Sasha - Art School Journey

[leeireo]

Oooo that's a nice character concept! Love myself some fantasy themed art heh.

The sketch I did may be a bad example, but I've replicated the pose you've drawn on the far left and as you can see all the lines are almost parallel or perpendicular. In most cases having parallel lines like this on an organic figure will make them look very stiff and unlively.

For standing poses ( and in most cases all poses ) to look dynamic and lively you will generally want to leave those parallel lines out. I've recreated the pose by using lines that try to zigzag and meet each other and also included a bit of gesture. This can really help make your figures feel grounded and alive.

I'm not very well equipped to give criticism yet, so please take what I say with a grain of salt! Some things I say may be correct, some things may be wrong.

EDIT: Your character is a mannequin so maybe these don't apply, but depending on how willing you are to exaggerate the pose of the mannequin it could help make it look more animated.

[_Sasha_]

Thank you for your responses & feedback @Kosmonaut @LesleyCarol @leeireo

I'll take all of this feedback on board and note them as I continue that drawing. Lots of useful information to think about.

For now, here's a group of 30 second and 2 minute gesture drawings. Definitely feel like with the guidance from this community and consistent practise I'm visibly improving the gesture and movement I can convey in each pose. If there's any further advise anyone has for me to focus on I'll happily take it on board ^-^

[gellenvera]

Great job so far! These new gesture drawings show already ots of improvement! And those 2 min ones look super good! Keep up the great work!

[_Sasha_]

I haven't abandoned the other DnD character, but I felt like redesigning my character. Any feedback on the cleanish sketch would be appreciated. Want to dial in the anatomy and feel before doing anything polished.

I know the line weight is kinda messed up on some of the feathers but I'm going to blame the fact it's a "clean sketch" haha

[gellenvera]

That's a really neat design! I love the feathers too The only thing I noticed is the leg that's behind - that one looks a bit confusing. Her feet looks like it's vanishing ? But everything else looks really nice!

[_Sasha_]

Thanks! The feathers are an in-game story development And yeah, I guess I forgot to draw that foot, I really should stop avoiding things if they're giving me trouble

[_Sasha_]

I've started the perspective section of term 1, and although perspective itself and using perspective grids on a basic level is not new to me. Using them to construct an entire scene is.

It's quite tiring work so I'll continue it and come back to it every so often, until it becomes natural I think a single scene will take a week to "sketch" at this point haha.

I also made progress on my personal artwork, finished up the linework and added some simple gradient colours for depth.

Any feedback or advice anyone has for either of these is greatly appreciated... Nap time.

[cyberspectre]

this is so pretty omg! the one thing I noticed that was a bit off were the angles on the horns, it’s not easy to explain so I tried to explain thru drawing

of course if they arent meant to be symmetrical u can ignore haha

[cyberspectre]

i can also see that i was a bit late lol seems we're on at the same time

since im here, the colors u added look absolutely amazing!! i can't wait to see where u go with this design from here!

[_Sasha_]

Thanks! And yeah I see it now, they were supposed to be symmetrical, I'll go back and try to fix them probably tomorrow, art-ed out for today
Thanks for the feedback though, it's another thing to keep in mind in future drawings regardless!

edit: Actually now that I'm looking properly, the back horn isn't even properly connected any more hahaha

[_Sasha_]

I'm probably going to stop posting the gesture drawings here, because I feel like I'm working from a solid foundation & understanding of my goal with them now. Though I do want to push the movement in the poses a bit better as I keep doing them.

Also I did a figure drawing with some shading & measuring, the grid is there because I'm working on a tablet with a screen and it's hard to measure physically.
Started doing some shading here because I want to find some painting brushes I like using and get on with, and get used to the process a little before I focus on improving that skill more. Any recomendations there would be helpful!

As always, any feedback is appreciated ^-^

[Kosmonaut]

I would recommend Sinix's how to learn digital painting series since it teaches you some basic stuff and gives you some good exercises to try out. he currently has 2 videos total of that series

[_Sasha_]

Thanks for the recommendation! Can tell it's going to be super useful already ^-^

Watched the beginner painting video in his series, and it already seems really useful, I'll probably watch the others for procrastination purposes, and then try his hard brush 2 value studies to start avoiding lines in painting

[_Sasha_]

I've done a few 2 colour value studies based on the video @Kosmonaut suggested I watch. (thanks by the way, they were interesting to watch and will definitely go back to them to recap in the future!)

I think they came out quite well, but I don't think my eye is trained enough to tell if anything is really wrong so any harsh feedback would probably be helpful so I can start to see the issues ^-^

In hindsight, I probably should have used a better lit screenshot from the game in the last one. But it was a fun challenge so I'm not complaining

[Kosmonaut]

these look good to me in the 2nd video he critiques someone's work so maybe that can be applied to how you did as well. I haven't done a whole lot of distillation studies and I should probably do more in the future but It looks like you understand the idea of the exercise

[_Sasha_]

Thanks! I'll probably try this again, and then add a third color before allowing myself to use opacity and eventually doing studies that can look like finished pieces.

I did actually watch the second video and took some of that feedback he gave into account when doing these.

But yeah, I do think I understand the goal of this exercise as you say, but I do appreciate you recomending that video, it's given a lot of useful advice!

[_Sasha_]

Thought I'd do an update post here as I've been working on that 3rd DnD character some more over the past few days (alongside gesture drawings)

So, since I wasn't happy with the direction I took @leeireo's advice and tried to come up with some more poses and angles with a more dynamic line of action and opposing hips/shoulders.

After sending these poses to the recipient they chose out the one they liked the most (not the same as my favourite pose but that's how it works :P), which I took and tried to push a bit more to get a refined pose that I liked, and fit the brief.

After refining that pose I blocked in a simple background (so that I could use it to match the lighting) and also did a render test on the waist sphere to match the lighting and style I want to go for.

The last picture is my current progress in the artwork, I've refined the style and rendering a bit more too. Any feedback and advice on direction would be greatly appreciated! I'm really pushing myself to get this as good as I can, push my current level of skill to its limit!

[leeireo]

I love these recent poses, great job! They look very fun and exciting!

For your artwork progress at the bottom, all of the colors you've chosen ( except the sky ) is very dark in value. In a scene that looks to be outdoors in a sunny day it looks it bit too dull. I went ahead and used an add(glow) layer and brightened the whole scene with an orangey-yellow color.

The example is a bit intense, but already I can feel that it's a lot more lively and pleasing to look at.

Another thing you might wanna take advantage of is the surrounding color. Since you added a blue sky there it could add a really nice flavor to add some blueish hints on some of the shadows and some spots that the light hits the mannequin.

Also the ink spell that the mannequin is casting looks a bit messy. There doesn't seem to have been much thought put into it, but is just there to add a bit of coolness to the character, which I totally understand. I love these types of magical energies in fantasy artworks! Maybe try to study how other artists have drawn magic and flowing liquid?

I always say this after I give criticism, but please take everything I've said with a grain of salt, especially this one! I'm very weak with design, color, and lighting so I can be wrong with a lot of things I've said.

[_Sasha_]

Thanks for that feedback, this painting was a lot of work and stress, and I realised my tablet's colour profile was quite off compared to most screens and way too saturated/bright.

I may have got lazy but it wasn't an easy subject and I didn't want to stress myself out by pushing to hard to get this one perfect.

I sorted out the colours in the painting and although I researched liquid effects as Leeireo suggested I prefer to just finish it and move on for now. (but I'll still take the feedback into account for future work)

Also I just threw the environment together without much thought, I'll probably do some more studies before I think I can do them properly.

Anyway, here's the finished piece, not perfect, and far from the best I think I could achieve in the right mind frame, but finished:

[Lockenheim]

I absolutely love the effects with this it looks so cool! This reminds me of a comment I saw on the art station forum a while ago by artist Anna Podedworna. She has several works that have an effect like this and someone in the comments asked how she studied it. Her comment was "I credit the rise of slime fad on instagram for that. Literal millions of photos and videos of people playing with and throwing goo." I dont know if I can link to to art station on cube brush forums or if thats not allowed. But its her Strixhaven art might be right up your alley!