Post your sketches here!

[CelesJessa]

Originally Posted by Khael!

Oh God yes, it is skull-crushingly time consuming to do things that way. Worth it in the end. I'm still developing an order of steps that makes it go faster myself - That's why most of the art I post is only loosely coloured and 'unfinished' at times. (CJ FEEL FREE TO HELP US HERE. INSERT SMILEY FACE.) Fastest method of colouring without outlines seems to be to use acrylics and just paint the thing in real life overtop the original sketch.

MY METHOD. (I redid the skin of hte snake picture in a few minutes to take these pictures, as I did snake pretty much on only a few layers, so I can't go back and take good in-progress type pictures... so it's worse than when I did it for real!)

Also I did that in, like, 15 minutes so it shows that it can be done rather quickly (even though that was the junky quick version, it's not TOO bad.) but I also am notorious for being fast at drawing. XD

CJ I love your colouring skills so much I hate you with mad jealousy but then the hate turned back into love. What the hell! The jealousy might be marshmallows now, I don't even know anymore. I still have this teeny thought his hair should be a bit shinier where the light hits it but I don't know if that would look good or not. :P

Thank ya! (And thank ya Bluestar too!) Snake can't afford shiny hair, he will be spitted! But yeah, the hair was a pain in mah butt.

Originally Posted by Corel

Edit: That first guy CelesJessa has some killer lats! Oh yes.

You know it!


CRITS:
TDK - That is looking a lot better than your original one. It's always nice to redo an old picture and see how much you've improved.

Corel - very cool. Working on the facebook painting thing again?

Blue - I quite like the little attacker one.

[Corel]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

CJ, that picture is amazing by the way. Batgirl, that Deadpool is comic-worthy. TDK, Crack The Sky is much better now that the buildings have stayed put. Corel, "I'll do my crying in the rain?"

I believe the Deadpool is from one of the Comic Covers, one of my favourite ones if I recall!

And he's not crying, he's shedding weakness from his eyes!

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

You guys seriously make me wish I had actual drawing talent.

Aaah, no such thing as drawing talent! Tis all hard work. Sit down for a few solid weeks and read up on exercise, tutorial and practise practise practise and you will see dramatic improvements in your drawing.

Originally Posted by CelesJessa

Corel - very cool. Working on the facebook painting thing again?

Nooo, was actually an older one I scraped up for I felt I wasn't contributing enough to this thread. I really should do some more soon.

..If I end up drawing a bear I will throw myself into the chasm cursing TDK with my last bitter breathe.

[Savage Thinking]

[TDK]

Originally Posted by Corel

..If I end up drawing a bear I will throw myself into the chasm cursing TDK with my last bitter breathe.

Bears for the bear god!

[Doc ock rokc]

No Anime crossovers for the japan gods & video game gods

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Corel

Aaah, no such thing as drawing talent! Tis all hard work. Sit down for a few solid weeks and read up on exercise, tutorial and practise practise practise and you will see dramatic improvements in your drawing.

Well, to elaborate on that, it's not that I lack an artistic eye or anything. Given enough time, I CAN produce a work I'm happy with. However, I suffer from a mite of clinical lack of fine motor coordination. To put it this way, to make what I see in my mind is a painstaking process of sketching, erasing, re-sketching, sketching over my sketching until I have a wide line that contains the desired curve that I can then erase from the outside in for the desired result, obsessing, darkening, erasing, re-doing what I messed up, and ultimately coming out with a product that has varying degrees of quality throughout, but at least has the shape I want, and maybe scanning it in so I can carefully ink it by hand with splines to produce the final product in a form that I can then cut away from a paper that's likely blotched up from all the erasing and lines that my scanner didn't pick up.

All told, I might work on a sketch for weeks before the lines are presentable as a finished product of art. If a sketch is truly important to me, it will eventually reach that state. But the last true piece of art I ever came out with was produced years ago. Most of what's happened since then have been costume designs and facial art, but rarely a combination of a head and body, because I'm not coordinated enough to draw fine facial features on that small a level.

To put it in perspective, my average facial design is roughly 2 inches from crown to jaw, where my average costume design is maybe 4 from shoulder to sole. It's easy to just say to draw the body big to match the head, but at that point, my ability to accurately and effectively draw the costume breaks down and I run out of paper. That's not to say I can't draw HEADS on my bodies, but I have issues adding anything but the nose to the face with my current level of ability.

In terms of anatomy, I'm pretty happy with my work, all told. And the speed at which I can produce a work I'm happy with is improving. It used to take me almost a month for pieces that were really important to me, but I had more time back then. It's not that I'll never get better so much as it's a slow process. I've managed to double my typing speed in the past few years of being on the Internet, which is a marked improvement from what I started with. I'm not a traditional typist, but at least I've gotten faster. The same goes for my art. I'm finding that provided with a good supply of sharp pencils, I can usually produce a basic outline in a matter of minutes and can then spend the rest of my time on refining and improving what I have. Sort of like the 80/20 rule. XD



Edit: This is to say I can produce a standing pose in a reasonable amount of time at this point. I've gotten very good at drawing standing bodies, but my repertoire of more dynamic poses is limited to a certain few I've used enough to have practiced up, such as a backwards jump that I drew a lot in high school. Like I said, a process.

[Savage Thinking]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

To put it in perspective, my average facial design is roughly 2 inches from crown to jaw, where my average costume design is maybe 4 from shoulder to sole. It's easy to just say to draw the body big to match the head, but at that point, my ability to accurately and effectively draw the costume breaks down and I run out of paper. That's not to say I can't draw HEADS on my bodies, but I have issues adding anything but the nose to the face with my current level of ability.

Well, if you ever do decide to draw again, then I'd recommend just working on drawing a close up of whatever you find hard to do. For example, hands. Who doesn't hate them? I remember sitting in school and doodling nothing but gigantic hands in numerous positions.

I mean, when you try to draw an entire figure, you might seem a bit cramped at times, but when you try to draw, say, just a face or just a torso, 8 1/2 by 11 is a lot of space.

[bluestarultor]

Well, this is one I did back in high school.



Looking back at it, I made some pretty common beginner's mistakes, like with over-detailing the pants and a bit of funkiness with the anatomy, but it's one of my works that I'm actually quite happy with from that period.

What I really keep coming back to is actually how happy I am with the front hand. It's hard to tell on this scan, but the position I was going for was a sign language A, so I used my own hand (and crazy flexibility XD) as a reference. If you could see it better, you'd also have a better time seeing that the tip of the thumb actually extends past the knuckles of the fingers like it does on a real hand in that position. I'm also pretty happy with the wings. Even though they don't have the shape of the real thing, I put a ton of effort into the feathers and can say I'm happy with how at least those turned out. A common mistake I avoided was that people often don't put enough space between the big ones. Really, most of the issues with the wings could be remedied by changing the lines of the upper edges.



The honest truth, though, is that this one is never going to be modified. Basically, I have a notebook, a really old one, that I pretty much hold sacred. The paper, for some reason, got aged in a way that made it erase perfectly cleanly, and after finding it and some of my old work again, I decided that with its limited number of pages (not that there aren't a lot left, but it's not infinite), that I was going to save it for those really special things that came along that I'd put as much work into doing as I did with this one. It's been quite a while since I've had any opportunity to add to it. But the things in there are basically there to stay. It's all stuff that was really important to me at the time, and I don't think it's fair to myself to undermine that by going in and changing things and risking screwing up what sometimes amounted to over a month of work and a finished product I was finally happy with.

Yeah, who'd have thunk? Blue's sentimental. XD

[Savage Thinking]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

The honest truth, though, is that this one is never going to be modified. Basically, I have a notebook, a really old one, that I pretty much hold sacred.

Man, I'm envious if only for the fact that whenever I look at something I did long ago, I always mark it as trash and can't bother looking at it without getting embarrassed.

Oh, and I hope you don't mind if I scribbled all over your sketch. I know you're not gonna change it, but seeing as you've pretty much covered a lot in terms of critiquing, it'd be easier if I used a visual instead.

Didn't feel like doing the wings in real detail as it's kinda painstaking (and I just drew the basic figure), but reason I did it is for future reference and it saved me like a paragraph or two of text.

[CelesJessa]

Savage Thinking - That picture scares me deeply (the one you posted earlier)

And Blue, I never fix anything I've done in the past. Once I'm done with a picture, I'm done pretty much done. An important thing I think it the ability to be ableto say "I'm done" and move on instead of continuously going back to a piece.

I can't stop drawing Metal Gear stuff.