Here are some of my drawings. Lately I tend to wanting to better my digital skills as it allows more flexibility. I've included some paper sketches and drawing too. The most recent ones are the Tony Soprano portrait (from reference), the wood study and the Zangief (big muscular hairy guy) drawing, all completed this week. All of them are drawing from 2021 to 2024
As you can see, I have an interest in portrait and figure drawing.
My main goals are :
- improving my anatomy and folds knowledge
- improving my digital rendering abilities to tend towards a more realistic/polished render
- improving my capacity to draw from imagination in order to create more
- becoming better at drawing
nice studies! especially mannikin poses are looking really good!
with the brushes, try using a simple round brush, but not 100% hard. you need some softness to it in order to get one stroke to merge with the next, giving you control over making a softer or harder edge. I honestly find it easier to paint with a slightly textured brush, than just a circle, but I know a lot of people want to start out without texture brushes for probably good reasons. I can tell in the eye study some parts are like way too hard, and some are blurred. Neither look particularly good because it needs to emulate the exact transition between colors to make the form, and neither blurred nor super hard is 100 percent the right effect.
You can also try zooming out more, and painting kind of squinting or unfocusing your eyes a bit. That way the softness is supplied by your eye instead of the brush, and you can focus on the values without being distracted by the overlapping hard edges. When you zoom in again the strokes might not look pretty, but it should get the job done.
Try to respect the scale of object as they are in the reference or make the reference to suit the size you want.It easier to critic your work when thing are at a 1 / 1 ratio.
The low eye lid is significantly different in shape you can notice the wrinkle and the color of the eye lid specially of on the left side is to red also. The color that radiate from the middle of the eye toward the outside goes more toward the edge.
Also you could have tried to add the reflection found in the eye made by the eye leashes but i give you that they are not really noticeable unless you zoom in and look at the micro detail.
The shape of the eye lid lips toward the left is to thic and curvy.Will the top eye lid toward the left is larger and less aggressive in it curvature when it should be.The shape is closer to an oval that was flatten at it top you made the curve like the shape of a symbolic eye.
You made the eye a bit like 3% to open when it look more relaxed.That one is just me over analyzing haha =P.
@JosephCow Thank you for this very interesting feedback! Yeah I tried some textured brushes but I feel like they are more difficult to blend colors with. It was some time ago I sure will give it a shot. It's true that I have trouble picking the right softness for the right spot. I know that with a pencil and paper I could recreate pretty well a gradient from a reference but somehow I'm not this confortable with Digital painting yet. I really like what you advised about zooming out and squinting/unfocusing my eyes. I indeed realized that a lot of my 'problems' while rendering were because of me focusing too much or too early on details, while forgetting the Big picture. Thanks a lot! I'll try to remember and apply this very soon
@darktiste Thank you for overanalyzing ahah that's why we're here for! Sorry about the 1:1 ratio thing, I scaled down the reference for the export in order to put the artwork in the spotlight lol. Thanks for the critique! Yes I lost a lot of the overall shape of the eye in the process... My paintings tend to "spill" if I'm not extra careful. Will pay attention to that next Time. Thanks you again!
About loosing detail if you want make sure you keep your initial sketch separate on it own layer you can afterward make a new layers for the painting stage take the initial sketch layers and lower the layer opacity and put the layer on top of the painting layers this way you dont loose anything from the initial construction once thing get to a cleaning stage you just turn off the initial sketch and start to clean up the edgework where lineart was previously.
One thing i will add to add to the comment from JosephCow is try to pay more attention to color use the squint tactic to simplify the color range it also help you spot the value differential.
One thing you can also do to improve your color is to do the inverted method basically you put your reference and drawing upside down and you focus only a specific aspect of the drawing let say color this way your not distracted by the image since you are interpreting something that more abstract for the brain.You can do the same to improve the quality of a line to avoid simplifying what you see.
So the first study I did in Photoshop yesterday using a textured brush as JosephCow suggested. for those who may wonder the original image is NiaArchives' album cover of her latest album "silence is loud". I didn't bother with the eylashes and highlights in the eye because I had to go to sleep
Then a friend of mine suggested that I tried Krita. As he's an overwatch fan I drew Roadhog. The brushes have very realistic and cool effects. I used a pastel textured one. Some of you may be Krita heads and have some brushes or technique to recommand ?
Ok so I'm working on this character design. I posted in my sketchbook introduction message a design of a "vampire hunter" I did without really thinking about it, a couple of years ago.
So the idea is pretty basic: take the same character brief/idea and create something a little bit more well-made.
About the character:
His name is Vladislav. He's a pious man who hunts vampires. He's experienced, self-assured and sometimes arrogant. In reality, Vladislav's faith is put to the test and his never-ending quest makes him question himself. As his body urges him to leave this life behind, he discovers clues to the existence of a supreme vampire, the source of all evil in this world. Who is this mysterious being? Is the death of this creature the key to inner peace for Vladislav?
I read a bit about Dracula, vampires in general and tried to use that information. My character evolves in what could be Romania, during the late XIVth/XVth century. I found out that Vladislav was the name of the man who inspired the character of Dracula so I thought it'd be a fun reference.
I focused the costume designs around 3 aspects :
- How do you protect yourself physically from a vampire? You need to have your neck protected. You're not fighting a dragon, a vampire is agile and strikes by surprise. Protect yourself, but not too heavily!
- The owl and the hawk are 2 predators of the bat. (feathers, hawk-shaped helmet...) I tried to incorporate it in how Vladislav look too.
- Religion
I can't quite decide which costume to go with for the moment. My favorites are the 3 of the top row with a slight preference for the 3rd one. I'll work with colors once I chose one
Great sketchbook here! Really loving the variety of figure studies as well as your style in general. The 'Street Fighter' illustrations are brilliant as well, you captured the style of the game while making them your own, good stuff!
Nice! I think I like the first costume the best. top left. I think it's a flattering shape for this character. I really like the idea of incorporating hawk/owl motifs into the design and the first design doesn't have a ton of that, but I think it would be cool to incorporate that somehow.
Btw definitely seeing some improvement on the panting edges. I like the effect the krita pastel brushes give to the stylized work. I also use Krita, but honestly I don't have any specific brush recs I just have a few go-tos but I haven't really tried that many different brush sets. The default brushes are honestly pretty good.
@cgmythology Thank you! Your art is jaw dropping so it means a lot from you! I'll check your sketchbook more in details when I have time to :)
@JosephCow Yeah the first design is one of my favorite too. The rough idea for the hawk-owl concept on this one was to make claw-like "shoes" with a pointy part towards the ground. I don't know if it'll work but that was the idea haha... For the moment I'm trying to clean up one or two of them and figuring out a color scheme. I'll post that when it's done before trying to render to collect feedback or just share and keep track.
Yeah I'm getting used to the brush and I figured that you can tweak them pretty strongly to what you need so the main pack of brushes is plus than okay. Thank you for the feedback Joseph :)
Line art clean-up is done. Experementing with color schemes now, it's been 15 min but I need to sleep on it and open the file with a fresh eye tomorrow!
