I've got a rough study plan in my head starting out with general drawing skills with Drawabox exercises and figure drawing studies (from photos, Loomis etc.).
But to kick things off and take stock of where I'm at here's some recent early D&D inspired drawings, (the out there colours are deliberate choices, but colour theory and realism in painting is something thing I'm going to have to look at!).
Interesting start i would recommend also starting to look into to getting use to casting cast shadow.Also it seem like you don't use a tablette the mark making seem to indicate you go over your line which isn't necessary the only way to go about creating line weight if you know how to activate pressure sensivity on a table you could use to have an easier time cleaning up your line.
But it promising i already love the style.Are you yet aware of the principle of design?
I've done a bit of design work in the past as part of the pixel art stuff, and a bit of web design at one point, but with no training or study behind it, just doing it intuitively. My tablet is set up for pressure sensitivity but for the images above I had it set to a very "soft" feel - so it maxed out the pressure very easily and there's not much variation in line.
Here's the first set of Drawabox exercises and some studies with an attempt to push line weight through pressure sensitivity.
The studies show up a few issues I've got with my figure drawing. 1). I tend to straighten poses out subconsciously and lose a bit of dynamism. 2). Working from refrences I've got a tendency to draw people shorter then they actually are and 3). Struggling with hands, head structure and likenesses, which is going to take a lot of study and practice.
I feel like your using to small of a canva or it just that your presentation give this impression this could be why your figure appear shorter than they should be aka ''squeezing'' you can always use a little more drawing space than necessary and than crop the excess.I feel like right now you kinda put to much information on the page that you could put further down your practice seassion and i would suggest to focus your attention on what you know is already being a tendency you can fix and are aware.
For example right now i would ignore light and color aswell as inside anatomy this what you got plenty of more time to fix your proportion if you don't have lot of time to draw and that leave you sometime for other drawing.
As for what i see you don't seem to know about the principle of gesture.So let us know so we might give you book and advise on that topic if you want.Gesture is basically the expression of movement if i have to give a description.
Personally i would heavly focus on the drawbox exercise because they lay down the necessary exercise to start thinking 3d which would benefit everything you do and if you don't have instructor it almost as good as one.Minus the feedback but you could probably sign up for is critic if you want to if that something affortable for you.
Some more Drawabox exercises and gesture studies. Struggled a bit with the freehand perspective exercises so will look at revisiting some of these before moving on to the next lesson.
This is more an observation than it really matter since it hard to tell it more of a subjective interpretation and commenting.
It kinda strange how the light work in your scene because if they are suppose to be in a snow storm there would little to no cast shadow and the snow would be less bright.Also in term of reflection your metal would be also affected because there would be little to no light to reflect due to the cloud and snow .But there also something i might not be considering which would be that it not actually snowing but it a strong wind picking up snow in that case i would say it a matter of trying to imply the story for example the snow on the ground would be more powderous if that even a word and there boot would sink in and you would see ''drap'' like section of snow liftting from the ground.
And lastly there an other final scenario that would make sense it would be that they are above the cloud so in that case we would see the sun and get more contrast.
I think what i am trying to say is that light is one of those thing where you have some room to play with.But that it will not always make sense to everyone who look at it because of the fact that most time it outside the frame which could pose a problem in illustration and storyboarding if it give out the wrong impression than the one your trying to tell throught your light us.
Thanks for your reply to my sketchbook :) Started exploring drawabox because of you!
I don't fully agree with Darktiste, I see his point but I also don't see a problem with it snowing and being daylight at the same time. Weather can be quite local and strange around mountain tops. ;)
However when it comes to this particular image the lighting on the characters doesn't really seem to follow the strong cast shadow that they make. If the light was that strong, the characters would be cast almost in half shadow the way I look at it. It doesn't add up. Look at Mike Mignola for inspiration.
Also the lighting on the mountain top is the opposite of that on the characters. Looks a bit strange, there would have to be an explotion or something on the right of them for it to work, but we don't have that information so they look a little pasted in. Perspective's cool though!
Regarding the talk about lighting and atmosphere, I've got to admit I didn't think too much about it when I drew the picture, sort of making it up as I went along in terms of colour choices. The ground looks like hard rock, but maybe should have had some snow cover, or softer lines to imply snow cover. I can't believe I missed the lighting direction in the foreground and background being in opposite directions! It's all these details that really help sell a scene.
Some value studies from photos. The first one was around 2 1/2 hours, then I decided time would be better spent on more quicker studies, so the rest are all 30 minutes.
This is still probably too long for what I need to focus on: understanding overall form not fine details and focusing on movement and proportion more than accuracy (the same thinking behind doing gesture studies) so I'll look at doing quicker studies again (5-10 minutes?) and think about starting out from building values up on top of gesture drawings.
And the last exercise in Drawabox lesson 1 which yielded mixed results... I found this a lot harder than I thought I would, I assumed I could at least draw a box in perspective... What I realised is that normally if I need to draw a geometric shape in perspective I spend time correcting, re-correcting, drawing over perspective grids etc. Turns out just freehand drawing a box is still tricky for me! So looks like I've got the 250 box challenge to take on next (I might sneak ahead to lesson 2 at some point in the middle of those 250 boxes though to keep a bit of variety).
Looking good! Love these short gesture studies. Also dig the values and rendering on them, especially the longer study.
I'm looking forward to doing the organic perspective exercise as well! Looks like a lot of fun : )
Some more figure studies that came out halfway between gesture drawings and more detailed sketches. I find it much harder to do stripped down gesture drawings like the first set I posted here a couple of weeks back. I tend to overdevelop or erase and redraw without thinking about it. I have to be in a very zen mood to pull them off!
