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So where are all the chill art communities these days, outside of this one? Been looking for a while now and just can't seem to find anything that'll stick; they seem to be too massive (CA) or just so small they might as well be nonexistant. I used to post on the Penny Arcade art corner, but just got so sick of dealing with all the clickish bullshit that goes around there. It was very frustrating to deal with and left a bad taste in my mouth on what's acceptible in an art community. I dunno, I just want a friendly little place where I can post a doodle every now and then. I'm not trying to be a hot-shot artist trying to blaze a trail as numero uno concept artist, just want a pad to show a silly drawing every now and then. I'm getting fed up with all those sites where it's super serious all the time where every little thing you post is gonna get nitpicked to death. It sucks the fun of out of art for me quite frankly, and it's kind of a poor standard to set for an online community. I already have friends who are working professionals in the industry that I go to whenever I need advice on how to get better. I don't really want a place to grind myself retarded, just a place to post odd paintings I do from time to time, like shark girl here! Anyone got the scoop?
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Aug 5, 2015 03:53
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I think the reason we're all here is because the number of chill art communities is non-existent. Or at least, mostly. I've seen some rumblings from others in this/the making comics/the self-taught thread but I hear just as much criticism hurled at the same site(s) so it's hard to tell. Art related, fixed most of my head issues last night, need to bring the hair in closer to the skull but we're getting closer to viable. Note that I change facial expressions on characters constantly while drawing them for my own amusement and am not sold on this one. 
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Aug 5, 2015 05:40
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windex posted:I think the reason we're all here is because the number of chill art communities is non-existent. -You aren't drawing hands or feet. If your hands suck, draw hands more. -This is almost entirely contour. That's okay for finished line art, but you really should try drawing in box forms and cylinders to really push the idea of this figure as a 3d object. I want to see the sides of the kneecap and the inside of the elbow, the curve of the shoulder and armpit, and the general mass of the torso. The right boob stops at the bottom of the arm, it should continue up a little bit. Also, the right boob is clipping through the left. -Your lines seem really, I don't know, labored? How long did this take? If it's a while, you might benefit from more gesture drawing - 60 seconds at posemaniacs/quickpose. Do a lot of these. Like, a lot. -Save facial expressions for last.
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Aug 5, 2015 06:30
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Mimir posted:-You aren't drawing hands or feet. If your hands suck, draw hands more. This is good feedback. Hands & feet - I usually just kinda work on things in a progression. I usually start with the head or body, do the other, hands, and then feet, since I may tweak the pose quite a bit while thinking. It's not that hands suck, so much, as they're about as much effort as anything else. I also generally have an easy time visualizing contour shapes, and go back and work out finer details with shading, etc. I do usually draw 3d boxes/cylinders when drawing hands, though. Feet, I have some kind of undiscovered fetish for and can draw reasonably well without a lot of thought. Labored lines - The first session on this was about 40 minutes on Friday and last night was about 30, including warm up time (~10m). I usually draw something at this quality level then intend to go over it with finalized lines, because I have very poor fine motor control due to literal brain damage (I had spinal meningitis when I was born). I'm not going to disagree with you, but, things are way better than they used to be. There is no very quick drawing, or handwriting, in general, in my immediate future - but I still try. 
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Aug 5, 2015 07:09
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Interesting & relevant sidenote: Faces, hands, and feet are good indicators of an artist's skill.
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Aug 5, 2015 08:48
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Thats part of why I wait till everything is settled, I've wasted a lot of effort in the past getting them right. This one will be interesting when I get there because my ideas for her hand positions are new to me. I'm also probably going to adjust her arms to a less rigid position. Hands and feet will be visible in the final image, so they're going to be important. Boobs, not so much.
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Aug 5, 2015 11:21
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Delta Echo posted:Interesting & relevant sidenote: Faces, hands, and feet are good indicators of an artist's skill. a better indicator is if they decide a paintover of a disney character without panties is a good idea Parrotine posted:So where are all the chill art communities these days, outside of this one? Been looking for a while now and just can't seem to find anything that'll stick; they seem to be too massive (CA) or just so small they might as well be nonexistant. this is cute! try out tumblr. it's really the only one I know of and you have to kind of build your own community. facebook art groups can be good too.
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Aug 5, 2015 20:06
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Honestly I think I have more followers and useful feedback on Tumblr than anywhere else...kinda sad.
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Aug 7, 2015 01:19
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tumblr has something crazy like 100 million users so it's not surprising.
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Aug 7, 2015 01:59
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The surprise I think comes from how god-awful Tumblr is at communication. I would be leaving a lot more feedback, if I didn't chance whatever I said being made a public part of the person's blog. It's completely bonkers.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:10
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Same here, and I hate how you can't see your sent messages either. Total pain in the rear end.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:14
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Scathach posted:I hate how you can't see your sent messages either.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:14
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windex posted:Thats part of why I wait till everything is settled, I've wasted a lot of effort in the past getting them right. You should probably be sketching out the whole body before refining any of it, doing hands/feet/faces at the end will make them look stiff and tacked on because you didn't work out their position while putting together the rest of the figure's line of action. And if drawing at a decent pace is hard for you that's all the more reason to improve your economy of line so you don't have to rework the same drawing for an hour, sketching out the figure then noting the mistakes and moving on to the next drawing will help with this.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:53
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You aren't wrong. The problem I've always struggled with is that all textbook definitions of progression just lead to failure on my part, always have, and it's incredibly frustrating. I have been taught the processes you guys are describing in person, in books, off youtube, etc, and generally speaking, it saddens me that I never manage to get results that way even if I try to mimic what I'm seeing. What I started doing to make progress was just abandon all of that. The first full character sketch I did this way probably took 60 hours, was mostly crap but helped me set character dimensions, and I had tons of trial and error learning. I've have worked it down quite a bit since then to just a few. The thing that helps me in critique form is closer to the first one, which was mostly pointing out errors, than these last two, because process critiques are very valid for some, but just don't work for me. I drug myself down that path once and abandoned art entirely for like 5 years because of it, and a year and a half ago focused on something I wanted to do that needs art, bought a Cintiq and continue to power through it. I have thousands of throwaways between now and then, but I really think I'm doing much better these days than I've ever done. To put kind of a cap on this thought, one of my artist friends who was more traditionally educated (and has seen me work in person) describes my process as the same methodology you use to form clay into shapes, and thats a pretty good train of thought, but I've been hesitant to talk about it because I don't want other people to latch onto UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE METHOD justifications unless they really have spent years trying and failing and stumbled into their own way. windex fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 06:47
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windex posted:You aren't wrong. The problem I've always struggled with is that all textbook definitions of progression just lead to failure on my part, always have, and it's incredibly frustrating. Kinda curious, do you happen to have any examples from your life drawing classes that you'd feel okay with posting here? Or details about the instructor's teaching methods? It's true everyone has to find their own way as far as techniques and what not but I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't see some benefits after tackling that for 2+ years. Did you have the same instructors for that period, cause I wonder if they were adaptable enough in how they taught the material. Some people are very good artists but aren't good at teaching, so I wonder if that's what happened. Mind you if you'd prefer not discuss process at all that's fine, I just find it a fun topic. As far as having lots of throw-aways, I have lots of those too. Hell, even someone like James Gurney has them. Dude literally made a solar mirror that can burn bad paintings with the power of the sun. You just need to find an appropriately metal way to dispose of the bad ones and it's all good.
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Aug 7, 2015 09:54
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windex posted:You aren't wrong. The problem I've always struggled with is that all textbook definitions of progression just lead to failure on my part, always have, and it's incredibly frustrating. I'm really not trying to be mean here but it really just feels like you're making excuses let's be honest now you may think the way you're doing things leads to improvement but if all you really have to show for it is a floating torso with no hands or feet you might want to rethink the whole giving up on traditional methods of learning art if you put the time and effort in and not just spend a million hours redoing the same thing you WILL improve
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Aug 7, 2015 11:24
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The hardest thing I had to accept when I wanted to improve my art was I had to throw things away. I think I improved a lot faster when I did drawing after drawing rather than trying to fine tune one. Drawing a variety of similar things was more beneficial than the same one thing. If something isn't working for me, it's usually better to scrap it and start over. I mean I'm not doing 80 hour paintings, I'm doing comic art, but I think that's what really pushes me forward.
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Aug 7, 2015 12:59
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JuniperCake posted:Teachers/examples/stuff I seemed to have the most issues among my peers, primarily because there was no undo button. When I have to live with a line it's usually a disaster, because the forms of control most readily available to me are grinding the edge of my palm into the surface of the page to brace my hand (which is how all handwriting goes, generally) or moving my entire arm - but with bad tactile control of the pen on the page, e.g. pressure, and otherwise. I basically hold the pen in a continuously fixed death grip like position between three fingers, usually with the end pinned against the crease of my thumb. I know these are mistakes other people make in art, but regardless of time spent, I couldn't overcome it. Working on the Cintiq lets me zoom in/out and retains the ability to move the page in any possible position to line up lines, which helps a lot. I've also greatly improved my wrist control which is more readily available to me than hand/finger control, but once and awhile fails to accomplish what I'm going for. The wrist thing is the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do while drawing, but the RSI from work is seemingly lessened by the other repetitive stress of drawing so maybe they're canceling each other out. As far as examples, all that happened when I was still married and living in the midwest US, and I don't have much of anything from that time. What I can tell you is that if you go look at your average cringe-worthy deviantart stuff, mine would've fit in. Whenever I'd work out roughs for a drawing, I'd spend more time erasing than drawing, it seemed, even after I moved to blue pencil sketching and photocopy linework at the suggestion of one of the TA's after the first year - this improved things a bit, in so far as I wasn't handing in pages that had spent a lot of time under an eraser and they were mostly shaded correctly. This was the better stuff, but still had too many straight lines / line segments. I actually failed the first semester, effectively, because I couldn't complete a few (important for grade) drawings in any legible way in time. I repeated that and continued after discussing the problems with the department head, because she could see that I was trying... (I was also married to someone who thought art was dumb and I was dumb. Probably didn't help.) I do throwaways but they're usually not complete works, e.g. anatomy studies (including hands!), one-offs, foliage (trees and other plants are where I did most of my line control grinding to date). And talking about process is okay, I guess, it just doesn't always help me, because it never leads me to an "a-ha" moment. On top of the other history, I've got stacks of books in two languages telling me the same stuff on my shelves, but I have far better luck using those books as a reference for "how do other people represent this" over "how do I do this". Troposphere posted:valid criticism This is why I made the comment about "UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE METHOD justifications". It is an excuse, inasmuch as it is what it is. I still got quite a bit from the education I did get, particularly in how to eye up mistakes, etc. It wasn't all worthless. And, part of the answer to this is the same as the answer below: Mercury Hat posted:Throwing away stuff What I did was I set up a process where I work for 1 hour on whatever I can think of and just chase it as far as I can. It's a far cry from the 60 second examples, but it was productive. During the slow months at work I was doing this every workday, and during the weekends I would just plow through things if I didn't have plans. The thing is, is that once and awhile I kind of have the urge to bring an idea to completion even if I know it'll be painful. There's two reasons for this: 1) Whatever the idea is/was, seemed awesome (actually is, different thing entirely). 2) It's a good way to build more discipline. I expect if I finish the idea in my head this sketch started from it'll probably take another 20 hours of actual work mixed with some reflective periods between work time to nail down all the details for the entire scene, a couple hours to clean up lines, and however long I am willing to invest before being satisfied (or not) in coloring/shading. The real problem is it's past 10pm on Friday in Tokyo, I just got home from work, all week has been worse, and I've had about an hour to draw for the last seven days but lots of time to post on the internet as I wait for my peers and/or customers to do their jobs at work. As is the life of being an engineer in a country with no engineers. I'll do some drawing this weekend.
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Aug 7, 2015 15:28
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maybe do some charcoal drawings? I know this is the digital art thread, but you can draw with a really loose grip with charcoal and that might be a bit easier for you, and you can transfer that looseness into your digital stuff afterwards keep at it!
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Aug 8, 2015 01:46
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Troposphere posted:maybe do some charcoal drawings? I know this is the digital art thread, but you can draw with a really loose grip with charcoal and that might be a bit easier for you, and you can transfer that looseness into your digital stuff afterwards Yeah, this is a great idea. You can also just mass stuff in, kinda ignore contours and focus on just value which might help if you have a difficult time making stable lines. It sounds like you've been an awful lot though and that sucks. I'm glad that despite it all you are sticking with it and making art, that's real dedication. If you've not read it. I'd recommend The Art Spirit. What I like about that book is Henri focuses more on thought processes and what goes into drawings/paintings mentally. Since you've hadn't had the best luck with pure technical stuff, I think maybe something in there might help since it does approach things a little bit differently. Don't get me wrong, it might not help at all but it's a nice little book and it's worth a try I think. Also, Have you ever tried other art mediums? You mentioned an artist friend comparing your process to a sculptor working in clay so I wonder if you've tried Ceramics? You might have a knack for it. Wood is another popular material, and cold work in glass(fusing/slumping) is my personal favorite for non drawing mediums. There are even tools to help with accuracy and precise cuts so having difficulty with fine motor control shouldn't be as much of an impediment. Obviously they aren't necessarily the best mediums for 2d work (though you can paint with glass dust!) they might be worth exploring. JuniperCake fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 05:51
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Oh yeah, I don't have any photos handy as I'm running errands but I do a lot of airbrush work because I have one I can work the pressure with using a rocker and my thumb. Mostly customizing airsoft guns, but some canvas stuff but not recently. Way easier. Whole arm movements work okay without contact. Sadly the Cintiq airbrush pen is a lot more effort to work.
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Aug 8, 2015 08:27
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Complete idea out, lines are not fancy. There's a handful of errors, I tried to do this one with minimal redraw. Still took most of the day.  
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Aug 15, 2015 19:30
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some recent stuff   
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Aug 15, 2015 20:49
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Smoke Poison 
President Kucinich fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 03:38
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Did this for a reddit art competition. Warning, anime lesbians. First time doing the (mostly) line-less style for a long while. Maybe it worked?
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Aug 19, 2015 23:53
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Can I have some posture/ergonomics advice for pen and tablet use? I just started working full-time (using my tablet) in addition to using it at home and the extra hours of use are making me realize that my posture is really, really crap. It's hurting me and probably limiting the level of my work in terms of line quality, etc. I'm pretty sure I've been doing it wrong all this time but I never thought to actually ask until it started to hurt. How do you guys do it?
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Aug 20, 2015 05:29
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I use a cintiq and not a tablet, but I use it as a drawing table: I also have a good full back chair. They make ergonomic arms for Laptops that should hold a regular pen tablet at a good drawing table angle.
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Aug 20, 2015 05:34
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Fangz posted:Did this for a reddit art competition. Warning, anime lesbians. more like anime tricks you into thinking they're lesbians but surprise they're straight  cute style, I think you have just enough line in there to work with the painterly style. Reina's head is a little big though
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Aug 20, 2015 07:57
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I was ok with the size of her head. They're correctly proportioned for 8-yr-old anime lesbians.
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Aug 20, 2015 10:39
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Delta Echo posted:I was ok with the size of her head. They're correctly proportioned for 8-yr-old anime lesbians. they're high schoolers and even for kyoto animation characters the proportions are pretty extreme it's an easy fix though, just elongate both of the torsos a little bit and shrink the heads anime is tricky
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Aug 20, 2015 13:22
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Made a variety of small changes, including fixing Reina's head size. Yeah, they do look rather younger than their ages in the show, but aging it up now is gonna be a pain in the butt, and maybe this works better with the more cutesy tone I'm going for. Pretend that it's some weird alternative universe.
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Aug 21, 2015 01:09
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Delta Echo posted:I was ok with the size of her head. They're correctly proportioned for 8-yr-old anime lesbians. anime is really cool
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Aug 21, 2015 01:28
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Fyadophobic posted:Can I have some posture/ergonomics advice for pen and tablet use? I just started working full-time (using my tablet) in addition to using it at home and the extra hours of use are making me realize that my posture is really, really crap. It's hurting me and probably limiting the level of my work in terms of line quality, etc. I'm pretty sure I've been doing it wrong all this time but I never thought to actually ask until it started to hurt. How do you guys do it? Get a tablet arm. If you have a 13HD you have to build your own mount, it's ridiculous, but still, get a tablet arm. They're actually called monitor arms believe it or not. Ergotron are the best if you can afford them, but even if you can't, make sure you get one with a spring loaded arm. I changed all my monitors to arms over from stands, and it feels incredible compared to hunching in the restrictive positions that still allowed me to see what I was doing. The human body isn't meant to be static, you need to move about and poo poo, which is why all ergonomic chairs worth a drat have wheels and why monitor arms are so great. Get a monitor arm. Also I have a smudge guard which is really expensive for what it is but is pretty great for letting you do smoother strokes over your screen. EDIT: If you don't have a tablet-monitor, get a monitor arm anyway, it'll let you sit in more poses. You can probably get mini-drawing tables to put your tablet on or something. The best solution ultimately depends on your set-up. Chairs are important too. Invest in a good one if you can afford it, or at least see what chairs you have in your house. I have a really lovely full back chair that I have to keep pulling the back up because it's poo poo, but I also have a deck chair and a garden chair that I use to relax in later on, or sometimes when I'm sculpting or something. The monitor arms lets me sit in these chairs while having the monitor directly eye level, I really don't know how people work without monitor arms any more. curse of flubber fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 01:30
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Megaspel posted:Get a tablet arm. Seconding this. I've been using an arm for a month now and my back went from feeling like someone had been punching me in the spine frequently to normal existing aches and pains. Bonus skeleton points if you get a comfy work chair and a foot stool--I can lean against the back of the chair with my back straight (I used to sit on the edge of my chair and hunch over like an idiot) and then keep my legs elevated, which is something I got used to doing when I was super pregnant and find keeps my legs from falling asleep when working for long stretches of time. From there, I can pull my yiynova pretty much right up to my face if I need to. My only recommendation is that if you'reusing a hollow ikea desk instead of a solid wood desk is to buy a pack of shims. I have an ikea desk and the weight of my tablet and the arm is enough that the c-clam style base of the arm is compressing the cheap wood a little. Some wooden shims ought to reinforce and curb that. Also be very careful about what sort of weight the arm says it can handle. Wacom/Yiynova/whoever else you got your tablet monitor from should have clear product weights on their websites. the last thing you want is to wake up to a broken arm and subsequently broken tablet.
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Aug 26, 2015 19:00
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Oh yeah, I'm in a shoddily converted attic, and my main monitor is clamped to the side table things which are slowly getting prised off by the weird of the monitor. Eventually the monitor will fall straight on me, but I'm hoping I'll be able to move out before then.
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Aug 27, 2015 14:57
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I recently started using Inkscape for the first time, and this Oaktopus tree has been my first real project using the program. I feel like it's still missing something, but I'm not really sure what else to do with it. I'd love to get some feedback.
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Sep 1, 2015 09:01
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An old one for L5R that finally got published. 
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Sep 1, 2015 13:45
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Hell yeah Beezlebub, you're invited to my birthday party My mom's hiring a clown and everything, gonna be sick
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Sep 2, 2015 04:06
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I do like clowns! Cross-post from the daily thread. An amphiptere for the Southlands Bestiary by Kobold Press. 
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Sep 3, 2015 02:39
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This is great; you are great.
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Sep 3, 2015 13:35
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