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[maggie]

hi all!

Recently I've been doing mostly photo/master studies. And even though I think I've learned stuff, it is annoying because I feel like I'm always copying someone else instead of creating my own art.
Anyways, I suck at fundamentals and I really need to improve there. I'm very very confused on where to start and what to do so if you have any advice or idea, I'd love to read it.

Here are some recent drawings

with photo reference (no color picking/tracing)






Frank Frazetta values study (again no cheats)


and here's a self-portrait for which I used another painting as a ref for the pose of the character + lighting

[BenFlores]

Welcome, and nice work.
If you're not sure about where to start, try picking up some drawing and theory books to crush those fundamentals.
how to draw - scott robertson , color and light - james gurney , constructive anatomy - hogarth , andrew loomis, so much more but one bite at a time anyways. Keep up the studies, hoping to see more.

[Caisne]

Hello and welcome to a CD. Lovely work you have here.

If you want to start with a fundamentals I would suggest trying to master a perspective. Scott Robertson's "How to draw book" and his Gnomon DVD's are the great source.

Perspective actually explains how things in a real world are working. Not only environments or architecture, but any object on your sight is under rule of perspective. (Human head, dog etc.) Improving your knowledge of perspective automatically makes you better in everything.

Perspective is an extremely boring subject to learn, so I would recommend balancing studies with a personal work which has heavy perspective involved. It'll also help you to get more confident as you'll notice that your personal works are getting more precise and realistic.

Keep up the good work!

[Patrick Gaumond]

Edit: Got double ninja'd! Some repeated info in here d:

You seem to have a pretty good intuition for the fundamentals at the moment. Most of what you need to know about the fundamentals you can simply learn from observing the real world and from studying photos and masters as you're already doing, however there are some good resources to give that extra step forward and help you along

I always recommend Scott Robertson to learn the very technical side of art (perspective, values, medium techniques etc). His current series of books ("How to Draw" and the soon to be released "How to Render") will probably cover juuust about everything there is to know about the fundamentals, besides anatomy. If you can afford dropping ~100$ for those two books you can pretty much say that you have the fundamentals covered. How to render isnt actually released as of yet, but How to draw was absolutely perfect so there is no reason this one won't be as well.

For human anatomy, definitely look through Burne Hogarth and/or andrew Loomis books and do studies of those. In my opinion, Hogarth's books are great for learning the way the body moves and how the pieces all fit together, while Loomis is more suited to learning proportions and realistic/semi-realistic (ie stylized) depictions of the human form. I have to say though that neither is exceptional on its own. They complement each other, but more importantly they help you study real life anatomy more accurately than just by guessing or copy-catting!



As for what to do, really just do whatever you enjoy doing the most. Definitely set aside time every single day to do studies for at least 2-3 hours, but also spend time using those studies in your own work so the knowledge isnt wasted. Literally every artist ever copies other people's work. What sets aside the good ones from the bad ones is that the good ones use the knowledge they discovered in the study in their work, to push it further. If you like drawing animals and creatures, do that. If you like drawing portraits, do that. if you like cars etc etc... Get good at something you like doing and someone somewhere will recognize you for it

With that said, It's also important to leave your comfort zone frequently so you don't end up in a rut. It's self evident but The more you push your art boundaries the more you'll be able to do, and the more likely you'll be able to discover what you really like doing and thus be hired for it at some point. I used to think characters were the only thing I'd like, and so avoided environments for a long time, but at some point I did one anyway and ended up liking it more than characters!

Hope that helps, if you have questions feel free to ask here or in the shoutbox, loads of helpful people around here :)

[maggie]

Thank you guys so much for the useful info!
I have some of the books you mentioned (Andrew Loomis' and Scott Robertson's) plus a few DVDs so that's good!
I decided to follow your advice and I will be mainly focusing on perspective for now.
Here are some random sketches from the past days.


and now I realise that sphere at the end is totally messed up






this was very quick but I won't spend much more time on it


and four skulls, I have to do 99 so.. the road would be long I guess haha. I just can't imagine where I would find so many different references of skulls.

[CoreyH]

Nice work on that Scott Robertson stuff! Seem to be picking it up quickly.. Skull looks really nice too! I think everyones already pointed out what do focus on.. nothing else to add. Looking forward to seeing where you go with it all :)

[maggie]

Thank you CoreyH :)
I've looked through some sketchbooks today and you guys are so inspiring! I don't want to spam your topics so I'm just writing it here:)

Anyways, here is a quick sketch. Unfortunately I didn't have much time for drawing today.. I deeply dislike such days haha.

perspective is killing me.

[CoreyH]

Nice work, make sure to try your hardest to use one clean line. I have the same problem haha its so difficult! Coming along well though

[Rognoll]

Nice! I would recommend you to read Scott Robertson's books, but you're already done that, plus I'm sure everyone must have said that already
I can't help, but notice how you're exploring two different branches of illustration, like children illustration in the first ones and then more industrial design-ish stuff. Why the sudden change?

[Triggerpigking]

Hey welcome to CD!

Really liking the style you have, love the first cartoony girl.
The skull studies are lookin nice as well, if you need ref I found a good amount of skull ref here http://www.cgbrush.org/p/downloads.html

You seem to be on the right track to me anyway so keep it up :).

[maggie]

CoreyH, yeah it is hard indeed.. If I draw traditionally it's not that big a deal to draw one smooth line, but digitally it's just killing me. For one simple line I might need 20 undo-s. But I should work on that definitely, so thank you for pointing it out!

Rognoll, I'm not sure I can answer your question hah. The little characters were an attempt for character design for animation (not child's books) and were made a few months ago. To be completely honest, I don't know what I want to be doing in future and which 'path to take'. I find so many things to be interesting like for example character design, environments, industrial design, entertainment design etc. I was even interested in 3D at one point and learned to do that too. I am really confused by how many things I would like to be able to do and I guess that's why my art is so confusing and going in different directions, if that makes sense. And honestly, I don't know how to deal with that haha:)

Triggerpigking, thank you for the nice words! And a bigger thank you for the skull references, that's exactly what I needed! :))

[maggie]

So here are my sketches from the weekend.
Sorry for the 'fancy' photos, my camera is kinda crappy.







I saw this squares-exercise on the Internet and thought I should give it a try. wasn't as easy as I thought I would be!




and 3 more skulls using Triggerpigking's references:)
so far 7/99 yay!

[StardustLarva]

Great job with the perspective sketches and the skull studies. If you don't mind me asking, did you follow any guidelines or anything for the perspective stuff? Just curious, as I need to improve on perspective myself.

[maggie]

Hey StardustLarva,
I read Scott Robertson's book about perspective (Drawing and sketching objects from your imagination) and I draw simple cubes and stuff using the principles written in the book. So far it's been very useful so I definitely recommend it!



And some off topic:
This doesn't really concern you but I think you'll understand my pain :d I've received 40% discount on Scott Robertson's new book 'How to render' which is awesome! But the shipping fees outside of US are higher and the book becomes very expensive... so unfortunate haha

[Patrick Gaumond]

Yea i had the same issue. I don't know where you live but here in canada it came out to ~20$ extra just for the shipping/import duties. The rebate, thankfully, negated that entirely so I was able to get the hardcover as I wanted.

How much is it for you? I imagine off the continent it must be much more than that which is unfortunate but theres always the softcover

[maggie]

Oh Canada! I wish I could live there someday and have snow all the time :>
But yeah the shipping cost is the same for me (Bulgaria) so 50$ is the final price for softcover. When you think about it, it's not that much.. but the standards here are muuuuch lower than the US or Canada so it is kind of expensive. Anyways, I didn't mean to complain or anything, I'll probably order it:)

[Patrick Gaumond]

No worries! Was just wondering is all

And there hasn't been much snow here lately, unfortunately. Hopefully this year will be better!

[maggie]

Oh I hope you have a snowy winter then!

And I ordered the book so now I have to wait for 2-3-4 painful weeks until it's delivered D:
Anyways, here is today's skull study. I also did one master study but I'll post it tomorrow when it's all finished.

[Adam Lina]

Beautiful skull studies! And Id like to commend you for working on those perspective drawings. That stuff is so hard. I only managed to make it up to the mirroring parts and it got too intense for me. I need to get back on that book one of these days...

[Caisne]

Glad to see you're working on your perspective. But don't get too pencil happy, this stuff can annoy you too quickly. And.. nice bones