Knight's sketchbook

[darktiste]

Timing study is important in the idea that you are building a moment where there is little to no distraction you don't go on social media or anwers the phone.This as to do with not breaking the momentum you are building as you work.

Also if before hand you have set goal for your next time seasson which are aim either toward ''skill maintenance'' or ''building new fundation''

I find that exploration is more of a spontaneous thing which can be derailling as it generate alot of excitement it like opening alot of tab inside your brain. I think it where taking note is important and making a habit to not only write note but come back to them. Sometime it can prove difficult because your thought are in a infantile state so they are not even communicate that well with your memory of what they meant the moment they where wrote down. Making note is an important skill under use by artist because they might tend to be more visual communicator and it hard for other artist to quantify how much you leak the skill in itself it because it very much personal in general and rarely ever shown.

Building momentum in study is important to keep yourself rolling and interested but having thing to look up forward to is also great that generate exitement but it can also build stress the problem is gauging the level of preparation and when to stop over thinking. You don't want to work 24/7 you want to have space where you can disconnect from the project without loosing yourself in that space because it a coping space to procrastinate. So even timing the time you reward yourself as somewhat of an importance. Being slave to a schedule is a problem in itself. So i think i already said alot there so think about it and since i don't want this to overwelm you or confuse you with something that end up sounding incoherent i best if i try to keep this short.


I think very honest priorization of fundamental that scream at you is important to address.If you are not accountable to yourself because you fear your own weak spot you need to be more authentic i think people under estimate the amount of ''violence'' necessary to level up there skill.By violence it mean art come with a deal of sacrifice and breaking your own skin from time to time not to stagnate. Obviously you don't have to do thing that are not contributing to your long-term goal but it can be hard to evaluate the benefit of doing certain thing specially if the project is a very large one.

Think of everything having a positive and a negative if you feel like you need to address something it can be hard to determine the benefit without doing it so looking outward for people who did similar thing is a good place to look for anwers but the answers come from you always. Each situation is were own.

[Leo Ki]

Uh-ho, this last speed painting exorcism would indeed serve the graphic novel very well. Straight to story telling, no drowning into details. I would just refine the eyes a little bit further as a focal point. Thank you for the info dump, I really didn't mean to pry but I also exaggeratedly enjoy discussing settings and what-ifs and the consequences of these and the consequences of the consequences...

The Vess-inspired WIP already has perfectly readable volume and light. You even have the skin-diffused terminator lines at this early stage! It is more stern and dramatic than the original, I like it. Sketchbook - Stunning fabric and hair renders! With just a pencil. Impossible. Smiling at the enjoyable salad of legs and lizards, I suggest also drawing mermaids with very long twisted tails.

Timed practice: I hate the pressure but I love it when something readable comes out which I would have never made this way taking my time. It also teaches efficiency which is vital in a comic, but utmost efficiency has a dark side: It can stick one in a rut and kill imagination.

Amazed again at all the advice you provide here and there.

[dimensional-knight]

@darktiste

Ok. That's in line what I'm trying to do. I used to struggle with building momentum for this kind of practice, but I think I got the hang of it.

I might still face a little more trouble with these figures than with the portraits because I've been doing them late at night and sometimes I'm too tired, but I don't think I'll completely drop the ball here, just skip the days I'm dead to catch up later.


@Leo Ki

Timed practice: I hate the pressure but I love it when something readable comes out which I would have never made this way taking my time. It also teaches efficiency which is vital in a comic, but utmost efficiency has a dark side: It can stick one in a rut and kill imagination.

I'm lazy. Taking the shortest path is my natural mode. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I only ever take my time when I don't have a more efficient approach. It's not that I actively hate sinking time into something, it's just that efficiency is better for time constraints and health. And you know... laziness.

Uh-ho, this last speed painting exorcism would indeed serve the graphic novel very well. Straight to story telling, no drowning into details. I would just refine the eyes a little bit further as a focal point.

(snip)

Smiling at the enjoyable salad of legs and lizards, I suggest also drawing mermaids with very long twisted tails.

Thanks! I'm trying to keep it more sleek, with fewer almost-nervous-breakdown brushstrokes like my default.

Funny you mentioned mermaids! The woman in the water is a folklore figure and yes, a mermaid. That sketch is to keep a more complex idea of her with her full tail in view at bay for now.

I think I'll still tweak this one, add a water lily here and there so it's not so empty because it's a bit too plain for an illustration. Are the eyes bad? I'm a sucker for fuzzy eyes.

The Vess-inspired WIP already has perfectly readable volume and light. You even have the skin-diffused terminator lines at this early stage! It is more stern and dramatic than the original, I like it.

They're so cheap to include (overlay or color dodge) and help to keep skin from looking distractingly dead while you work elsewhere! I also include a couple of hue shifts this early for the same reason. My brain breaks if I try to work on volume-less pieces, and tiny hue+values shift carry a lot of curvature information.

I went full drama because she's an immortal being first and foremost, and a pretty pissed one in the beginning.

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Minor update on the Stardust piece. I try to move from worst area to next worst area so I don't neglect the unfun parts too badly. In the last post it was the barely suggested dress. Next are hands.

I'm using the chance to try new sketching brushes as I solve the outfit. Right fits better the original strong rim lights I envisioned, but I don't like the contrast. Top-rim lights as if from the hair look considerably less flatter. Left has fill light-derived shading only, the outfit planning sketch (red = shapes, white = concentred highlights) + a couple of warps previewing general corrections.



The sleeves were inspired by this lovely take on traditional hanfu sleeves. I'll explore a closer folding pattern in the next outfit pass, but I don't think it'll work because a large part of their appeal lies in the pose and hidden hands.



I graduated to hands and feet for the figures, by the way. It's a lot of the same, I'll only post something when I have complete page spreads that are readable at least.

[darktiste]

I have done a post on momentum but i called it being in the flow.You can find the post here https://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-5494.html i suggest you take alot at it if you keep struggling to build momentum. Of course a bit of meditation can also help you develop an inner dialogue this help you build up accountability toward yourself but for any meaningful inner dialogue to occur you must have an honest hearth and you must not be driven by the sub conscious urge.Here a post for once you have develop tha capacity to describe what your intension(Goal) are https://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-4107.html

And to finish just to address something the quality of work is as good as the quality of your mind and energy.Drawing before sleep might not be the best time if you are trying to memorize something as your awareness could be low but it is said that before sleep we sometime review what we learn so it also not such a straight foward problem it really depend if you are lethargic or no.Just because it bed time doesn't mean you are not full of energy... it not just a time thing it the quality of the time you practice inside that affect how much attention and effort you can put in whatever you are doing.

[RottenPocket]

(and this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up so bad at legs)

Shhhhh...

[dimensional-knight]

(and this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up so bad at legs)

Shhhhh...

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Timid progress on the water piece. Exploring sharp geometric background details to match the character. Quick lily pad clipping masks made in Blender because no way I'd waste so much brainpower tracing perspective guides just for them.




Sharpened her a little, still want to touch up something here and there while hoping I don't overwork her.

[Leo Ki]

Aw I was too slow to reply to your previous post. I didn't mean that her eyes were bad, only that imagining the image as a comic panel my eyes would be drawn first to her face, then too quickly to the bright green stroke at the top because her eyes are fuzzy. Now that I know she's a mermaid though, and fish eyes can be fuzzy...

Your last version is excellent, I don't think you need to touch anything any more (unless you wanted it to be a standalone illustration that told the whole story).

I like the more angular drapery (on the left) because I find it more fitting to the character's mood as you described it. I also like the texture of the charcoal-like highlights even though I suppose you will make them more silk-like. I also agree with you that using the top lighting is more solid.

[mechapark12]

(and this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you end up so bad at legs)

Shhhhh...

---

Timid progress on the water piece. Exploring sharp geometric background details to match the character. Quick lily pad clipping masks made in Blender because no way I'd waste so much brainpower tracing perspective guides just for them.



Sharpened her a little, still want to touch up something here and there while hoping I don't overwork her.

Wow you can clearly see she's the main focal point in the image. :)

[dimensional-knight]

Aw I was too slow to reply to your previous post.

*ninja*

Aw I was too slow to reply to your previous post. I didn't mean that her eyes were bad, only that imagining the image as a comic panel my eyes would be drawn first to her face, then too quickly to the bright green stroke at the top because her eyes are fuzzy. Now that I know she's a mermaid though, and fish eyes can be fuzzy...

Wow you can clearly see she's the main focal point in the image. :)

It's easier to get away with making the character a menacing presence on an empty scene, but once I added the lily pads I had to sharpen her and her eyes anyway because the viewer focus is no longer a half arc — without changes it'd bounce everywhere on her sides.

Your last version is excellent, I don't think you need to touch anything any more (unless you wanted it to be a standalone illustration that told the whole story).

I want to try add a little extra plane separation to her through hue shifting and finish cleaning up the un-skewing I did. She was getting seriously deformed by doing painting passes over a loose sketch. Plus I'll try out some water lily flowers, which are bright, so I might need to put a little extra focus on her to counter them. Let's see.

I like the more angular drapery (on the left) because I find it more fitting to the character's mood as you described it. I also like the texture of the charcoal-like highlights even though I suppose you will make them more silk-like. I also agree with you that using the top lighting is more solid.

Agree on everything, even on the appeal the white sketch highlights. I wish I knew how to keep that energetic and effortless look on finished pieces!

---

Got around taking photos of the figure studies. First my latest hands on the new sketchbook, which I got to try the brand as a potential moleskine substitute and really wanted to love... but was forced to lightly sand so the paper is able to keep any graphite at all (look at the first unsanded page). It's so slippery! 






Feet silhouettes and half hand page on previous sketchbook.






I struggle with angles involving palm foreshortening and wanted to find a more natural way to structure the hands, so I tried something I've been stewing over for a while: Tracing.

It feels weird and wrong and I keep repeating "its like écorché, but for planes!" to myself, yet it is helpful. It's a good way to explore how to approach the subject and get used to unusually angled lines and overlaps. This was done between old and new sketchbook.

[darktiste]

If you want to practice foreshorten you could take a serie of Burst shot using a camera that as this function.Basically all you would have to do is set a delay or ask someone to be a model or you they take the picture and you model.The idea would be that you go from a profile to a foreshorten position will the burst shot are being taken.This way you get a slow collection of reference that goes more and more into foreshorten.

An other option if you want to study foreshorten would be to buy high quality 360 angel model of real people and simply change the camera position to get different degree of foreshorten.(Require 3d model software+model)

Or maybe you can exchange service to someone for them to be your model and you draw them live you just gotta get creative with what ever resource you have.

The problem with tracing is that it only as good as the reference will there is more flexiblity to obtain what ever pose you require if you have the option to take photo of someone.So i think it always easier and cheaper to just take your own photo and everyone pretty much as a phone so there is no real excuse not to try to find someone to be your model.You can probably even do the modelling yourself using delay and putting the camera in portrait mode where it invert the camera toward the user so this way you can see yourself and adjust to your need.

Good luck and i hope you found my advise useful.

[dimensional-knight]

@darktiste

Interesting idea. That fist closed around a rod I drew over and over again is a 3D scan. I did something similar, but only for points of view I find challenging.

I'll try that when I repeat this exercise with feet. Been experiencing some difficult foreshortening them when they're flat on the ground, plus I need to find good landmarks for the soles.

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Now that I know she's a mermaid though, and fish eyes can be fuzzy..

Hey Leo, this one is for you!



I'll see myself out.

Oh, and a minor composition thing. Not sure if I'll go this way, but lessons about value grouping were learned from that test forest painting. Laser focus (B) experimentation through values:

[Leo Ki]

Her fresh fish eyes are lovely, just missing the dorsal fin on top of the head now :P

Value grouping version B with the darker woods works for me but it suddenly makes me want to see some highlights on the lower vegetation from the light reflecting off the water. I'll revise my position once you have the bright flowers on the floating leaves though, as this is going to change the balance.

Sketches of hands: I could say that some look a bit made of rubber, but as you said it helps more to investigate why they do. Were you a rubber tree in a previous life? Have you been working mostly at Disney? I'm out of clues... It takes an accomplished teacher to trace back to the roots.

Tracing. You probably know that old masters traced using a special optic device through which they saw both the model and their canvas. I do some tracing once in a while when I want to untangle complex things, especially, yes, foreshortenings. However, each time, I fail to learn from the exercise because it doesn't let me comprehend the volumes and structure.

Comics are even more of a special case because the panels have to be readable fast, and many foreshortenings gain in being hugely simplified and transformed based on structure rather than actual aspect. Furthermore, a comic being thousands of images, the reader has plenty of time to adjust to the author's particular simplification tricks, and I think it works fine in the long run.

[dimensional-knight]

Sketches of hands: I could say that some look a bit made of rubber, but as you said it helps more to investigate why they do.

What do you mean? Is it the shape or the (lack of) rendering?

Comics are even more of a special case because the panels have to be readable fast, and many foreshortenings gain in being hugely simplified and transformed based on structure rather than actual aspect. Furthermore, a comic being thousands of images, the reader has plenty of time to adjust to the author's particular simplification tricks, and I think it works fine in the long run.

Yeah. Readers are very forgiving, and I'd argue in favour of just picking a different gesture with a clear silhouette  in these cases because you don't want them getting hung on a harder to read gesture, decoding meaningless details, in this type of medium.

Tracing. You probably know that old masters traced using a special optic device through which they saw both the model and their canvas. I do some tracing once in a while when I want to untangle complex things, especially, yes, foreshortenings. However, each time, I fail to learn from the exercise because it doesn't let me comprehend the volumes and structure.

I understand the purpose of tracing, it's just some stupid ingrained aversion trying to get in the way.

I can't say how helpful it is yet, but it's surely a "safer" targeted way to try out different ways to represent structure, besides getting your eyes used to seeing weird poses in your style so you don't unconsciously shy away from the involved angles later on. Kinda like easing yourself into a cold body of water, slowly but surely.

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I followed darktiste's suggestion of turning around my tracing study subject. It's similar to the multiple angles approach I tried earlier and it's certainly cool to look at, though to be honest if feels a bit wasteful. I think I like more targeted studies better.

I used the opportunity to investigate if using white highlights instead of more lines to represent curvature-through-light like I do for some fabrics improves readability, and yes, absolutely. Got to think of a way of doing that on paper now.



I'm getting slightly better at foreshortening hands now by the way. Planning how the wrist connects to the palms and identifying the finger leading the hand's action helps immensely with foreshortening them. I borrowed that approach to the feet above, making up a bit of leg the original 3D scan is missing.

[darktiste]

Certainly the foreshorten get harder and more interesting as the complexity increase just foot or just feet is not the most challenging so certainly it can feel repetitive but just think of a bit of twisting and overlapping in the finger and it can get less repetitive.Of course the most overlap occuring in the finger.Less twisting is involve with the toe by contrast.But there little more lenght in the foot than the hand but what great about the feet is the complexity of the form.There is a diverse level of challenge in each targed study.

[dimensional-knight]

I disagree on both points.

Doing multiple drawings for the odd two that might be challenging is very wasteful. It doesn't matter if the subject is more complex if you're sweating over very specific things cropping up only on brief occasions.

But there little more lenght in the foot than the feet but what create about the feed is the complexity of the form

Overlaps may be more complex than a continuous foreshortened surface, but they help a lot with perspective. It's not that I consider myself good at overlapping folded fingers, it's that I'm exceptionally bad at compressing flat masses. Case in point, back of hands with less complex fingers, which should be less challenging by your measure, and more complex fingers:




It's not repetitiveness I mind and I feel you're putting too much emphasis on smoothing out the wrinkles in the process that'd bother you, which don't bother me at all. Sometimes the detour you're suggesting to avoid the fatigue you'd feel is the kind of stuff that grates me. I can do boring just fine.

This type of turnaround exercise is good for understanding the logic of the structure underlying a gesture; it's for when you can't see it. This is not the crux of my issue. I'm failing because I'm not representing it well. I'm giving attention to the wrong elements; When given the choice of representing one out of two planes I'm picking the wrong one, no mystery here.

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Just to post something, the feet I managed to squeeze between work today. Working out how to represent soles (go back to my legs and look at feet seen from behind/below to understand why this I'm working on it), plus a couple of weird angles I've never draw and angles I should master by now because they crop up on concept art all the time.

[darktiste]

Sorry i have slight dyslexia what you read was sadly not how is should have read as... so it been corrected what i am saying is that you don't have to do those turn around what you want is to find something that look challenging not the a degree that impossible for you or just out of your depth something that as complexity as you go by increasing the foreshortening, the overlapping and the twisting.

Anatomy is certainly not the domain i should give advise on and i should recognise that by now if you know your own weakness power to you i can't advise you any exercise that you don't want to do for x,y,z reason i just think you should consider that exercise pro and con might not show themselve right away being to hasty about certain exercise regiment isn't advise not that i know anything about your knowledge of such exercise maybe you did a ton of it i couldn't know that...

[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.

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.

The lack of some leg in the model, especially the ankle bulges, is a bummer, but you reintroduced them in some of your drawings, it really helps anchoring the foot to the limb.

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.

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

[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

[darktiste]

I think detail are the 10%. The right approch is a sound structure and the proper form is the 90% if you feel like you got the 90% in the bag than it mean you are ready for thr 10%.

I think what you might be loosing is the gesture if you feel like they aren't as lively as they could be.I think gripping pose tend to look like they are not as lively as let say a graceful hand where the finger fan out but it also about how tense you make the finger look just take for example a loose hand on the side of the body vs a hand gripping around a object i think studying from a more loose grip toward a more stiff grip could help gage how much ''gesture'' goes throught the hand one thing that can get miss is the string of the hand they play a big part in how stiff looking the hand will feel or relax and is also the range of motion might be something to look into because i think it where you can get a bit of a mechanic look if you don't imply the folding of the finger correctly considering how they skin create bumb or flatten as they strench or compress.One visual exercise for you is to bend one of your finger and look at it closely i mean like one thumb distance from your nose at your finger want you want is to look at the silhoutte.Also try to avoid straight line this is just bad art 101 when doing anything organic.

This book as some nice observation of the shape of the hand i would recommed but it kinda expensive compare to other book and it not for artist but sculptor.Not everyone as the same budjet so i just leave it here.

[dimensional-knight]

Yep! At first I was just outlining the form to get used to it and getting a sense of what sort of sketch carries useful information because aphantasia makes it very hard to see volume without certain types of landmarks to anchor my mind.

Now I'm doing more gesture-like studies, investigating how joints influence fat, how I can get better lines of action, this kind of thing. Of course, sometimes foreshortening, misplaced or not familiar enough features get in the way, so I'll take a break to get them to a level they stop interfering in studies.

I've been looking a lot at Leyendecker's work and his masterful simplification of forms too.