let the characters come forward. 
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Dec 12, 2019 18:39
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Al! posted:another one of these Based on this piece and glancing over the rest of the pieces you've posted in this thread, I think you should spend some focused time on studying light. I think it would be an extremely rich vein for you to mine that will have a big impact on improving your work. When I say "study light", I'm talking basically about an artist's version of Optics. For anyone who wants to do representational renderings, it's really important to have an intuitive working model of how light sources interact with surfaces. Understanding this stuff will help give everything you paint a better sense of three dimensional form(because the primary way we discern form is by how light falls on a shape), and it's also a great way to get a better handle on controlling value in general (because value is the primary tool an artist uses to communicate light and form). It seems like you're struggling to create convincing depth in much of your work, and I think it's because the light in your scenes is not well understood. This causes any individual form within the scene to feel flattened and artificial, and the overall value composition to be haphazard, rather than focused as a tool to create a strong sense of space. This Proko video is a good a starting point as any for beginning to learn this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3WmrWUEIJo The way I personally started learning these principles was observational still life drawing with pencil or charcoal (small scenes with strong directional light sources that will give you a chance to observe all kinds of shadows), and I'd recommend starting there if it sounds tolerable.
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Dec 28, 2019 12:13
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