VickGaza - Help me learn 2D char. design

[vickgaza]

Hello everyone :) 

I`ve decided to come back to 2D in order to work on my foundations and learn some 2D character/creature design so that I can design my own 3D characters in the future. Professionally I work as a 3D char/creature artist in AAA games.

Any kind of guidance and help is very very much appreciated :D
I just want to target character/creature design so hopefully that will narrow my study methodology a bit. I don`t want to know how to render or illustrate.  Good line art and good design is all I want :D

My work is 9 to 5 but I reckon I can put in 2-4 hours of drawing per day on average if everything goes to plan. 

Anyway here`s the 1st batch of drawings I`ve done.

August - September - 1000 x 1/2/3 minute quick poses to get myself comfortable with drawing stuff.

[Patrick Gaumond]

I think you'll need to know how to render to some extent to do character design. Line and the other non-rendering fundamentals are definitely the most important, but you'll need the ability to depict materials and lighting information on at least a rudimentary level, or at least have a good enough understanding of it to able to photobash it, as reference for whoever uses the sheet (even if its just the art director). But youve also said this is just for your own purposes, to design your own characters, so maybe that's not needed :)

That said, I've seen production-oriented design sheets that are only line art with flat colours, and the materials are depicted on the side with photographs. I don't often hear this method talked about on the things i've seen/read on the web, though, so maybe I'd guess its a less commonly used practice.

As for your art, thats a ton of drawing! On top of quick studies like these, complement them with longer studies where you really zone in and focus on getting things accurately. Even these quick ones look pretty good, so using them as a basis for longer drawings should be an easy transition.

Do you have any examples of the kind of drawings you're shooting for? That might give a better idea of what kind of feedback you'll get, especially since this skill will be for your own purposes mostly rather than as a career :)

Cheers
PS, do you have a link to your 3d work? i'd love to see some of it

[vickgaza]

I think you'll need to know how to render to some extent to do character design. Line and the other non-rendering fundamentals are definitely the most important, but you'll need the ability to depict materials and lighting information on at least a rudimentary level, or at least have a good enough understanding of it to able to photobash it, as reference for whoever uses the sheet (even if its just the art director). But youve also said this is just for your own purposes, to design your own characters, so maybe that's not needed :)

That said, I've seen production-oriented design sheets that are only line art with flat colours, and the materials are depicted on the side with photographs. I don't often hear this method talked about on the things i've seen/read on the web, though, so maybe I'd guess its a less commonly used practice.

As for your art, thats a ton of drawing! On top of quick studies like these, complement them with longer studies where you really zone in and focus on getting things accurately. Even these quick ones look pretty good, so using them as a basis for longer drawings should be an easy transition.

Do you have any examples of the kind of drawings you're shooting for? That might give a better idea of what kind of feedback you'll get, especially since this skill will be for your own purposes mostly rather than as a career :)

Cheers
PS, do you have a link to your 3d work? i'd love to see some of it

Hey Patrick, thank you so much for the reply ! Honestly man I appreciate you taking the time.

For me , as far as 2D goes, materiality is not a priority as I can resolve that at 3D level but I agree that it would be useful to at least suggest that a belt buckle/sword is metallic as opposed to a dielectric flat gray. 
The flat colors and photo references to materials is my preffered way when dealing with other concept artists concepts tbh, I`d much rather the concept artist spends his time making tight lines, good design, back views or fixes design continuity issues as opposed to render materials, as I already have a library of materials that I can use later in the process. 
Btw you can find my personal and professional 3D work here https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zWvQd (ArtStation profile)


Below you will find pretty much my target of quality that I would ever need really.   
The ability to design organic creatures and people with nice garments/armors for me would be the priority, but I think you are absolutely right, I need to learn to at least show volume and surface turning , especially for organic stuff. And some  2 tone render in order to show a cast shadow would also be beneficial. 

Anyway thank you again so much for the feedback and I will be posting my current studies soon too, need to upload them!

Kind regards,
Vick.  






And as far as creature design goes, simple line like this is more than adequate, as I am predominantly a sculptor, so I can tackle details/rendering easily in Zbrush later ok. But gesture, proportions, anatomy and iteration I still think is much much faster to do in 2D and also allows me to explore a different medium

[Patrick Gaumond]

Great stuff! Huge fan of the first TW:W, I've been really digging all the 3d Models and art you guys have been releasing :) Pretty cool to have someone like you around I must say

It's interesting to hear another 3D modeller confirm that good line work is more important for them than anything else; there seems to be a predominant opinion in the online concept art communities that "realism" or photobashed concepts are whats needed and that lineart is a thing of the past. But i've spoken to a few other modellers and concept artists at my old job and they said the same thing you have said here! 

Anyways, some places you might want to check out to get started (keep in mind I'm still learning myself!)

For drawing, Proko is a great resource: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClM2LuQ...23462tQzBg His free videos in my opinion are sufficient, but I've also bought most of his courses and the extra bits of explanation as well as extended critique videos are also helpful. 
He has series on both anatomy and "how to draw" so to speak. You already have a good understanding of musculature and proportion from your 3D work, so you can maybe skip over those more textbook-like anatomy videos and follow the drawing ones, although there is some coverage on how they appear when drawn too but thats a minor point in those videos. I believe the course is called 'Figure drawing fundamentals' and will cover gesture, lines, curves etc rather than muscles and such.

Right now its a question of transferring your 3d knowledge to a 2d plane, and step one would be gaining more confidence in your lines. I understand these are quick <3min drawings, but its good to practice drawing with fewer marks. The drawings themselves seem solid, but the lines are a bit scratchy and uncertain. I think part of this might be that youre trying to capture in your drawing more than you're capable of in that time frame; so i'd recommended reducing the amount of detail you're seeing/trying to draw in these shorter studies. For example, how these figures are simplified in a 2 min gesture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I_egPHop9A

The figure still shows through and reads very well, but the emphasis for most of the drawing is not on the bumps of the arms lets say but on the flow of them. Save the contours and anatomical bumps for longer drawings!

Other resources might be any of these books:

Bridgman or any of his other books: https://www.amazon.ca/Bridgmans-Complete...1402766785

Any of Loomis' books: https://www.google.ca/search?rlz=1C5CHFA...i0XJS-iIts

maybe optional, but going more in depth in perspective can help a lot even for characters and creatures. Note that the above Loomis books will cover basic perspective. Scott Robertson's How to Draw is the single best resource for perspective, but is mainly geared towards vehicles or environments rather than characters: https://www.amazon.com/How-Draw-sketchin...bc?ie=UTF8


As for Line art, one of my favourite artists and line artists happens to work at Creative assembly too, maybe you can give her a visit (I'm assuming youre both working in-house, i have no idea really lol) 
She's also a phenomenally good designer, someone i look up to personally as an artist and designer:
https://www.artstation.com/bethh


As for design, theres no real answer to this. It's largely personal taste. There are vague concepts that can be explained, but even those can be broken and often are. With that said, silhouettes are probably the only thing I can really point to as a steadfast rule. Not just the silhouette of the character as a whole, but the silhouettes of the objects they're wearing and how they relate to each other. Let's take one of the images youve posted as an example:




The size, shape and value(on the grayscale) of these elements relate nicely to each other. We have varying amounts of each with the gambeson being both the largest piece of physical clothing and the single dominant colour proportinally, with secondary accents in the armour, and tertiary accents in the yellow belt, trim and collar.

Balancing these two levels of silhouettes is in my opinion the only universal principle in good design. Besides that, even though you don't necessarily need to "Draw" any of the below, you will have these other things to consider depending on what you want to achieve visually. One good reason to have a rendered character is to see that these design elements will actually work when everything is lit, as something can sound good on paper and in line but look awful when its animated, modelled or lit: 

Colour palette (This will partially be determined by your silhouettes above and some elements below. For example, if you have made a design with a lot of small detailed elements of varying materials, theres a chance your colour palette could suffer as a result. You might have a lot of competing colours as a result. So, your palette should also follow good design similarly to the silhouette example above; think of one dominant colour or hue with 2 or 3 secondary ones to accent and complement the main one)

Material variety (examples: placing metal beside fabric, layering types or colours of fabric, using one kind of material exclusively vs multiple types etc), 

clothing construction (types of seams, buttons, patterns and embroideries; how clothing is made using those different elements; thinking about why a specific material might be used in a specific spot or on certain kinds of design etc)

Historicity, culture and practicality ( how historically/culturally based is your design? how practical would it be to actual use? Does that matter for your design or is your only goal something new and unique?)

Character posture and expression. It can be important to distinguish characters not just by their clothing or items they have, but how they stand, compose themselves, or interact with other characters (potentially) (In Disney animations for example, this often takes precedence over some of the above elements. This is less important in video games more often than not, or only really takes importance when its being animated in some form)

Theme (If your design is part of a larger body, do they work well together? Do characters of the same region/faction etc feel cohesive?)

Uniqueness or identifiers (Some characters might have a feature, item or piece of clothing that distinguishes them from everyone else in a universe and is unique to them. You can see this a lot in hero-type characters. Other characters might have an identifier that shows they're part of a certain group, like an emblem or specific weapon type)

Story related (If you're working on something that ties into a plotline, consider where the character is in that particular moment of the story, and how this might be reflected in their design. For example, In starwars, the change in luke's clothing from the first film to the last)

And possibly a bunch of other things I'm forgetting :) But that should be a good starting point. From here, find images of things you like, do a study of said thing and take notes on what you think is going on with the design or what you like about it, keeping those points above in mind. It can be a real object like a historical armour, or a design for a game or movie that you like and think is succesfull, or literally anything else. Even trees, bones, or other random things in nature can have good design that you can pull from!

Cheers and can't wait to see what you do next

[Amit Dutta]

Hey Vick, welcome to the daggers. Patrick gave you a crapload of good resources and suggestions already. (Also...hey Patrick...long time no see!! glad to see you back :) )

One of the things I noticed in your drawings so far is that more attention could be paid to the construction of your basic primitive 3D forms. You have some pretty good drawings there, but some more iffy ones, some issues with perspective, form, and even general figure proportions. Many people teach or tell you that the ability to visualise and draw basic 3d forms in correct perspective is the fundamental base off which you can start building solid looking figures or creatures or whatever you might want to draw. Boiling complex forms into boxes, spheres, cylinders etc. It all starts with solid construction in a perceived 3d space.

I haven't used this resource myself, being predominantly an enviro guy, but Krenz Cushart is one that is always mentioned specifically for the 3d Simplification of figure work. Ofc this can be applied to drawing any 3d object well in a 2D plane.
https://gumroad.com/krenzcushart

Another more basic series of exercises is drawabox.com. It may seem too basic, but it really aims at the key fundamentals of 3d form building, line control etc and the exercises will help your general drawing abilities.

And ofc the bible of technical perspective is Scott Robertson's How to Draw.
There's a lot of stuff on technical perspective here too https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/perspect1.html but ....yeah you either get through it, or you don't :)

I would also be remiss in not recommending Dorien Iten, who published a great simplified tutorial on accuracy training. https://gumroad.com/dorianiten
He has other videos as well, but for studies and how to analyze in a more classical way what you are looking at if using ref or from life, this one is priceless....and it is priceless. Legend!

With your 3d knowledge, you can and should totally use 3d models to refer to to help your studies. Doing exercises where you do line drawings of things like turnarounds of specific study objects, organic or otherwise will really help you create and check your own work from a sense of 3d form and perspective. It can be limiting to do this just from a single static photo, but we all work within our limitations.

Also Croquis cafe on Youtube has "live" video poses and turnarounds that are much better than static photos if you are doing figure studies
https://www.youtube.com/user/onairvideo

That's all study stuff.

The only other thing I would suggest without seeing more of your work is to try and complete some finished line drawings every so often (once a week, once a month?) in the way you envisage you want your skills to progress towards. It's only through repeated evaluation of our current weaknesses that we can decide what needs work and what doesn't. If all you end up doing is studies, you really won't have a good sense of what is lacking in a more general sense. Make the work you want to do! Evaluate and then tailor your study! Many people get caught in the study loop without testing themselves adequately in how they are tracking towards their goal. Don't make that mistake. Take time to try to make work that is your own, and isn't study.

Take the time to evaluate (ask for crits if you have trouble) and identify where your weak spots are. Then try and address those weak spots in future study. The more iterations of this cycle you can do the quicker you will improve.

Good luck and welcome again!

[AfricanVoodoo]

Hey dude! Welcome to CD! I'm very happy there are already two people who are giving you so much info and support on how to be a better 2D artist. I'm grateful for that. Your 3D work is very excellent and you have already established that you know your shit. But 2D is a different ballpark unfortunately and I hope CD can guide you to your desired level of drawing! 

 Your figures excel in gesture and rhythmic linework but, similar to what Amit said, not that much in terms of 3D forms and construction. I am in a very similar rut where I am good at flow and loose gesture but that's it. I am currently trying to alleviate that problem by just constructing my figures out of cubes and cylinders first and then go in with the drawing. And also reading some figure drawing books like Hampton and McMullan and Hampton and the "Force" series and Hampton.

BUT, It's great that you got gesture down well because that is genuinely the hardest yet most important part of drawing the human figure, so good job on that. It is super hard to find that happy medium between solid forms and gesture but you just gotta... chug through it y'know. (Also, 1000 drawings in THAT amount of time?! Nice work bro!)

I got some misc. shit that you can check out:

Fresh Designer - A webiste that has photos of the human figure and portraits. Double the fun.

Karl Gnass - You've probs heard of him, but he has some good tips on figure drawing

Color Supply - I just found this thing and I thought it would be cool to share it. Sorry for it not being figure drawing related.
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[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS-5A3Veue4]ModernDayJames - A Youtube channel where the guy generally focuses on structure and adding volume unto everything. I think he's cool

And that's all because i have no idea how to fix that coding issue up there. I hope this helps! Bye bye!

[vickgaza]

Oh my days guys honestly thank you so much for taking the time to link all those resources and breakdown steps and methodology. Honestly this is exactly what I was hoping for. I swear if someone tells me CD forums are dead onem ore time I`ll kick them in the knee :)) 

Also sorry for not replying sooner but I was really busy, but rest assured I read all posts more than twice and will refer back to them as I progress.
I will be posting art in big chunks like maybe once a month, as if I`m taking photos of drawings or spending time online too much it will just disrupt my flow. That said I do studies everyday as much as possible. Sometimes less sometimes work depending on my actual 3D job.

I`m currently going over a list of topics that are most important too tackle and will try to do stacks of 20 hours of deliberate practice on each topic. Once a month I`ll try to post the progress and number of hours.

So far I will focus on 20h in each category:

• gestures with least amount of lines - nice warmups anyway
  
• robo beans - Proko - also will use them as warmups
  
• manequin 3d volumes drawings - Proko (this will be my main practice/focus activity for the next 2 months at least)
  
• 5-30 minute life drawings for fun (photos and life drawing - company pays for a weekly session)
  
• copying artists that I like (when i`m too tired or bored, I`ll just copy in pencil artists that I admire)
  

I`ll post a bit more soon, but for now my lunchbreak is done :))

Again, thank you so so much, I`ll make sure I make it worth your guys time for posting all the help :D

[vickgaza]

Hello again,

Long time no reply, but I`m still here :D 

So this is a dump of images that I finished drawing BEFORE I posted here and got feedback, so basically what I drew in November.
 I will be posting the most recent batch (December) soon , I just wanted to post what I had from before so that I`m up to date :D

It`s insane how much time I spent doing drawings that I haven`t learned much from, in December, simply by doing a drawing from reference and trying to redo it from memmory has taught me so much more than copying like a mental patient during November. But it`s fine not all is lost, it was a good lesson to do some pointless drawings too :)

Happy new year guys and next time I will post will be with the drawings did after I applied all the feedback from you. 
Hopefully I`ve done it justice.

Vick.

[vickgaza]

Continuing the stream of drawings, this is what I`ve done during December 2017.
These are some of the better ones , I`ve left out the tonnes of quick poses and really shitty ones. Left Proko Mannequin exercises and some more manequins done from a book of a french author - the book is called Morpho.

Basically I`m not learning to do stuff from my head, I`m still relying too much on photos so I will try to focus a but more on doing stuff from imagination in the future, even if it looks less pretty. 

January is going to be hectic both at work and moving house so I doubt I`ll do much this month but either way I`ll do my best to squeeze in some studies. 

Feedback and thoughts are welcome as always, but for now I think it`s clear - study more, foundations more :)
Also lots and lots of cubes ! 

[Fedodika]

Hey Vick! I like that you're doing this proko stuff and it seems to be putting itself together well. big thing i notice in here is an inconsistency with the individual parts you lay down, particularly the heads. Id reccomend getting a sheet and just doing heads from one angle side by side and noticing and fixing your issues as you go along; also checking a diagram of heads to note changes and proportions. 

Also your gestures are quite stiff, but you are headed in the right direction for sure. Just try and get a swooshing motion and try to maintain that swoosh as much as you can

Here watch these 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07fusT-dwVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OWLT0_i5Co

"be water my friend" 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJMwBwFj5nQ