Crimson Daggers — Art forum

Here goes nothing...

As I've only started working with traditional art (with two art college classes) last year, and finally doing digital art since about a week ago (consistently), I'm going to be horribly sloppy. But I have to start somewhere, need to take baby steps, need to let the fundamentals sink in over many months/years. If I can stay consistent, I hope I can look back on these first couple pages in a few years time and notice major improvements.

All I've really learned at this point is how to observe objects from my art professor. Relationship lines - where and how things match up in space by constantly comparing, analyzing, and filling in the details with a strong focus. With relationship lines, I can see where and why certain things in my drawings are wrong. But even so, I'm still bound to make tons of mistakes, as the mistakes aren't always obvious to me :<

My ultimate goal is to be a manga artist. I get some artists would scoff at that, but I don't care. I fully respect the works of master artists of centuries past, and I keep an open mind about other people's work, so I'd hope people could do the same for me. I actually don't intend to do any "manga" style work until I'm fully confident in doing so. Can't do it until I have tons of essential fundamentals down anyway.

Right now I'm using CtrlPaint, Proko, Sycra, Loomis, Vilppu, Feng Zhu and some CGMA videos I have from attending classes there (of which I completely failed to do the work as I lacked skill/confidence).

Specific exercises I'm doing now: tablet warmups by drawing straight lines/arcs/waves/circles and ellipsis (basically what Peter Han explains here), observing boxes/cylinders and drawing them from imagination, digital still lifes and basic gestures.

Anyway! Huge blocks of text, I know. But I'd like for this sketchbook to have some text rather than just dumping artwork.

---

Oops, forgot to post work I did for CGMA. What little I actually could do, anyway. Movie composition studies, and making a spherical form of an object.

(09-28-2013, 03:07 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]As I've only started working with traditional art (with two art college classes) last year, and finally doing digital art since about a week ago (consistently), I'm going to be horribly sloppy.

C'mon only a week? and they already so good?!

(09-28-2013, 03:07 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]My ultimate goal is to be a manga artist. I get some artists would scoff at that, but I don't care.

We are open minded community no one will complain about that :D

(09-28-2013, 03:07 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]Right now I'm using CtrlPaint, Proko, Sycra, Loomis, Vilppu, Feng Zhu and some CGMA videos I have from attending classes there (of which I completely failed to do the work as I lacked skill/confidence).

Those are amazing resources great choice! Also you can't "fail" in practicing, that's why they are called practices! If you keep drawing often you will get fast progress for sure! Keep posting I'm waiting for more :D

(09-28-2013, 07:55 PM)Madzia Wrote: [ -> ]

(09-28-2013, 03:07 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]As I've only started working with traditional art (with two art college classes) last year, and finally doing digital art since about a week ago (consistently), I'm going to be horribly sloppy.

C'mon only a week? and they already so good?!

(09-28-2013, 03:07 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]My ultimate goal is to be a manga artist. I get some artists would scoff at that, but I don't care.

We are open minded community no one will complain about that :D

(09-28-2013, 03:07 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]Right now I'm using CtrlPaint, Proko, Sycra, Loomis, Vilppu, Feng Zhu and some CGMA videos I have from attending classes there (of which I completely failed to do the work as I lacked skill/confidence).

Those are amazing resources great choice! Also you can't "fail" in practicing, that's why they are called practices! If you keep drawing often you will get fast progress for sure! Keep posting I'm waiting for more :D

Thanks :) My only "edge" is being comfortable using Photoshop, as I've used it for nearly a decade.

The issue I'm finding with using so many resources is that there's many different ways of teaching, and it's very difficult to focus, narrowing things down and try to build exercises or assignments to work on. Basically I'm using Proko for gestures (his work is largely influenced from Loomis/Vilppu), CtrlPaint for basic digital painting, the Loomis/Vilppu books for reference, and the others for mostly notetaking.

I really like the value studies that you show here. That is something that I need to work on. And the texture studies are a good idea too. Looking at your sketchbook is actually helping me learn how to practice. I'd love to see some of your figures. Anyway, great stuff!

Did some stuff. 50 45-second gesture drawings using instruction from Proko, where he wants you to draw the general "feel" of the pose, not worry so much how it looks, and get past all the detail. Well, I tried. Thinking maybe I'll do 1000-1500 more to get it down, rewatch his video for instruction for memorization, then move onto the next steps.

I then did a color still-life with an apple twice. First time was kind of a mess; wasn't sure how to get the general colors and shapes down properly. After looking up some digital painting tutorials, I got the idea to block in colors with a hard brush like this:

[attachment=34288]

and smooth everything out accordingly. This was probably too many colors to work with, but I think I got the general concept. The second apple turned out better IMO, and I could've easily spent another one-two hours refining detail (which I got sloppy on), but I think I'm adjusting to doing digital painting. Which means I should probably do more challenging things...

I've been doing a fair amount of work, just not much of the actual...working thing. Rather, I've been collecting resources (videos/tutorials, websites, etc), but not doing much actual drawing.

It's probably a mix of being lazy/having fear (mostly the latter). For some reason I'm still afraid to fail and make crappy drawings, but that's kind of the whole point of improving. I should be eager to fail, so hopefully someone can point out what I'm doing wrong, or maybe have an idea myself.

I don't think it's entirely for nothing though - I'm taking the time to learn all the skeletal landmarks of the body, as well as anatomy. I'm taking existing pictures and mapping where all the visible skeletal landmarks/anatomy are, and it's helping me figure things out and what to look for. I think it'll help a lot when I really jump into figure drawings.

That said, I did make a crappy digital painting of another apple. Bit off more than I could chew with this one.
[attachment=34640]
I'm wondering if someone can help me figure out how to render out all the gritty details of the apple on the left? I was only using one brush (out of the three from ctrl+paint), and I figure I'd need to use a new brush, do a textured brush, or a differently shaped one. That and it probably would've just taken a lot of time.

Welcome to Crimson Daggers!
Nice studies so far you're value study''s are coming along great considering you just started. On the last apple drawing I think you needed to use a hard brush more and also there's that higlight as well you missed, as for the texturing........god knows XD have'nt figured that out myself, I think it'd be a good idea to group the larger amounts of colour together though and slowly add more and more detail, if that makes any sense.
For your traditional work, i'd suggest you try Micheal Hampton's book sometime, i'm studying him atm and he really goes in-depth on gesture drawing and how to build the figure up over it.
You're on the right track man, keep it up :).

Yaaaay! Another sketchblogger! Much respect ~
You're already off to a great start... really quite remarkable given the amount of times you've drawn in your life as well O_O

Keep it up, I'll be watching 'ya :D!

Hey ohnoes! You have a nice start to your sketchbook so far. I saw you mentioned a fear of failing and just wanted to let you know that is very normal(we do want to be good at this afterall!) and it does take awhile to get the mentality of "failure is good" installed in your brain. It can be rough until you really get it nailed down in your head so hang in there and keep pushing yourself.

It's good that you are learning the skeletal features. Something I recommend to everyone who is learning anatomy is to learn the muscles of the body as well(no skin). There are a lot of them but when you know what exactly what is under the skin and how everything wraps around the bone/eachother, things get much easier!

As for your apple I did a quick step-by-step paintover thing. It got rather long so I'm just gonna put it in spoiler tags so it doesn't clutter your sb

Great start you made here! Additionally to atrenr's awesome paintover, I'd suggest to do some painted studies of basic object shapes like spheres and stuff.
This way it'll become easier for you to distinguish between color changes due to form / shading and texture when doing those fruit studies :)

Wow, thanks for all the replies everyone! I try to go to this site sparingly (so as to prevent slacking off) so I hadn't noticed these until now.

(10-06-2013, 12:49 PM)Triggerpigking Wrote: [ -> ]Welcome to Crimson Daggers!
Nice studies so far you're value study''s are coming along great considering you just started. On the last apple drawing I think you needed to use a hard brush more and also there's that higlight as well you missed, as for the texturing........god knows XD have'nt figured that out myself, I think it'd be a good idea to group the larger amounts of colour together though and slowly add more and more detail, if that makes any sense.
For your traditional work, i'd suggest you try Micheal Hampton's book sometime, i'm studying him atm and he really goes in-depth on gesture drawing and how to build the figure up over it.
You're on the right track man, keep it up :).

Yeah, that makes sense. And I do intend to go through Hampton's book at some point. Maybe not right away, since it just gets to be too much if I utilize too many art books at once.

(10-06-2013, 05:14 PM)smrrfette Wrote: [ -> ]Yaaaay! Another sketchblogger! Much respect ~
You're already off to a great start... really quite remarkable given the amount of times you've drawn in your life as well O_O

Keep it up, I'll be watching 'ya :D!

Thanks :)

(10-06-2013, 07:10 PM)atrenr Wrote: [ -> ]Hey ohnoes! You have a nice start to your sketchbook so far. I saw you mentioned a fear of failing and just wanted to let you know that is very normal(we do want to be good at this afterall!) and it does take awhile to get the mentality of "failure is good" installed in your brain. It can be rough until you really get it nailed down in your head so hang in there and keep pushing yourself.

It's good that you are learning the skeletal features. Something I recommend to everyone who is learning anatomy is to learn the muscles of the body as well(no skin). There are a lot of them but when you know what exactly what is under the skin and how everything wraps around the bone/eachother, things get much easier!

As for your apple I did a quick step-by-step paintover thing. It got rather long so I'm just gonna put it in spoiler tags so it doesn't clutter your sb

Thanks a lot for this! I'm assuming you did the initial steps with the brush tool and not smudge? I'm not sure I could get the same smoothness with the brush I was using. Maybe I need to fix the spacing. And you're right, I forget at times I need to go from general to specific with my drawings/paintings.

(10-07-2013, 03:46 AM)Elif Wrote: [ -> ]Great start you made here! Additionally to atrenr's awesome paintover, I'd suggest to do some painted studies of basic object shapes like spheres and stuff.
This way it'll become easier for you to distinguish between color changes due to form / shading and texture when doing those fruit studies :)

Yeah, will definitely do this at some point! Sooner than later for sure.



So I've made anki decks (spaced-repetiton system for studying/committing to memory) for remembering skeletal landmarks, as well as anatomy. It should help for remembering the names and location of the muscles, but of course, I'll need to start actually drawing the muscles in at some point to get an idea of how they should look.

I've been focusing on figure drawing the past few days. Mainly sticking to Proko's 30-second (doing 45 second for now) and 2-minute drawings. Getting the "feel" of the pose, using fewer but long/important lines, and not trying to care if the drawing's "good" or not. I do care a little bit though sadly :( He recommends to try to draw how he draws (learn through imitation), then draw the pose myself, or vice versa - so that's what I tried here. It's a bit tough, because he applies gesture a little differently each time.

I just need to remember that it's a long-term grind with no real shortcuts. Hope I'm not doing anything radically wrong though - not trying to copy contours. I am trying to keep at least a little conscious of proportion (harder to do/measure when I'm put under a time limit). Proko almost always gets his proportion spot-on, probably because he's done this for years/decades.

First attachment's 100 60-second gesture drawings, then the rest is explained. The last two-min drawings I tried to do messed me up, and I show the model here. I retried it a few times because I was disappointed in it, but then I exaggerated the curves on the last one and it seemed to work better.

One thing I want to get done by next week is build a reference folder and organize it. Want to dump thousands of images into there. Since I want to learn to draw manga, I'll probably be getting a month of pixiv premium so I can start hoarding tons of the popular work they have. I'm already following hundreds of artists, but I haven't bothered downloading anything lol

I've also bought an easel. I'm mainly going to draw myself nude in the mirror every day or every other day. I assume it's the next best thing since all life-drawing sessions are an hour-long drive away :\

Oh, I have a important question: Is there any tips or exercises on drawing boxes/cylinders/cones from the imagination? It sounds a bit silly, but something almost every big artist pushes is being able to draw those objects at any angle/perspective. I've been drawing boxes/cylinder-shaped objects from real life, observing them - but I'm wondering if there's more I can do to try to grasp drawing these objects a bit more.

Haven't drawn as much in the past couple days...I've been trying to reconstruct a curriculum for myself, as I realize I've been spending way too much time finding/watching art-related videos/websites and not enough actual drawing. Resources help, but it's not the only thing I should be doing.

I should also mention I'm trying to learn a language on the side...Certainly makes things a lot tougher to plan out. :[

Here are my current daily assignments:

- Watching Erik Olson's perspective series on New Masters Academy, taking notes and repeating what he's doing for myself at a later time so that I fully grasp the material. I wanted a full, extensive series of videos on perspective that also kind of holds the hands of the student, and this seems to be it, as he carefully explains what he's doing and goes over what he did at the end just to make sure it sticks. Perspective is a core fundamental that I don't think I should pass off and try to get away with by "kind of" knowing how to do it. That said, I want to blitz through these videos as soon as possible and start practicing what he's teaching on my own. There's a lot of videos though..

Also, if there's any point at which he gets too technical and I can't figure it out, I have a backup plan. Not quite as extensive, but should be helpful nonetheless.

- Warmups: drawing lines/arcs/waves/ellipsis, drawing boxes/cylinders from real-life and from the imagination. I should start taking the latter more seriously. Perhaps drawing objects from real-life and converting them to boxes/cylinders.

- 50/100 gesture drawings (preferably 100) for up to 65 seconds or more. What I want to try to do soon is taking perhaps 1 or 2 of the best gesture drawings I made, then building everything I can on top of that (cylinders/boxes for the body parts, drawing in the anatomy, and finish with the contour/cleaning up). This will easily take a lot of time to do at first, but should gradually get faster. After that, I plan on doing the same figure from the imagination and working on top of it. Should help a ton in trying to remember what I just learned.

By the way, I'm trying to switch to Hampton's method of drawing the figure. Nothing wrong with Proko, I just think I'll get more mileage long-term by trying to go with Hampton. His gestures are confusing me though. When he (or other instructors) say they're not drawing the contour, but draw curves at the edges of the figure, I really don't know how to interpret that. Maybe he's not drawing -the- contour of the figure, but he's definitely drawing -a- contour. That and I feel like he adds certain details at the gesture stage (knees, elbows) that should be done in another step. It's throwing me off to do it that way anyway..

Okay, I've decided to start posting in this thread everyday with new sketches, or something - anything. I thought I could get by with just telling myself I'd do drawings daily, but it's not really happening. Trying to set myself up to not fail. Of course, I can't 100% guarantee I'll upload things daily...my sleep/work schedule can make things complicated. Nonetheless, I'll do whatever I can.

Did my usual warmups, 50 45 sec gestures, then I tried to skip ahead and go from gestures > boxes > anatomy > finished contours. It went absolutely terribly! I hope I can look at that image in a year from now and have a laugh.

Well, go me - I already messed up on my goal to draw daily. It's really hard to do consistently without fail. Well, today's a new day, right?

At the very least, I'm trying to do some important research into proportions and learning the origin/insertion point of muscles. Wish there were some really simple diagrams out there for the latter that I can reference easily - I've been looking...

Think I'm gonna draw skeletons soon cause Halloween's coming up and THEY'RE SO SCARY D:D:D:!! Or maybe that they're a valuable exercise.

I've also stumbled upon a useful tutorial: http://nsio.deviantart.com/art/Nsio-expl...-401151718 - the way this artist makes the mannequin lit a lightbulb for me, with the joints/articulation, drawing the middle lines of the shapes to really get the 3D look/feel of an object. I've had a hard time trying to draw the body in boxes, and it just seems to make more sense to try to render them as the shapes they most resemble.

So I traced over a model in an attempt to understand the concept. It's sloppy and inaccurate, but it helped me think three-dimensionally. And that's kind of the key components of using reference, isn't it?

hey, good amount of work, keep at it ! For your paintings, avoid white or black background, and think more in term of edges ! For the anatomy, check out kevin chen's stuff, google him, you'll find tons of things . Also concerning your different steps of figure construction from october 23rd, you should observe more what's in front of you, the figure, and not get caught up in details too early. you can easily do the gesture and basic structure at once, and on your basic structure thing, you don't think enough about .. structure, especially for the arms and legs. there's no consistency in your volume . imo, the anatomy stage is a bit useless. learning every tiny muscle won't make you draw the volume better, and you only need a few group of muscles in order to draw the body very well. also your refs are really good, where do you get them ?
keep up your stuff !

(10-17-2013, 01:48 PM)ohnoes Wrote: [ -> ]Haven't drawn as much in the past couple days...I've been trying to reconstruct a curriculum for myself, as I realize I've been spending way too much time finding/watching art-related videos/websites and not enough actual drawing. Resources help, but it's not the only thing I should be doing.

Don't be afraid too spend a great amount of time looking for resources each person need a solid foundation to start with.

lucky you i am here to save you hour of research but not really since it depend on what you need to work but at last you have a base to look at.

here is the basic of how to think when drawing:
http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-4107.html

The resources forum:
http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-3.html

My youtube channel for a collection of useful tutorial
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6EpNEr4...eos?view=1

List of useful channel on you youtube:
daverapoza,
daarken
Nicholas Kay
Xia Taptara
Draw with Jazz
sinixdesign
CGMWORKSHOPS
Peter Mohrbacher
jonathanrector
matthew39arch
FZDSCHOOL
Sycra

Free e-book pdf on the web:andrew loomis

Website must have:
http://ctrlpaint.com/library
http://artists.pixelovely.com/

@kikindaface Thanks for the advice. Yeah I've looked up Kevin Chen, I wish there were videos of him instructing though - pictures are nice for getting an idea of his figure construction, but seeing him apply it from start to finish would help a lot.

And I kind of realized after talking to someone about figure drawing that anatomical knowledge is helpful, but perhaps not the most valuable depending on what you want to be drawing - for example, Marvel superheroes, or petite females. The former would benefit the most from anatomical knowledge, the latter the least. I'm aiming to draw more of the latter, and in a stylized way (manga) which reduces visible anatomy even more.

Oh and I got the model references from proko's website. Costs $10 but I've found it to be hard to find quality model photos with little/no distortion like his.

@darktiste Thanks, I've already found a lot of those places though since I've been habitually looking for things..

I figure I'd upload something here: notes I've taken on Erik Olson's perspective course. The notes really don't make sense to anyone other than me, but it's supposed to be a guideline so I can learn to reconstruct the perspective on my own to understand it.

Oh boy, lots of failure today. I thought I was a little more ahead than this.

Drew cylinders from RL and from the imagination; drawing from the imagination is tough. Getting those ellipses just right and making the cylinder not look flat/crushed...

Then I spent over an hour (about 1 hr 15 min; timing myself now) trying to go from gesture to a constructed figure. My work is so amateurish and I'm wondering if I've learned anything at all. There's a million ways to construct a figure and all I can seem to do okay is the first step - gesture.

Gonna go draw myself in the mirror after this and see if I can at least get the proportions right in one gesture. Not going to bother building on top of it.

I'm liking the gestural and anatomy studies I'm seeing :) On more of the "painting" side of things I would recommend Richard Schmid's book "Everything I Know about Painting" and James Gurney's books "Color and Light" and "Imaginative Realism" (if you don't already have them). I found them to be super super helpful in understanding color and painting in general. I think you're doing awesome so far with the anatomy stuff and you seem like you've got a good critical eye. Keep at it and I hope to see more as you go along

pnate: Thanks! I really need to get back into painting soon...I've been devoting all of my focus on figure drawing of late. Probably need a good balance of the two.

I watched a recording of an older Dave Rapoza livestream, and found out he mostly just painted RL fruit (still-lifes) in the early days for practice. It probably doesn't need to get more complicated than that. Think I might buy a lamp and start drawing/painting from stuff on my desk.

After I got frustrated with my last upload, I determined I needed to go back to what my art professor taught me - relationship lines, and the frequent comparisons to the lines I'm making to other lines to measure things out. Not only that, but negative space, and just general measuring angles with a pencil or tablet.

At the end of the day, I'm assuming the idea of "proportions" is about the same as the idea of "measuring". Hence the whole "8 heads" concept and where the nipples/navel/crotch/etc line up. The problem I find with measuring heads is that it's only applicable to so many poses - throw in foreshortening and everything becomes a nightmare. Which is why I'm using relationship lines/negative space as well.

Anyway, I spent most of my figure drawings today doing measuring. Still would like to get into drawing skeletons and possibly drawing anatomy over them (which I've just recently compiled an anki deck with the origin/insertion points).

Also, I'm reducing the sizes of my images, because while I always want to work in large dimensions, it's...pretty pointless for simple sketches.