Knight's sketchbook

[dimensional-knight]

@darktiste

No need to apologize when you're only trying to help. Studies like the proposed have their benefits, I suppose they're great to fine-tune your sense of structure too, I'm just not ready to take advantage of it.

I'm probably being unclear about my capabilities and what I'm looking for; It's no wonder we're talking past each other when I'm being so cagey about what I can currently do.

Taking hands as example, I can do passable hands if I set my mind to it.




Boring, obviously posed hands. Such is the effect of sketching them like this:




You can't have good hands when you have stilted, near useless sketches. They only communicate there are hands in a certain area of an illustration, doing this or that pose — which I'll heavily reference from my own and overwork into artificialness later. I got a very basic structure problem and it's not even a "how hands work" type of structure issue, it's a "how structure hands that will naturally lead to expressive illustrations".

I believe some of the misunderstandings are coming from you and me looking at horrible sketches and seeking different signs of improvement. While you might be looking at proportions and overlaps, I'm looking at how organic the fingers are, how close to solid these deformed hands feel, how conductive these sketches are to natural-looking finished hands. As long foreshortening doesn't get in the way of making a hand look like a hand I'm okay with it for now. When it breaks my perception of an angle I do focus on it, otherwise it's not the ultimate goal of studies just yet.

I look at this and see improvement even if it's a mess:



I'm experienced at cleaning the mess at a later stage, what I can't do is conjure liveliness after the fact. They're horrible because I'm throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, what's comfortable. I probably could do cleaner technically correct sketches given more time, however that's akin to painting stilted hands in linework form. It will get me nowhere nearer to natural-looking hands nor more comfortable (aka efficient) sketching.

Look at how the fingers taper, at the transition from knuckles to them. It's more organic and with practice I'm finding myself creating these — instead of cylinders — more and more by default. I hadn't gotten around throwing some color at one of these as a sanity check yet, but here's the toddler hand:




I don't know if I'm going crazy here, but isn't it slightly less try-hard? Doesn't it have more character? And it took me 10% of the time to make the same macro color choices I went through in the paintings above, because this sketch contained enough structural info it required no ref up this point.

The other study aspect generating misunderstandings is that I like a slow and steady approach. I'll be happy to finally get the volume of that one knuckle consistently right while everyone else is put off by the endless rows of weird hands. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


@Leo Ki

By rubber I meant that some fingers seem to lack the rigidity of the bone structure. As to how that arises, it could be from wanting to wrap the whole hand into a well rounded unit? Poking in the dark here.

Ah, yes. You get rubber hands by prioritizing the wrong parts as mentioned earlier + studying this kind of reference:

Your turnarounds and varying angles of the foot are very believable. One thing bothered me though: I kept picturing some as being flat on the ground when the 3D model is very probably in the air and this changes the whole shape of it.

I suspect some of the models where partially flat on the ground and got their soles rebuilt because they're unnaturally smooth at pressure points. Plus some of these online 3D previewers won't let you pan or fully turn around the objects, so you end flipping them into weird positions to be able to peek from the desired angle, adding to the feeling of wrongness.

Looks like you'll have to invest in a tan paper sketchbook for the white highlights, eh? BTW I never thought of sanding paper to give it tooth.

Only someone desperate enough would sand paper, haha. This paper has a light grayish color, but I didn't find a good white material to work with it. White charcoal blends or smudges away due the paper lack of tooth while a white gel pen lacks opacity control, so it only produced good results on limited occasions.

Your strategy of avoiding the unreadable foreshortenings in comics, works too :) Some authors go the other way, you know when you start at the macrophotography level of a detail of a speck on a shoe lace and end up at the giant spaceship in the sky in one panel :P

I've never been a detail gal. xD