Would you like to come up and see my etchings?

[Adam Lina]

Thanks everyone for the words of encouragement!

Just some more sketchy stuff and assignment 2 from The Crimson Crusade

[Samszym]

Great effort here! You can definitely see your lines improving as those images go along. have you considered working with ink? it's a blast!
Right now your line width feels very all the same throughout the drawings, If you keep working in lines you'll learn how to vary line width to give the illusion of light and dark, and where to make the lines thicker to lead the eye to the focal point, and how to place areas of black to suggest shadows or leave places undetailed when you don't want detail there.
I'd recommend studying some comic artists you like to see how they use lines and areas of black in inks. I learned a ton from copying Jeff Jones' Idyll comics, if that's not your cup of tea maybe look at Charles Dana Gibson's inks, or Frazetta's, or (if you want to go insane) Franklin Booth

Keep drawing people out of cylinders and boxes! it's a fantastic way to force yourself to decide what's closer to the the viewer and what's further away, that gives real depth to your work.

[Adam Lina]

I've been using cheap ball point pens for all my traditional drawings but that does remind me I should do some more drawings with my brush tip pens. Thanks for the recommendations too! I'll add them to my book marks for future reference :)

[Jaik]

Haha I was going to say the same thing as Samszym.. then I read his comment and saw that he already said it -___- taking my ideas.. damnit..
With the digital studies, try making the outside lines of everything (limbs, body, head etc) a bit thicker, it would help with varying it a little. Also from those studies, you can see that you just sort of trace you first gesture with more and more refined lines, which is really good, and the final ones look killer, but try experimenting with leaving some of the lines a little more gestural and which ones require a good solid line to convey what you are looking for.

Good work though, so much work O___O you are really stepping up your game.

[Adam Lina]

Thanks Jaik, I think I will be focusing on exaggerating poses more if thats what you mean.

Heres a form drawing I did mainly to play with the dodge and screen layer mode. Looks kinda like Tron right, you guys? ... you guys????

[Adam Lina]

An interesting bit of information I found while doing this study is that a jellyfish's mouth also functions as its anus ಥ‿ಥ

[Adam Lina]

Working on visual library and studying Frazetta's inking techniques.

[KurtJeremy]

Salutations my fellow mentee!
Awesme sketchbook , I see alot of improvement even on the 1st page of your sb thread,
My questio is, how do you go about studying and such? Do you have a particular schedule to follow? How do you think I should limit my time studying a specific subject?

Im also thinking about starting my sb soon in here, again awesome sb! See you around in Crimson crusade!

[Adam Lina]

I kind of do what ever I feel like doing at the time. If I dont have anything in mind I'll do gestures at pixellovely or do a self portrait. I recommend spending a little time going through tutorials of basic drawing exercises. Sycra and Proko have a ton of videos on youtube. Dont just watch the video actually do the exercises too. Also I find it helpful to make a to-do list before bed most nights, so I can organize my day better. I find if I write a schedule for a whole week or month I dont follow it since I only look at it one time when Im making it and then forget about it in a couple days.

It depends what your habits are already and trying to work with your current level of motivation. You cant expect to be able to draw for 4 hours a day if you arnt already drawing every day for 2 hours. You have to gradually increase your expectations for yourself. The first step if you arnt already doing it is to do at least some drawing each day and never skip more than 1 (try not to even skip 1 if you can) day in a row. Even if you only get one quick drawing done it helps to establish the habit that you can build upon.

[Lyraina]

If you liked the jellyfish info, you'll for sure enjoy this one, too: A squids/octopus can "choke" on their own brain, because their brain forms a loop around the throat (donut shaped)... so if they decide to eat something too big... yeah :p

Nice Frazetta studies. And yes, the dog absolutely looks tron-like :p

[Adam Lina]

Funny thing is I actually already knew that about squid XD ...Did you know that baby koalas actually eat their mothers feces so to get the bacteria they need for digesting eucalyptus leaves which are normally poisonous to them? (。・_・。)

And thanks!

[Lyraina]

Ooh. Didn't know that. Then what about this: There are caterpillars who are able to force ants to carry them around to feed on a plant (daytime) and rest in the ant's nest (night). There even are caterpillars who force ants to carry them into their nest, where it then eats the ant's babies. :O

[Adam Lina]

Oh nice one, did not know that. Reminds me of the Liver Fluke which is a parasite that passes into ants from the slime trail of snails, controls the ants behavior and causes them to climb up on foliage to be eaten by grazing mammals. It then matures and feeds on the mammals liver and passes its eggs into the feces which then find their way into snails, completing its life cycle... Biology is so much fun to learns stuffs! щ(ಠ益ಠщ)

[Adam Lina]

Got another Frazetta study and a few attempts at applying what I learned. Also I tried to do a quick landscape from a crappy photo I took at the park with my not-smart phone.

[Samszym]

Keep the ink studies coming Hypno!
Think you could edit the pictures so your study is next to the drawing you copied? That would make it much easier to give you some helpful crits. it might be helpful to write down some notes with the studies, try and notice techniques Frazetta uses and what effect they achieve. Writing them down will make them more concrete and easier to use in your own work!
One thing he was really really disgustingly good at was having all the hatch lines he used look unified as a single transitional tone by having total control over the direction of the strokes and the distance between the lines. Try to copy his hatching exactly as it appears. It'll be really frustrating and hard since you don't yet have the dexterity he did, but that's a great way to develop some!
Oh, if you hadn't realized, Frazetta diluted some of his ink with water so you might want to try having some watered down ink as well as flat black ink, if you're copying a work that seems to have lighter lines.

Keep killing it!

[Adam Lina]

Thanks for the advice Sam! I take everything you say into consideration. Im not sure how to dilute my ink since Im using felt tip markers. I do have some bottled ink and dip pens somewhere but theyre a pain in the ass to use. Perhaps I'll try to just use a brush with the ink since I dont really like the cheap nibs I have for it. I was using a brush tip felt marker to simulate brush technique but its not quite the same as using a real brush. What kind of inking tools do you use?

[Adam Lina]

More Frazetta studies and a perspective drawing of the parking lot outside work. Also I did some quick gestures of people walking through the parking lot that I later drew as naked ogre-esque characters.

[Lyraina]

Oh no, I've learnt about that, it reads like a really terrible horror story for insect lovers like me! :( Evil, evil parasites. Also reminds me of those fungi which infect ants (or other insects), kill them, and then grow new fruiting bodies out of the insect's body to infect even more insects. Which looks... morbidly interesting and almost pretty, if I wouldn't pity the ants :P

Good to see you apply some of your studies!
That photo study has lovely colors, but the hard edges (horizon) are really distracting, as well as the very dark blacks you used in the background as well as the foreground. Makes it hard to differentiate between what's in the foreground and what is background. The power poles make for very cool silhouettes though!

Keep it up!

[Adam Lina]

Oh yea I've seen stuff about that before! The insect world is so bizarrely fascinating. Its great inspiration for art! And yea I thought about putting more effort into that landscape. I spent all my mental energy for the night figuring out all the perspective and structure on the power lines that werent actually in the photo. That was my first half assed attempt at painting a full landscape. I'll be doing lots more landscapes so I'll try not to forget about atmospheric perspective in the future. Thanks for the input!

More studies and some imagination sketches I crapped out. Drawing from imagination is getting less painful even if Im still not at all happy with the results. So thats something.

[Samszym]

Hey, sorry for the late reply. I can't say with any confidence what tool frazetta used, my guess would be a small sized brush since it's easier to make a line move from thin to thick with a brush than a pen, and Frazetta cared very much about getting a lot of variety in his line weight.
I found this interview: http://fritzfrazetta.blogspot.com/2011/0...acles.html
in which he talks a little about his process and mindset. he mentioned feeling the hairs touch the paper.

I'm using a kuretake brush pen and a size 0 kolinsky sable brush. The first makes really nice, dark marks but it very difficult to control well enough to make thin lines. The kolinsky is a brush teachers recommended to me, it's apparently great because it retains its pointiness. It does turn into a rather drybrushy mark pretty quickly unless you hold it very near the tip of it. You can see my practice making lines with it on my recent sketchbook updates

Nibs are easier to control since they don't give as much variety in line width, but it seems like your goal here would be to develop dexterity so I'd recommend trying to find a nice, pretty small watercolor brush to practice with, and diluting the ink if you study a Frazetta piece where he did that.
The studies are getting better as you go along, and the personal drawings should start catching up soon! You're definitely going about this right, study and apply. One are I think you could improve at immediately is the direction of your hatching marks. Notice how in the majority of Frazetta's drawings the hatching goes in one direction with minor variations in most of the figure. He does go different directions in some areas, but he always has a good reason to.
Using this uniform hatching direction is one of the ways he prefectly directs the viewers eye where he wnats it to go, and describes the form the lines cross over, and describes what value he wants them to be be how thin and close together the lines are. It's really amazing how much you can do with a bunch of perfectly places strokes!

I'd recommend trying to study some of his drawings that have more subtle value work and hatching, like this one: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_PB-O1yT5EYg/S-...nbrute.jpg

Keep killing it!!!! I've gotta start working hard at style emulation stuff like you, your dedication here's really inspiring

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Oh, forgot to mention, try to get a nice heavy paper like a pad of Bristol for ink stuff, if you're not using something like it already.