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Okay trying to get back on a schedule now. Over this past week I did take a little bit of a break. Still did some studies just not as much and I have some unfinished personal stuff. I did start the torso anatomy lesson and did some practices. It is pretty tough and I’m trying to make sure I touch all bases for practices, not just the current lesson. So I’m not spending a bunch of time just doing torso anatomy practices. Still got a lot to work to do for past lessons too so figuring out a good balance is becoming more and more important and difficult. But for now I’ll post some of the torso studies and the few clothes I did. Plan on getting back on a good study schedule. And hopefully figure out a good flow to touch all bases.
This was done shortly after last post. Folds aren’t bad I don’t think but I do need to spend time just observing clothing in real life and in other media. I think it’ll do me good.Somewhere in between, no thoughts really. Most recent, I think I like this one.
These were the first torso practices I did. Don’t think I got the muscles correct exactly.Most recent, still don’t think I got them right. I’m going to review the lesson again on Wednesday when I practice.
That’s pretty much it, the torso has a ton going on and I can see this being difficult maybe. But it should be okay. Got a lot to figure out, and more to improve on. Idk how my progress as an artist in general is coming along. So I need to take some time to do more (finish) personal pieces instead of studies that way I have solid benchmarks to look at for overall skill. Anyways I hope everyone has been doing well and I hope progress is making its way to everyone. Have a good week.
These are all looking very good
keep at it!
cheers
Thank you very much!
Hello all, this last week I did a little less clothing studies but drew a little more heads. I’ll post the clothing studies and some of the torso studies.
As for torso it could be going better I think and I’ll have to keep going back to the lesson video and taking a look at how the muscles are suppose to sit. I’ll also probably try to find some good 3d models to look at. Tried to find some a while ago but didn’t find any good ones/ ones that’s worked for me. Although I didn’t look long tbf.
But that’s all for this week, hope everyone is doing well and I hope everyone’s studies are going smoothly. As always any critique or the like is welcome. Curious if I have the breast in the right spot? I think I do but I thought I’d ask regardless.
Hello all been a while again. Even though I haven’t posted in an 3 week I’ve still been practicing. Still doing trace overs for torso because I feel there is a lot of different positions coupled with angles the torso can be seen from so I’m trying to get some variety. Also I’m not just dedicating my time to just torsos like I would for other lessons. I’m doing heads more often, about twice a week instead of every once in a while. And still practicing clothes when I’m not doing heads. I mostly try to fit in a front and back view of the torso a day. I’ve been thinking to try and see where I’m at and draw the torso from memory. See if I can get some decent results. And decide if I move on to the next torso assignment from there.
Anyways I won’t post all my studies because that’d be ridiculous. I’ll post the most recent heads. And a mix of clothes and torsos.
For the heads I’ve really been trying to step away from references as of late. Mostly using them to find a position I’m not familiar with. And help with that beginning step. I’m doing a lot of experimenting currently and it feels like I’m having more success but still wading through the water. I realized not long ago that when not using a reference to find a position I tend to hover to a 3/4ths position. So that’s something I can mix up going forward. Also I’ve been meaning to get more expressions into the studies. That way I can make sure I stay familiar with how the face can change with different expressions.
Clothes have been fun to be honest. I dunno where I stand with progress. Think I’ve improved a bit since I last posted but I don’t think it’s by much. To give an idea, The box head figure is the most recent one I’ve done that’s here. I’ve also been making sure I find references for similar I’m unsure if what I’m visualizing the folds to look like are correct. Priority is making sure I keep enjoying these as much as I am. I do wanna push myself to try and get some different stuff goin. I like the types of clothes I’m doing now but I wanna expand and build upon them too. They don’t necessarily have to have a bunch more going on though.
Lastly are the torsos, I won’t say much here I’ll leave any critique to anyone else. Only thing I’ll say is i struggle a bit with the mid to lower back sometimes and the muscles behind/next to the obliques and pecs.
That’s all, sorry for the lengthy post. I won’t say much more besides thanks to anyone who takes the time to come in here and read/respond. Any critiques are welcome and I’ll do my best to apply advice given. Hope everyone is doing well and making progress. Thanks again
All good practice man.Progress is iterative, almost like evolution. You won't see much change from piece to piece. It might even seem like a downgrade at times depending on your mood, but do a quick comparison against something like a year back or more and I think the progress is much more evident.
These are pieces you posted here, and even though the right one is more of a sketch, I think you can see some significant progress!
For muscles, I think you get the general idea, which is the whole point of the exercice. To get to know the muscles exist and take it into account when you do a piece, which looks better than someone who doesn't even know they exist. I think you'll be surprised at how much it improves your next piece!
As feedback, once you finish tracing the muscles, try to hide the original potrait (hopefully you have it in a different layer), Then flip the muscles line art. I think you'll quickly see what gaps may exist, then come back and try to correct them, then retry until it looks "good" flipped. You can try to outline the body as well to help you when you hide the potrait.
Yeah you’re right, you Bring that up at a good time because the last 2 days of studies just haven’t great, just couldn’t get things down like I wanted. And lookin back at where I was, even months ago, can be helpful for the mental. Just having you bring it to my attention has actually helped so thank you!
As for the muscles, yeah I think I forgot I needed to get an idea of the muscles here and not necessarily have each fiber engrained into my memory. I’ll still stay in this exercise for a bit longer and try that tip you gave. Seems pretty useful, wish I could have thought of that sooner. I’ll see how well I can make use of it.
Hope you have a good week and thanks again.
Hello all, been a while. Hope everyone’s been doing well. Mostly did more,of the same since I last posted. Just started drawing the torso anatomy over skeletons yesterday. Over the past week though I didn’t study much. And I drew a bit but I just have some unfinished personal stuff to show for it. No pieces really involving the whole torso though. Dunno why specifically but I just couldn’t get into the mood to study/draw even though I did pick up the pen and start.
Anyways, here are the torso studies I did over the past couple days. I see I forgot to draw the trapezius on some front views and didn’t draw the collar bones either on some. Aside for, that minor thing. I think I’m getting the proportion wrong for some of the muscles, either that or the shape. I did reference some similar angles to try and help but honestly I feel I still didn’t get it. I can’t say it’s just one muscle at the moment because to be honest each one had something about them that I think I struggled a bit with. The back I’ve always felt I’ve had the muscles over the shoulder blade too large and I usually draw them last so I don’t know for sure which part of the back I’m getting wrong that’s causing that. Which leads back to the beginning of the paragraph.
The plan for now is to take time to review the lesson some more. Study references more thoroughly and obviously put some more time in to draw studies. Also putting in some time for personal pieces that have the whole torso in view that way I get some practice in while doing something that isn’t just studying. Putting the practice into some practical use i guess. That’ll be all for now as I don’t wanna have a whole essay for folks to read, not being too hard on myself as I know this isn’t what many people would consider “easy” in art. The torso has a lot to it and I did expect it to take time. Hope everyone is doing well and that your week brings success. Thanks for your time.
Hello all, hope all is well and everyone enjoyed their holidays.
I the past month has been really busy for me. So I haven’t been coming to the forum to check things out like I should. There has been some days though where pretty much all my relax time was spent playing an mmo i like a lot. Like this last weekend, I did still practice just I feel I could have allocated some more time to practice or coming here. But I ended up sitting down and getting myself back on tracks bit. After I posted last I continued putting the muscles over skeletons for a while but decided I wanted to try and see what poses I could accomplish with just some reference use and nit drawing over skeletons. so I’ll leave some of the recent ones below. Some I like some I don’t. I’m not very consistent but that’s what practice is for. I can feel the improvement though. Way back when I was doing gesture poses it was frustrating getting the torso correct but now I’m not haven’t near as hard of a time. Obviously there are some exceptions even with the head I sometimes struggle still. If anyone has any feedback to give its more than welcome and I’ll do my best to apply any critique or advice to my studies. I have been on this assignment for a while so I did decide to move onto term 4. I’ve only just watched the game prod video so no new assignments yet. Should be soon though.
I did get in some personal stuff, only about 2 pieces are what I’d consider finished and another one that’s close I think but I dont really know what to do next with it. I’ll post the 2 i finished here. If there is any advice or critique for those I’d really appreciate that. Doing full works is still foreign to me because I only ever do practices and they’re usually very rough sketches. So any help in the full finished piece area would welcome.
Hope everyone had a good start to the new year and im sure many of you will reach new heights. Thank you for your time!
Hello all, not much to show this time in quantity. Moved on last week to the rest of the arms and hands. So the follow along will be here.
Hope everyone is happy and healthy. Have a good week everyone.
Hello, hope everyone has been doing good. It’s been a while since I went and watched a lesson so I felt the need to watch the rest of the anatomy lesson and whoof. The leg man lol. A lot goin on there. 3/4s view was particularly difficult for me. The follow along is below.Here are some practices, hands are still hard sometimes, obviously not perfect. But I can feel progress which is good. As you can see I was only focusing on what anatomy classes I had done so now that I’ve watched the lower body I’ll always be incorporating it now. Unless I feel the need to work on specifics like faces, hands, etc.
Lastly I started a few pieces, finished one abandoned another and currently working on another but I don’t have many more ideas in what to do and I dont know if I wanna add color.
This one I finished.. Got the guidelines of the character and realized I was drawing something similar to a manga cover I like so I decided to reference it when I had trouble, the hand really. Guess I had it stuck in my subconscious though. I took the straight black shading of the hand and tried just using that for the a lot of the piece. More for style since I’ve seen Tite Kubo do the same for some of his art and I like his art a lot. I think I like it, I’m not going to make it an unbreakable habit though. This is the one I’m currently working on. It’s got more goin on and I want to add more. Just to add some stuff around his hands. But I dunno if it’ll be too much so I’ll see if it’s worth adding later on. I want to do something with the ellipses behind him too. But I’m not 100 percent sure what. So I’ll have to think. Also going to add ripples around the monster since it’s coming through space and I want some effect around the hole it’s coming through. Also gotta check the clothes folds and make sure they’re correct since I didn’t reference so I’m going to look around for references for that. Also wanna try something more expressive for the next character. This guy is nonchalant and cool so I think his expression is ok but just a note for the next. The third one I had a throne room scene where a king got blasted through a wall into his throne room. But I didn’t really know what to do with it anymore even though I liked where it was going. I should probably restart it but I can’t seem to get myself to do anything with it. In fact the previous two pieces were done after I stopped working on the throne room. So it’s been sitting dormant for a while.
Anyways just wanted to do a checkpoint type post again. I saw that many of you were doing pretty good in your art. It’s good to see y’all’s hard work paying off. hoping for everyone’s continued success. Until the next time, take care.
Hello all, hope everyone is doing well. Doing a progress post. So shortly after my last post I got in a pretty bad mood about my art and I was getting super frustrated. It’s was too be expected I suppose since I had just started legs and started doing full body studies. Regardless I tried slowing down, not completely stopping but I did cut down the volume of my practices and only did a little bit. I couldn’t completely stop because I did get the into the mood to draw and i don’t really like taking full on breaks because I feel lazy. But once I would start I’d end up getting frustrated so Id stop for the day to not get myself too worked up. This went on for a while like 2-3 weeks I think, I had gotten super busy with work as well during those weeks so that didn’t help. I am back on track now I think. Did some practices the past few days and was chilling through it all. I’ll post the practices from the beginning then kinda in the middle between then and now and then the most recent practices
These are the early ones, there isn’t much because of what was previously said. . These were some from last week, better and there’s a little more but I was still getting that feeling of frustration.
These were yesterday and the day before. 5/26 and 5/25. With those 2 sectioned off heads being from the weekend when I just pretty much didn’t draw at all. ( usually don’t draw much on weekends ) Not much here but if anyone has any useful tips or advice/ critiques they are welcome even though it’s been about a month since I finished up the anatomy lessons I don’t think I’m much further than where I started. I’ve noticed or at least feel like I’ve slowed down a lot. Spending a lot more time on lessons, I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily as long as I’m staying disciplined and working on improving.
Well that’s it, not much I can think of adding at the moment. I hope everyone has been seeing some progress big or small in your work. And if not hopefully the people around you can point it out for you. The pressures of succeeding can be a lot sometimes but try not to get overwhelmed. ( guess this goes for me too )
Take care everyone, till next time.
Yo, hope you're feeling better now, all of these look pretty darn good.
For the most part they have good form and gesture, if there's any feedback I would give, it would be to work on the lineart sketchiness. For the most part sketchiness is fine while... well... sketching, but once you finish the sketch, try doing more confident lines over the sketches to refine the lineart.
Keep it up man, there is definetly improvement there.
Thank you, I think I am lol. But yeah I agree, I’ve always had an issue with sketchiness. I tried to fix it for a while but slowly stopped. I do make an effort when doing bigger pieces and not just practices but it takes a while. Since I’m about to start some practices right now so I’ll do what you suggested and put some line art over the sketchy part of the practices. Build some line confidence.
Thanks a lot for the critique
Hello all, watched the Color and Light 1 class and did a few practices this week for it. About to do some more here but remembered I haven’t posted. So here I am. I don’t know how well I did with the color here. I did try to use that adobe CC palette generator but it was messing up on split screening so I opted to use procreates. And I used the split complimentary and it only gives the 3 unlike adobe cc which gives a while palette. I’m going to try to mess around with the stuff again but for now I was just using what I thought would look decent. As well as making sure to use at least the 3 colors that the color picker gave me to the best of my current abilities.
The first I know the anatomy is off and that’s the result of me not really using a reference for anything but the leg direction and by the time I noticed color was down so I decided I was going to leave it. All is pretty much bare bones besides the third and I didn’t try to add too much like light and shading because that wasn’t the point although I did start on her face and couldn’t tell if I was getting it right so I stopped. Pretty sure that shadow from her hair should cover that middle section of her brow as well but eh.
Anyways that’s all. Hope everyone is taking care of themselves. And having success in their studies. All critiques are welcome, thank you for taking the time to read these posts as always. Have a good week
Yo welcome back! For color studies I think these are fine, the only point that stands out is that though the palettes are fine and colors complement each other, there's not much distinction on the side of saturation or hue. Just like line weight draws the eye around the drawing and makes things easier to distinguish, so do values, tones and saturation for color. I personally do find these harder to manage, I don't remember how in depth Marc went over it.
Some of the exercices will ask to copy palettes from other artists, try to keep an eye not only for the color tone, but for some of the other values as well and how they affect your perception of the piece.
Hmmmm, I think I understand. So my range of greys/ saturation should be more diverse? For example in the last practice maybe upping the saturation on the corset piece and the gem as well as her hair? ( although I don’t know if i should have lowered saturation in any places for that practice ). Also if I had something with more presence I’d want to make it higher saturation and make it a bit brighter in order to bring some attention to it? Sorry if it seems like I’m not getting it. (potentially because im not) i had some more thoughts but i forgot them because my head is pounding currently and they’ve kinda been rolling in one after another. I’ll try fixing the variety issue here in this next practice and I’ll try to remember to post soon. Thanks for the help as always @daceronine sorry for all the questions. Hope you have a good day
That's right. You could change the hair or gem and eyes or both to get the attention
If you see your colors in greyscale they are in similar value and look pretty much the same. You want to have a focal point somewhere (usually the face but not always) because viewer doesn't know where to look at. Our eyes tend to go toward more saturated colors so want to use them on that focal point. You can use that one stronger color in other places but not so much so it doesn't take away from the main interest.
Marc probably explains it better
Hope it helps
@patrycja.lerch provided good sources to check out. If I'm honest, even though I mentioned it, I'm also just barely learning it myself, so I think you would better benefit from the videos. Colors are definetly a complicated topic.
That said, saturation and highlights are fairly simple to grasp, simply raise the saturation and brightnes around the are of focus, and reduce it in areas of less focus. Highlights in particular should be handled also like big "letters" calling the attention and driving the eye, almost like lines (though not necessarily lines)
Here's a very quick and rough example using that last piece:
Immediately your eyes should be drawn to the hair where I increased the saturation, I also "darkkened" or lowered saturation gradually to the bottom. The moon is a clear focal point so I added further effect so it stands out even more. Finally I added some "moon glow" around as highlights to kinda drive the eyes from top down and around her (though I rushed it).
There's a whole lot more which I'm still trying to get a grasp on, like warm vs cold colors, what colors mean and what palettes to use and so on, but this should give you an idea.
@patrycja.lerch now that you mention I do think I watched a video not long ago on Marc’s YouTube talking about how the face is a common focal point so I see now. Your explanation was more than enough, I understand. And I’ll check out those videos right after this. Thank you a lot for the help and taking the time to link the videos:)
@daceronine yeah that example helps quite a bit, thank you for doing that. while I was typing my response last night I couldn’t think of what to do with the sky even though I knew it also needed to be tweaked. The gradient effect/blending makes sense since the moons light would impact the visual. (goes for any lighting of course) I tried to stay away from using the lighting and stuff but that was obviously a mistake since those of course (like previously stated) influence all the colors like you demonstrated with the clothes too. Like you said colors are complicated so I still have a lot to learn. But you and @patrycja.lerch both helped me with a hurdle. There’s still the part where I have to put it into practice but understanding is half the problem. So thank y’all very much, I really appreciate the help.
Hope y’all have a good day.