Beau's Sketchbook

[beau]

Hey there :)

You've received some really solid advice from great people. I'm not going to reiterate what everyone else has told you, but rather try and get you to look at your line art approach differently with a bit of hard truth.

but I don't think it would be as effective for me as using clean lines on client work and getting better there.

The thing is, sure you might be getting better there, but what use is it when you're just going to destroy all your progress with sloppy line art during your studies? To become good at something you need repetition, but you basically cancel that out by reverting to chicken scratch line art in studies.

Your commission line art shouldn't be taking any where near 30 hours to complete. It is probably taking you so long because instead of practising your line art daily with all your studies, you are only practising it in your commission. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot here with a counter-intuitive process. Instead think of it like this -> The more you practice lineart daily in your studies, the quicker you'll be at commissions, the more $$ you can earn.

Another thing to note is that you really don't learn a lot with doing scratchy line art, and it makes it hard for people to crit as well. Line art like that doesn't actually convey forms, objects, details, etc. properly so you and your audience is left to try and find the image themselves amongst all the lines.

So basically tldr:
All this comes back to repetition - the more you do something (and do it properly) the quicker you will become at it.

Thanks, chubbycat, fedolika, Amut and Darktise- I'll focus on my line economy now, in my studies especially. I've never rally done that, so I can't say it's better to do something else, and it sound like my peers have reached more or less of an agreement. Thank you :)

Here is the finall image for the barbarian commission. I'm not very happy with it, there are so many issues with the image and the costume and the pose, but it's definitely not my worst work. I was really happy with the designs I made in her hair, and the color palette in her design, as I tried to use a very limited palette, so many of the colors are from different parts of the image, and her eyes are the only saturated part.