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Requested these threads be merged.

Also

DO NOT POST A PICTURE OF SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOURSELF. These posts will be reported. Please do not waste my time. Thank you.

Alarra

Cortana again Female Shepard Especially proud of these.

when you draw from a photo, then one good way to learn to get it right is to turn the picture upside down

the face is definitely the hardest thing to get right cos we get distracted by eyes, noses and mouths and ignore the spaces in between which are just as important - so if you turn the pic upside down you can trick yourself into into not being drawn to eyes etc as much. Once you have the general face drawn, you can then turn it right side up and tweak it and get the beauty in.

it may be a disaster at first but if you stick at it I think you will notice the difference

Also, and I speak from personal experience, use a softer pencil. What this does is cause the carbon to smear easier. This can seem very annoying at first, especially if you hand rests heavy on the page, but with practice you can use your finger to smear the carbon where you want, to add shadow, or in the case of hair, make it seem less stringy.

But yeah dude, you are getting better. Nice to see you putting some honest effort behind this.

Had a very busy day. Only drew this one image and it is subpar. Partly because I was tired and partly because its an angle I'm unfamiliar with.

Claudia Black/Areyn Sun As for your suggestion Venger its a good one but I can't do it because I don't own softer pencils (that are light enough) and I'm not in a position where I can buy more (please don't ask).

But that's a good suggestion Mattbot. I think I'll try that on some scratch paper. Out of curiosity what is it that's disproportionate? The cheekbones? The forehead? What is it?

Don't cut yourself short. If your drawing looks like the subject, or is recognizable to the subject, I'd say you succeeded. And when I saw it, I definitely thought it look like Claudia Black.

Draw me like one of your French girls thuro and we have a deal.

Thuro wrote:Had a very busy day. Only drew this one image and it is subpar. Partly because I was tired and partly because its an angle I'm unfamiliar with.

Claudia Black/Areyn Sun

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As for your suggestion Venger its a good one but I can't do it because I don't own softer pencils (that are light enough) and I'm not in a position where I can buy more (please don't ask).

But that's a good suggestion Mattbot. I think I'll try that on some scratch paper. Out of curiosity what is it that's disproportionate? The cheekbones? The forehead? What is it?

The eyes, nose, and mouth are still positioned too far towards either end of your head, but it's getting better! If you've never seen one, you can find a ton of proportion diagrams on the internet; if you're going for a "realistic" style, your eyes will be about halfway down your head, the tip of your nose a third from the bottom, and the mouth a little under halfway between the nose and the chin.

You downloaded GIMP, right? Another thing you can do is load up your reference picture and your drawing, then use transparency to check the proportions. For example:
It's kind of tricky, but I tried scaling the drawing according to the size of her head in the photo, then positioning it according to her chin and left cheek. As you can see, the eyes, nose, and mouth are all a bit too high and are too far to the left, given the perspective of her face. Pretty close, though!

The main thing I'd recommend working on right now is your scanning technique. Again, it may look fine on paper, but when you're uploading your pictures to the internet, they come out very faint. You can do this "in the cutting room" by using GIMP or Photoshop to play around with curves and contrast, but I've been having a [&@%!] of a time doing this here. The images you are posting, their lighting does not appear to be uniform, so trying to bring out the lines invariably results in great splotches of shadows on the lower righthand corner. So a better idea might be to try and take some new pictures, or even better still, go over your lines in ink (ink shows up MUCH more clearly when scanned or photographed, and is far easier to separate from the background in Photoshop).

You may also want to check out some serious art sites, like ConceptArt.org. I would NOT recommend posting there right now, because they have a tendency to be elitist [&@%!] and will probably not deign to give you the time of day, but they do offer some of the best critiques outside of art school, and if you lurk a bit you can get some great tips!



-edit- Also, another thing I noticed with the Cortana and Femshep portraits; the sides of your nose are too pronounced in your full face views. See how they kind of look like elephant trunks? This is a common error when drawing in full face view. While there is often some shading on either side of a nose when viewed from dead on, this shading is generally very subtle, and it's almost always stronger on one side than the other. As such, it's a good idea to either A) draw in only one side of the nose or B) forget drawing the sides entirely, and simply draw the tip and nostrils.

Well I'm burned out on faces. Can't even draw them anymore I'm so burned out. Drew this instead.

Darth Krayt @Doros I actually drew farore based off the other image but that's not important. I'm not primarily an artist. I'm a writer. I just draw for fun. So yeah. The images come out blotchy because I take a picture of them with a phone and I don't really care about the lighting. I just share because I have very few people in my life to show it too. So I'm not going to do much more touch up in GIMP than I'm already doing.

I appreciate your help but only drawing interests me. Not photoshopping.

Well done. I like your Farore and Female Shepard drawings especially.
I was going to give you a picture of myself to practice on but it seems I can not. Oh well...

If I can give you one thing from my art experience, it would be the one thing my art teacher used to tell me that got my mind racing to prove her wrong and my ever failure to do so made me a better artist: "Lines don't exist"

It's not really a Photoshop thing; it's more of a scanning and photographing thing, since the way you photograph your image determines how much 'shop work (if any) you need to make your drawings legible. (ideally, you want your photograph to be legible enough that all you have to do is resize it) If you really like uploading your work to the internet, proper scanning technique doesn't take too long to learn, and you'll have far better looking results. But to each his own!

The hands are looking good. You've got a natural eye for those things, and they're one of the hardest things to draw; I know a ton of professional artists who try every trick in the compositional book to avoid drawing hands.


And, oh, right, sorry! Wrong picture. Well, you get the idea - it is possible to use GIMP/shop to compare your drawing to your reference directly. You don't HAVE to have proportions EXACTLY right for everything, of course, but it's a very easy and very accurate way to identify where and how your drawing diverges from it's reference.

why not use a pen and ink, if you aren't using an eraser ?

a nice graphics pen or even a fountain pen (my favourite)

Didn't I mention I started using an eraser for my portraits? I just figured I was just being prideful not using an eraser. These are better because of it. Anyways I drew these for fun.

Darth Krayt (what? He's fun to draw) Antares Draco Antares AN ANNOUNCEMENT Portraits now come with an option to look like a sith. You can get Vor'shandi markings (or whatever) if you want. Or I can make you look like the Emperor. Or whatever you want. Just describe it to me.

Thuro wrote:Well I'm burned out on faces. Can't even draw them anymore I'm so burned out. Drew this instead.

Darth Krayt

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Whoa, this one is rad! I like how it spans two pages. Nice work.

Thuro wrote:Darth Krayt (what? He's fun to draw)

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You are extremely talented at drawing cloth.
Like, seriously. I've tried and tried to draw clothing and it always comes out looking really bad.
Drawing clothing and cloth in general is no easy feat <_>

Well I appreciate that Weasel but I was just eyeballing a drawing. Tomorrow I will try drawing a cloak from a photo.

Drew this but my primary project right now is an Angel WIP.

Sith

Worked on this forever. Hated the way it came out.

Well I drew these but the photo's came out blurry. But I'll post them anyways.

Kyp Durrons Ghost and Darth Kosh BATMAN

Again we applaud your cloth drawing abilities, especially the first image, right side. I also like the minimalist, monochromatic batman. That turned out real nice.

I agree that your angel picture isn't quite right. A fair drawing to be sure, but some how the proportions aren't quite right, and I can't lay my finger on what exactly it is. I think that it is from the hair being too "poofy", and the waist too narrow. Women are curvy critters, 'specially in the hips, and yours came out a little flat. Also, the left hand appears to be too small.

To be honest, I look forward to coming to the Arts section to see the new works you have posted. There is always some form of noticeable improvement, and seeing the variety of things drawn is also quite impressive. By mixing up the subject to be drawn, you gain good perspective and understanding.

I know it is a very cliched well wishing, but I think it applies to you very well: keep up the good work!

sorry for the art class

Allow me to reiterate on Matt's post.

Take a look at this link, Thuro. LINK This is done by our own Lady Nerevar, a drawing she did in a series called "30 Days of Skyrim", where she released one image each day in the month leading to the game's release. In the link posted you see the initial "skeleton" layout (image 2 in the collage), done in lighter shades of pencil, to help get the gist, and positioning of all the elements down and pat. Later, she came behind and began "solidifying", if you will, those lines into a more finished product.

This is what matt is referring too. First you mentally form the image (if you are doing an original work), and from there rough out a very light initial draft. Such light lines allow for you to erase them later on, as mat pointed out. If you use a paint program to edit pictures, like Lady Nerevar does, you don't have to be so picky about being so light with your rough draft. Merely edit the out later.

Drawing light, at least for me, was a frustrating thing to learn. But I found it helps to deal in many shorter strokes, bending at the elbow and NOT the wrist or fingers. And from my experience from calligraphy, it helps to use your WHOLE ARM to draw/write. It is a lot awkward at first, but once you get it down, it really makes things a lot easier.

I feel like using an editing program is cheating is cheating. And the Angel was...special. Usually the images I draw aren't that large and I just draw it. I can't really explain my method. I just do it; no method. Althought with faces I usually start with the nose.

Anyways
Darth Krayt III (I really need to buy another issue of Legacy)

Venger wrote:

I agree that your angel picture isn't quite right. A fair drawing to be sure, but some how the proportions aren't quite right, and I can't lay my finger on what exactly it is. I think that it is from the hair being too "poofy", and the waist too narrow.

Yeah, the shoulder-to-hip ratio is off, assuming it's a female angel. Specifically, female figures tend to have narrow shoulders and broad hips, while males are the opposite. The waist isn't too bad, but he should have enlarged her hips and narrowed her shoulers. Also, the wings are attached to her body at a funny spot. Usually, angels are depicted as having wings coming from their shoulder-blades or upper back. Her wings seem to attached to her middle spine.

Concerning your portraits, particularly faces, I could a offer a little advice. I'm not entirely sure if any of these points have been mentioned before, but whatevs.

-Depending on how realistic you want the drawing use lines and shading differently. I believe the concept is called lost and found lines. If you want a more cartoony look, use very bold lines with little emphasis on shading. However, if you want a realistic and photographic look, I suggest you use shading to define the figure and not the lines. For example Not a line can be found, and yet, you get a sense of the object being a 3d ball. Do this with the lips, nose, chin, and everything if you want a realistic view. You actually already did this when you draw clothing. The shading you made defined the cloth. Experiment with other subjects and see how they work as well.

-If you do use graphite, charcoal, or anything that can be erased, use the eraser. Not to chiefly erase, but to blend and create more vivid shading. Erasers are excellent smudgers and should be looked at as such. Don't see your eraser as a corrector; rather, look at it is another tool just like your pencil or whatever you're using.

I haven't drawn much in a while so if I think of anything else I'll post. I hope I don't sound like a super critic.