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Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Shinmera posted:

This is pretty embarrassing for me, but here goes anyway: I'd like to ask if anyone has some feedback about my style -- what you dislike and like about it, and if there's anything that confuses you or if you have any suggestions for improvements. I'm aware that style is something very personal, but I often get the feeling that I'm stuck in my own head too much, so I hope to get some new perspectives on things by hearing what others have to say about it.

If you're interested in lending a hand, an easy way to browse through my stuff is here. Also of interest might be this, which is an overview of my style development over the past few years.

I’ll say the 2 biggest things I notice that I think you would benefit from are varying your line width more (like it doesn’t look like you change it at all throughout one drawing) and varying up the face and body shapes of the people you draw, there’s a lot of same face going on throughout your drawings and it seems especially noticeable since you don’t define a lot of makeup or color change within their faces. I won’t say that the more flat, simple colors are bad because it’s a legit stylistic choice and when done well can look very good but I would maybe try to use more nuanced color schemes, some of the colors you pick feel a little default color swatch-y, not like ms paint colors bad or anything but just feels like you could make slightly more interesting choices.

Also that rainbow robot is cool

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Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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I'm trying to get better at making very clean, designer-ly drawings I guess. They take a long time

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Drew this during Garfield vids and forgot about it till just now



Don’t full-size it it’s huge, getting images made in clip studio on the iPad into a postable format here is a loving trial so I don’t wanna do it again just to resize it

dupersaurus posted:

Do you guys have favorite prompt sources?

Draw your favorite video game character making out with your favorite singer

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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ThePlague-Daemon posted:

Didn't do much new today, just went back and built on yesterday's stuff.





The landscape stuff is fun, I just need to put in more effort.

That's good spiky guy

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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ThePlague-Daemon posted:

I think I've reached the point where it's time to stop and move on.



cool

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Is that Mae with a crop top and abs

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Sharpest Crayon posted:

Approximately how cold and dead would your fingers need to be before I could pry harem-pants lizardpeeps from them?
(because I love them)

Harem pants are a good choice for reptile dudes cause of big tail

I know this cause I’m doing several pages of sketches for a reptile lady character and she is also wearing harem pants. Might post when I’m at a real computer

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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doing more pretending im a character designer. I dunno what her shirt is supposed to be it looks like a kevlar halter top or something






I got in this really stupid habit of thinking that if you drew one character a bunch it was bad cause you were just being self indulgent or doing comfort zone drawings or something, which is bad cause like............. that's how you learn how to draw something

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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thanks lol I'm always afraid that the more actually emotive I make a drawing the uglier and more off model it is so I end up doing a lot of stern 3/4 grumpy faces

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Sharpest Crayon posted:

IKR!? AND the examples posted by TheMostFrench and Wowporn, how does this stuff keep popping up? I can't remember anyone ever telling me that it's not real art if there's outlines on it, but drat if that isn't stuck in my head.
See also: you're not a good artist unless you know how to draw/paint anything and everything.

I don't know if this was just something I wrongly interpreted but it felt like a lot of teachers, older artists etc. in grade school made it sound like specializing was bad and that to be good you had to have experience drawing everything that existed to some degree, like if you were good enough and learned enough you wouldn't need to look at real things cause you'd just sorta know how to draw anything intuitively already. Then in college everyone says never draw fanart or self indulgent stuff you were either working on a 6 hour life drawing of orange peels on some lady's nude body or you were doing designs for some larger conceptual project or something (it doesn't help that my college treated every singe student like they were trying to become an independent visionary making some high art grand opus, rather than just like people who wanted to get really good at a specific set of skills so a studio would hire them. I really wish they would adjust to people with different priorities)

I frequently think that people who spent like 12 years very passionately illustrating their warrior cats fanfiction or w/e throughout adolescence end up honing their skills better cause they just whole heartedly worked at the thing they liked most for thousands of hours instead of caring about being some perfectly well rounded art luminary

that was a weird tangent so have this sketch I never scanned but just found under a bowl of cereal

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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School definitely gave me a good foundation of basic art skills but I get frustrated that I never actually got good enough at one thing to qualify for a professional level anything, after some time away I'm rejiggering my portfolio and I'm more confident now I'll actually have the skills to do something

I think if I had gone to school but not cared about actually graduating/fulfilling the degree I could have cut the fat with some of the non major related requirements (I will never ever make another clay pot) and taken more specialized classes in the couple things I was most interested in and gotten the best parts of both

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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that's a good rocko's modern life lookin rear end fish

I'm at that point again where I need to consider making an actual portfolio site to show to employers, but I am completely illiterate when it comes to making sites, trying to understand html, etc. so I am trying to get recommendations for the most brain dead easy way to make a portfolio site. The last time I tried making a wordpress site it went badly and I abandoned it. Stuff like Wix sounds like maybe it's easy enough for me to wrap my mind around? Want to apply to an open position soon so would be cool if I can get it finally figured out

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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I'm so loving rusty at this god



took me like 2 hours, I'd like to be able to do it slightly better in half that time, I have forsaken this kind of practice for way too long

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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DrGonzo90 posted:

I just finished a beginner's watercolor painting class, this is the piece i felt came out the best



Criticism welcome, especially with how to get depth on the door (it looks so flat) and how to make the flowers go in front of the door without getting muddied up (mask?) but be gentle, this is the first art class I've done since I was 12 years old :ohdear:

I think the biggest thing I would focus on would be varying the sizes and patterns of the leaves more, look at on the left side how the leaves start out larger and less evenly spread out near the top and get smaller and less clumped together as they come down. Layering things is harder, watercolor is a tricky unforgiving mofo when it comes to that, you kinda have to start with the things in the foreground and work back, which is the opposite of how other kinds of painting work so it's not very intuitive. I'm no good at watercolor so take that with a grain of salt.

This head is kinda creepy and generic looking, but I mostly just made it to use as a mannequin for some different hairstyles (why the top/sides of the head aren't really shaded) so it's good enough for that

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Vermain posted:

It might seem somewhat inconsequential, but ensuring that the planes on the mannequin are good - especially on the top/sides - is important for convincing-looking hairstyles. You don't even have to shade them, necessarily; you can use cross-contour lines or edge indicators to show the various plane changes. The reason this is important is the principle of having a solid framework to hang the hair on. Hair naturally follows the planes of the head, and is usually drawn in large chunks or clusters, so being able to "see" where the hair is going to turn down, what could cause changes in its course, how it relates in terms of its position to the head (if you're doing something like spiked hair, bangs, etc.).

I did a quick sketch based on your image to show what I mean:



Mapping out the side plane of the head especially makes it easier to place hair on top of the mannequin without too much fiddling or worrying about the shape, since you can compare the planes of the hair to the planes of your mannequin to more easily determine flow:



I say this only because I've learned the hard way that spending a bit of time on making the rougher stuff look good will save a lot of time later on when it comes to making the finished stuff look good. It doesn't have to be a Picasso (and it definitely shouldn't if all you're doing with the piece is some concept art), but making sure you've got that good framework to work off of will make your life a lot easier in the long run.

Yeah that's a good point, I have the hairline in the sketch layer still but I'll have all that stuff in the sketch for each hairstyle. I'm not amazing at drawing heads but I have a lot of experience styling weird hair so I hope it translates to this a little.

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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yall might wanna timg that

did some sketches of grace jones, she's great but like if you're trying to practice real looking humans maybe pick someone else




other doodles, the one on the middle left is my favorite

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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TheMostFrench posted:

Discussion wise, I've been doing a live drawing class where the lecturer tells us not to leave out the head or face because it's a form of identity erasure (we've also been discussing the history of nudes and how classical nudes were oppressive to women), and will mark you down if you just submit body sections. Has anyone else ever encountered this? What do you think? It seems like the intention is to train us to consider the meaning behind every mark we make, or to try and rise above historical ideals.

My life drawing professor told us not to detail the face cause it wasn’t the focus of what we were doing, which I mostly agree with. It is true that women were poo poo on by art attitude (in addition to ya know literally everything else ever) and being forced to acknowledge the identity of who you’re drawing is a good idea, but unfortunately I think most of the time the reality of how precious your time is with a live model and how much you’re paying for the class will make most want to skip it. You should at least always keep in the head shape though.

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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That's one of the main reasons I sketch in bright turquoise even when I'm doing it digitally so if I gently caress up and I need to select it out from the black it's really easy.


I stopped working on this for forever, did all the actual hair today........ eh. I feel like I am in a very awkward spot where I should have either left it all looser or more stylized or something, or I should have used more reference and tried to make it actually look real. I feel like I get pulled between those two things a lot when I go to actually try to paint/render something.




Internet Kraken posted:



Working on one last piece for Mermay. Wanted to do some more traditional mermaids with a lot of different body designs in one picture. Gonna take forever to finish but I'm kind of sort of enjoying it.

Anatomy is loving hard to grasp even for fictional creatures but I don't see anyway to learn it other than force myself to keep drawing stuff I'm not comfortable with.

You just gotta sketch like a thousand skeletons, then a thousand skeletons with meat and skin on them, and then a thousand with clothing also cause seeing clothes wrap around a body does actually teach you things about how bodies work(it is weird how revelatory it was for me seeing people wearing cargo shorts and thinking 'oh hey the shorts sit flush with the back of their leg and all the excess in the leg opening is in the front because of the way that legs angle backwards as they go down'). Not that I'm an expert but doing those things at least got me started on the right path

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Scoss posted:

This is a cool Samurai Heron! The head and upper body are well designed and looking pretty cool, but I would advise a little caution on the body interior. Things are becoming a little bit busy and confused near the unsheathed portion of the blade, some of the 'energy fwoosh' splurting out of the sword is even sort of making a tangent with the vertical design on the costume. I would consider simplifying some of the shape design on the cloth and quieting down the value contrast while pushing the value separation between the hands/sword and the body itself, in service of helping to make this spatial difference unmistakable.

Advice like this is so helpful cause I feel like every time I draw something the first pass has like 50 tangents and things with similar values overlapping that I need to slowly smoodge around until it looks okay

e that was not my drawing but I always appreciate advice like this so I wanted to point it out

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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What process do you use to add color? Anytime I try painting something in greyscale and adding color afterwards I'm never very happy with how the colors look, but I always get the values so much better so I wished it worked out more.

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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The last time I tried it it definitely helped to change it from greyscale to monochromatic brown or something first to make it a little less washed out but it still felt like I wasn’t getting the range of colors that I wanted. Gradient maps maybe if you’re in photoshop?

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Yeah that part is why it ends up feeling like I'm just painting it all over again to get the hues right, it always looks so dead of I don't do that part.

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Argue posted:

Drawn from reference



My brain can’t see this and not see sephiroth’s long rear end sword just out of frame to the upper left

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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I like never draw backs and when I do I remember I don’t know a drat thing about back muscles

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Argue posted:

Enjoy (but be sure to check out the basics on gesture and figure drawing and such first, if you aren't already aware of those)

If I remember right there’s a book by the same/similar name as that video that’s also pretty good. I have experience with figure drawing but the back and the forearms I think are the areas I’ve spent the least time drawing so I’m just dumb as hell at drawing them.

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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hello I'm def not doing inktober cause I am too loving slow at art to do that so I'm just back on more of this bullshit again

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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This one real cool

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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mae good

Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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I hope you sell a lot of paintings cause I feel like your stuff would clean up at a lot of gallery/auction kinda things

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Wowporn
May 31, 2012

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Al! posted:

lol that's great






This is def the best one so far in my imho

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