Okay, partner. Draw!

Okay, so I apparently do a lot of portraits of my friends, which I won't post here, so you're stuck with these. This one I made about two years ago I think. If you know who this is I will love you forever.

Anatomy and perspective are little wonky, but I made as a distraction from my final exams in highschool in like ten minutes, so considering that I don't think it's all that bad.

I also did a couple of fanarts for Game of Thrones, because I'm a loser like that.


The next is the last one I made (like 5 months ago, which makes me kinda sad). I usually do people but I wanted to try something different. I went to Luxembourg with my dad and got all inspired by the pretty castles so I made this one.

I really dislike how the forest turned out, but since it's one of my first landscapes it's... not that bad.

Edit: Wow, these are really big. I've never used imgur before, any way to get them a little smaller? Never mind, fixed it.

Those are all really good!
On imgur you can edit your images (there's a little icon if you hover over it in images).

Thanks (for the compliment and the help). I'd already figured it out, imgur is pretty easy to use even if you're a moron.

I like your 3rd one much better than the other two. You have an eye that pays better attention to detail when zoomed in. That type of pen scribble is good for a drawing with that type of minute detail.

I think that's probably in direct relation with the amount of time I put into it (and also the progress I made since the other two are a little older). But I think I'll try another landscape thingy for my next project, since I like venturing outside of my comfort zone every once in a while. I'll keep your advice in mind.

You should not dislike that forest. It's neat. Gorey-esque.

Also to add to what Pogo said: your linework in the landscape is much less tentative than in the other drawings. You're obviously thinking more clearly about form when you're drawing the texture of that cliffside, for example. Like the base of the tower, where the masonry sort of organically twists out of the living rock--it doesn't make a lot of sense, but it looks interesting and purposeful, which is usually more important than making sense anyway.

OH MY GOD. That's like, the biggest compliment ever because Gorey is my hero and sort of not so secretely the style that inspires me the most.

Now I'm loving this thread even more because this is really constructive. I have the next two weeks off so I'll be trying some more stuff and seeing if anything good rolls out.

Now that I'm in-between jobs I have some more free time on my hands. I've gone back to my comic, The Occult, and started doing some concept art for characters.

This is the scanned line drawing of Asmodeus and I'm currently colouring it with ArtRage.

Yeah, I think that's the key.

I've been woefullly unproductive since this thread went away last time. I haven't had a lot of free time, and what I have had I've spent on gaming. I've been working on some architecture stuff lately, but it's taking a while to get moving.

In the meantime, I did get this awesome book for myself for Christmas:
Figure Drawing for All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis

It's a nice big hardback book that will look great on your shelf. And in addition, it's filled with very useful things. There is a bunch of basic anatomy information, lots of useful charts and diagrams (you can see a couple of them in the Amazon images), and it's all written in a straightforward and personable style. I recommend it to everybody.

Wow, a lot of these look really good. I have a couple of scribbles, nothing really original.


Concept art for a 4X RPG that may be too ambitious for me to reasonably pursue. May put up more if there's interest.


Incidentally, this is how I imagine deep sea creatures under the UK and Australia behave every tea time.

No formal training, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm hitting a skill cap due to that since I haven't seen much improvement. Like Autumnflame, I've been working almost exclusively with a tablet since I started drawing, and working on paper now feels really strange since I can't get used to seeing my hands as I work.

I second aaron's Andrew Loomis recommendation. Those classics are darn near required reading for perspective and human anatomy. I'm so glad they're back in print. A few years back when I tried to buy one, they were all out of print and the few remaining copies were going for hundreds of dollars.

how does everyone manage to get such clean lines?

I've got the worst case of sketch lines. When I try to get rid of it (digitally), it looks all fake and soulless. ;A;

Dude what the FUCK that is hilarious and awesome


It's also technical since you picked a single strong light source and worked it really well (and the second weaker source).

The simple trick I use with Paint is the eraser thing. If the picture looks too soulless, I'll add some color. For example, the eyes in this one I call "Skype Surprise":

For a serious answer: don't bother. If you're sketching, just don't worry about it. Leaving them in there is like showing your work in math. Those of us who are interested like to see the process.

If you're working towards something finished, there are a couple things you can do. One is, obviously, sketch really lightly. Your pencil should barely touch the page. And don't put much detail in--you can work that out later. If you need to try a few iterations of something to get it right, sketch on a pad next to your drawing until you've sorted it out. Sketching for a finished piece (like under a painting) should be about guidelines and overall massing, just to remember what goes where. And of course, if your finished piece is finished enough you'll never see them anyway. My Nick Cave drawing up there started with guidelines and sketching all over the place, but you can't see it under all the charcoal.

If you're working on more cartoonish or comic sorts of things where covering everything up might not be possible, just learn to redraw. Your sketch is your practice run. Get everything worked out, then redraw it cleaner. Get some tracing paper and trace that sketch. Or if you don't feel like doing that, try sketching with blue lead. It doesn't reproduce well, and scanners used to not pick it up at all but they've gotten better at it. It also doesn't erase well on paper, so be aware of that. Once you get into Photoshop or whatever, though, it's a piece of cake to just take out all the blue. But I agree--taking sketch lines out of a sketch digitally often doesn't look right. Largely because when you were working on it your brain was figuring in those sketch lines as part of the composition, and when they're gone it looks like something is missing.

One thing I used to do in college for hardline drawings on big presentation boards was to draw everything in pencil, then finish it in ink. Once that's done you can just rub an eraser all over the thing as much as you want to get rid of any stray pencil lines, and your ink is just fine. You might have to touch it up if you've been a little too vigorous with your eraser, but that's no big deal.

TL;DR: There are lots of things to do, and all of them take practice. Just figure out what works for you. There's no magic to it.

I just use a pen and go over it...

Thanks! It's a "just for fun" piece that I decided to throw together recently, and I'm fairly happy with how the lighting turned out.

Don't know if you're referring to something I did, since I have nasty sketch lines everywhere. But if so, cleaning up sketch lines used to result in redrawing everything. Now, I just end up fixing the worst offenders and having bicubic interpolation take care of the rest. I work in at least at 4000 x 3000, and a lot of blemishes get left out once you resize it down to something sane.

As for the fake and soulless part, I find something I make can end up looking like that if I don't vary line width. Without coloring, a reasonably complex sketch with constant line width ends up looking like a mess of lines without a focal point. But yeah, what aaron said too can be the culprit. When I'm sketching without the intent to color, some of the sketch lines are part of the shading and cannot be removed without making it look flat.

This is an example:

I tried adding shading (obviously not on here) and it doesn't look any less...off.
original here

Doing my part to keep this thread alive! Here's a sketch of Mr. Italo Calvino:




And here is a quick sketch from right before bed last night, of the late, great, Louis Kahn:

This is a birthday card I made. My philosophy is the shittier the drawing the more endearing it is and so all my work is very endearing.



This drawing is new. It is dedicated to everyone.

That's a pretty good PBR can. I think you should make that corner picture your avatar.

done

I recently made my way through the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, which I highly recommend to everyone. This seemed appropriate for last night's sketch:

I edited a thing, and felt like sharing because of pretty reasons.


But more importantly. Drawing things! Sketch lines are all that I am TT^TT

Also. I don't really have a grasp of how things work, in terms of faces and bones underneath, proportions. I am however, pretty decent at making out well enough when drawing over or tracing. So here's to more practicing, especially pencil to paper because tablets....ehhh don't want to go borrowing the trouble of tablets, esp. with the bamboo I have being so not under my control.

Trying to keep myself dedicated to this one image thing m'working on. So cheyo~

Also, have a shoddily scribbled sketch.

I would post the things I've been drawing, but they're all animu in nature and I don't really think it's worth posting. ;A;
YOU'LL SEE, I'LL POST SOMETHING COOL SOON. SO COOL, YOU'LL BE LIKE "WOW. THAT'S SO COOL."
y-you'll see...

I understand not feeling like you have anything worth sharing. I certainly don't post every little sketch I do, and some of them I tear up and throw in the garbage. But I hope nobody is thinking of this thread as some sort of competition or that they have to draw something "good enough" to qualify for posting. I mean, if you want to participate, just post your work. Get some feedback. I think this has proved to be a pretty safe space for constructive criticism--nobody is just going to shit all over your work unless you ask them to. I'm no fan of anime stuff personally (as should be evident from my own posts), but who cares. That people keep drawing and posting in this thread is more important to me than what they draw, to be honest.

I know my artistic skills are unnerving, but nobody should avoid posting their art because they feel inadequate. It took me years of hard work to attain this level of ability.

What better way to improve than to get honest feedback from people in a supportive environment?

This thread excites me in innumerable ways.

Most of what I draw is ridiculous Homestuck fanart and considering that brokenforum is where I like to pretend to be an adult, I might have to limit what I post to reduce embarrassment to everyone involved.

Anyway, this was my birthday/christmas present for Ebly last month. I don't know how to scan watercolours, though.


And uh, this was a picture I drew for a story that my friend's writing.

I'm still trying to shake a lot of habits from animu influences, which floated into my drawings at the tender age of 12. It's not a great idea to try to learn anatomy from Fruits Basket, let me tell you (and I've noticed several problems in the above picture since I finished it. Such is life).

I'll try to get some of my recent life drawing sketches up when I have a camera available!

PS: Kawaii shipping picture for another christmas present, and fiddling with colours while drawing the exact same character I almost literally always draw.

i tried.
confession: lopunny is my favorite pokemon.

It's about as big a pain in the ass as scanning colored pencil.

So I saw a pose and I was like "wow, I wanna do that pose" and so I tried.



Original size here.

someone take this tablet away from me i'm possessed

original

A simplification of my weekend. Cousin got married. Ceremony was more conservatively Christian than anyone on my side of the family was expecting so we go to the bar a little quicker.

Open bar --> whiskey till close.

A picture.


Signed it as Raife so it'll sell for more.

Oh my god it's all so clear now. And dude... why you been holding out??

MulMizu and others - out of curiousity, what software / peripherals are you using for drawing digitally?

I haven't done more than idle doodling in probably a decade or so, and I should really try and knock the rust off. Drawing was the first creative thing I remember pursuing as a kid - before writing, before music, even before ballet.

I use a Bamboo tablet and Painttool Sai.
For more time-intensive things, I use Photoshop CS5 (i think).

Man, I hate when that happens and there isn't a bar to go to.

SuperJay Oi, I don't share my shrooms. And actually lolno, only thing I've smoked are cigars. So, yeah.

I also use Bamboo. And then like, paint.net or FireAlpaca.

You'd generally eat mushrooms. If you're smoking them, something's gone horribly wrong somewhere along the way :)

Neat. My brother uses Wacom tablets at work, but I've never had one. Probably a bit too much of an investment just to try and rekindle and old hobby, so I'll probably start the old-fashioned way first.