Thank you so much everyone for the kind words and the feedback. They are very much appreciated. I practice hard each day and making these characters was juggling many skills at once for me. I found it very challenging.
@xdarts @hasnatirfan150 @alwaysneedsleep Thank you so much for the kind words!
@SweetPastelPeach Thank you very much for the feedback! I will definitely take a look at the anatomy issues, thank you for pointing them out! I tried very hard to make the pose less stiff but I agree it came out lifeless as well. I pushed her hips super far on the gesture drawing but I think with the dress it doesn't translate well. I will have to explore some other options in the future. Do you have any suggestions? I think also the shoulders make it stiff as well. I have quite a great deal of difficulty with shoes in general, I actively avoided putting them in most of these characters because of that. But I think I need to do the opposite and push through my weaknesses!
@luke.buersgens Thank you very much for this suggestion! I will definitely be doing this! I definitely struggle with hands, arms and feet and faces, and well honestly I struggle with just about every part of this lol. I just brute force through most of these issues with putting a ton of time into them. I really want to decrease my time from starting the piece to having finished line art. The amount of time is really, really high for me to get there. So this week I am going back and focusing on the basics of figure drawing. I'm working on modifying my mannequin to help see the objects in 3d more. I think honestly the biggest time sink for me is the clothing and hair and figuring out the figure under clothed references. I think doing this exercise you suggested will be quite helpful in this regard! Thank you so much for the feedback and the kind words!
@Xybb Thank you so much for the advice Sascha! I really appreciate it. I agree with you, I believe also the lighting is my weakest stage as well. I do have a question for you in terms of strategy tackling the shading and lighting. What I have been doing is thinking about my light before hand, and then when I shade a leg like a cylinder, I shade lets say the sides, but leave the middle of the cylinder empty for the light. But after working on these I think that's probably not correct. Do you recommend just shading a cylinder in a basic shading manner and then let the light layer do the work?
I agree with the colors of the shadows as well. I will try to warm them up for the next ones. Thank you for pointing that out. Marc suggested that I do the shadows on a multiply layer and then change the colors of them afterwards. But with you pointing this out I can see that I am going to dark on my shadow layer in general. I think I need to play with this step more as I also feel like they are just feeling to dark and dead. He also suggested adding a gradient map to the shadows which I have not done yet as well.
In terms of the lighting, I'm mostly just fumbling around with trial and error. I don't have a real strategy or plan at this time yet. I paint with white on a hard light layer and change its color afterword's per Marcs suggestion. I definitely need to take a look at how others tackle this phase for sure, and the interaction over the shadow layer.
In general for me the biggest struggle these two weeks were getting to the line art, and the shading. I had a lot of trouble working on a multiply layer for the last 3 characters as I was having a lot of difficulties making the shading gradients smooth. I had been doing my blending using a soft brush mostly previously with the eye dropper tool, which doesn't work on a multiply layer for me since it just makes one color darker and darker. So on the last three of these I did all of the blending on the multiply layer with a smudge brush. Truthfully I don't enjoy using the smudge brush but I am not sure how else to blend in the multiply mode.
I really want to up the quality of my line weight as well and I did try quite hard on the line weight but I don't think it translated well. Anyways at this point I'm just rambling! Thank you all so much for the kind words and the feedback. It means a lot to me because I was feeling a bit that my progress had been slow for the past two weeks, especially for the amount of time that I put in. So thank you all for that!
