Crimson Daggers — Art forum

Hey Daggers,

I'm a long time lurker of forums similar to this and I've always been hesitant to post my stuff for critique.

So here's me taking the red pill to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Quick background, I've been drawing as early as 6 'til HS. My stuff were almost exclusively in anime/manga style character concepts, and pinups.

I'm self-taught after missing out on an opportunity for formal art education during college, and pretty much went dormant for almost 10 yrs. during my full-time employment.

Took up the pen again in hopes of picking up from where I left off, and like most, to someday make a living doing what is a life-time passion.

Will start off the SB with some of the doodles, practice, and studies I've done this week, and hopefully build up a consistent enough rhythm of practice/posting.


A pair of portraits from imagination, trying to make use of stuff I've learned in recent months.



Ongoing practice on expressions. Used a bunch of front-view expressions by Joel Jurion as reference and tried applying them unto a different character viewed at a different angle.




Something I've been working on and off on for the last couple of months.


4 hr. value and face anatomy study of Tyrion


Comments and critiques are very much welcome.

Semi bad day for sketching, quality is mostly "crappier" than usual, but at least managed to power through with something.

Here's a bunch of ongoing nose studies, assorted references used.


Not having done anatomy or gesture studies since Dec. 2013 has finally come back to bite me. Initially intended to do anatomy studies, but ended up having to re-acquaint myself with some gesture drawing.


Quick 1.5 hr. semi-realistic sketch attempt from imagination of a main character from a show I'm currently following. (this was actually today's warm-up)

More attempts at anatomy studies from yesterday

Wow man great sketch book! Those figures are amazing. I really like the sense of movement in that one with the guy leaping with the spear over his head. And those foreshortened figures, daaaang.

Still working on anatomy. I want to reach a point where I'm comfortable with it enough to make decent looking exaggerated poses without coming out too much like an "escher girl".

Attempts to draw last Friday was so-so. A lot of distractions and obligations. Did manage to squeeze in a few anatomy studies after some really bad doodles. Referenced from what Loomis pictures I could find on the net.



Today was much better. Actually have some anatomy studies I'm somewhat happy about. Albeit newbness is evident since these took longer than I'd like to do. Referenced from ImagineFX's anatomy compilation.



As always, comments and critique are very welcome. Thanks

Some (really bad) doodles yesterday from imagination and recent memory




Also more anatomy studies from yesterday referenced from Imagine FX




And still more anatomy studies. The underarm, back, and collarbone area are still pretty troublesome to visualize in my head.

Really loving these pencil anatomy studies man, very very tight, don't leave behind the values/colors studies. Keep it up!

@rafa zanchetin: Thanks dude, albeit I still feel my lines aren't "confident" enough. Thanks also for the reminder, gotta spend time looking for color/value studies that'll motivate me so to speak.


Last week was long and busy with my free time ending up being spent on either sleeping, distractions or worse, procrastination. Didn't want to end the week without a single study so pushed myself to do a few studies last Mar. 28.

More anatomy studies still from IFX..

Damn forearm got really confusing at times and I had to keep referencing my own poorly defined forearm, and some older sketches to wrap my head around some of the forms.



Right now the anatomy studies seem to be taking a big chunk of time as my brain tries to grasp the complex forms and how they interact. I sometimes find myself referring to old sketches and other sources to get a better grasp on the forms and how they work.

I know most of this won't completely sink in even after a good number of studies which leads me to sometimes wonder if "I'm doing it right" so to speak.


And here's a color study of Judge Anderson from Dredd.

Tried Hannes' style of no pen pressure color studies... and I have to say it was a bitch. It felt like painting with a mouse. It was especially jarring for me since it normally takes me anywhere from 10-20 strokes with a pencil to get the contours just right. This no pen pressure thing was scary as hell.

Not fully sure as to what the take away or points to focus on with this kind of exercise. Despite that, it was a fun exercise trying to eyeball colors as close as possible, and then estimate the nearest value/hue changes.



Here's to trying to return to my rhythm on studies again. As always comments and critiques are welcome. Thanks.

Damn this is one hell of a start for a sketchbook. Great stuff.

It's really nice to see a whole variety of poses being put to work, and it's already starting to show through. There's a lot of stuff I'm seeing most people tend to shy away from, myself included, a lot of these poses are hard as hell, haha. I can't wait to see you get some more finished pieces in here with all the applied learnings.

Nice Shiroe fanart, Log Horizon is awsome, and the Senketsu sketch is amazing, haha. Keep it up with the killer work! :DD

I'm loving your anatomy studies!

Worked on a few pose studies. Wanted to look try and get a confident, regal bearing while having a hint of femininity in them without being overly sexy/sexual.

Took a little longer than usual on these since the pose references were other paintings as well and I had to try and picture the pose scaled down to what I hope appears as an early-mid teen's proportions.

Cool stuff over here, the last poses look all pretty nice I think he would look cool if you draw him with the hat and the sword as design combination. Keep on!

sweet sketches!

@Blewzen: Thanks dude, although intended he to be a she. Wanted the stance and maybe the hips to bring that across cause small chest and possibly semi-realistic chest plate.

@DoubleThink: Thanks

So continuing with the gesture/pose ideas previously, tried some silhouette studies for her headgear/crown. But since I usually have difficulty with forms, figured might as well and try to paint the forms anyway.



Near the end I started getting ideas of making her a naval warrior instead of an army one. So the idea of an over-sized anchor shaped hammer/mace came to mind (inspired from Guilty Gear's May).

Nothing much lately except for working on a fanart piece when I'm not kicked out of the PC.

Happy with the improvements so far, although I'ms still at a bit of a loss on how to handle the hair, and more "how" to render/polish it to a good finish.

It's like this wall I'm still unsure how to breakthrough from doing rough-like painting/sketching.

Sweet style you have going here.

If you want to break through the render wall. There are a couple of ways to do it, both requiring doing studies.

First, you can find an artist who renders like you would ideally like to. Take one of the images you really like from them and copy it and try to backwards engineer what they did to get to that point (How they handle reflected light, form, colours etc). This short cuts through a lot, because you basically use them to do the thinking for you and learn by imitating. Not ideal long term, but short term gains are great for motivation.

Second way is to get a photograph (preferably high res) and do a photo study. If you want photorealism this is the best way, but most tedious, way to get there. Get a picture and just accept that you will spend 30hrs copying it in minute detail and it will help a lot.

Bonus way: From life, set up a still life and really try to look for all those things that a camera removes (subtlety in colours, depth etc). This is the hard way, because the benefits arent immediately visible, but the end result is what you are imitating in the artists master study (first method) where they learn to paint how they see the world.

I hope this helps answer your question, though I could have missed the point completely. Keep up the good work :)

@Jaik Thanks Jaik at least I know I'm headed in the right direction, and I'm not alone in taking forever (hours) to render something.

Admittedly tho' I've been neglecting my master and photo studies lately.

What I have been doing is looking at other illustrators whose style I like, and trying to apply their rendering style to my image instead of copying theirs. Dunno if what I'm doing is helpful or counter-productive.

While working on the fanart I think I know the other part of the render/polish wall that intimidates me. Aside from the time is the familiarity with tools and technique.

I'm only familiar with the 2 basic round brushes and my current process, and just simply doing paint overs/layers repeatedly in tighter and tighter (smaller and smaller zoom) until I get the look right(ish).

Can't help but feel lost when trying special brushes (textured), and still trying to learn and adopt other illustrators styles for painting.

I guess the difference in progress with painting, as opposed to say gaming after checking some guides/videos/technique is what gets to me.

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Back to painting/sketching in between the holy week breaks.

Tried and blocked in a little more light, worked on the left arm a bit again, and tried to put the right arm back into the image.



Didn't make it to the arena deadline. Reached mid-week with the studies and I still couldn't get a look I want; rather the picture in my head isn't coming together and I'm getting lost in experimentation. Keeping these around so I can bring it to a finish at some later date.

Busy week filled with irl stuff and celebrations. Didn't get to do much sketching/studies with it. Hoping that'll change in the coming weeks/days.

Did manage however to work on the earlier fanart and start polishing it up. Decided to work on blending first leaving the edge work for last.

Realized that I tend to lose a lot of dynamic feel and texture to my paintings the more I correct/polish. I expect it's because my line/brush work get a lot shorter and softer as I constantly correct myself resulting in less and less confident lines.

It's something I struggle with, and hopefully in time will overcome the more confident I get with this digital painting thing.

Really liking how the painting is going so far :)

Try not to overdetail and overuse soft brushes, use a harder brush for the edges and later smudge it to get a firm edge, there's a nice smudge pack from john silva on DA so try it out if u want..

Keep it up !

(05-08-2014, 05:19 PM)ShinOkami Wrote: [ -> ]Really liking how the painting is going so far :)

Thanks Shin, I'm still relatively new to edge work and polished rendering so I'm still trying to figure out where to go hard edge and soft edge.


This is how it's coming along so far, will be fixing the bracer and make one more attempt at the hair if I have the time before surrendering and calling this one finished, and moving on.

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Lot's of distractions again, specially of the gaming and freelance kind.

But thankfully managed to squeeze out some studies/sketches.

Warm Up and anatomy studies (tried to make sense of the Ben10 Fanart pose using my old anatomy studies as reference for how the muscles possibly work)



Thinking of doing a typical sexy pinup of an old comicbook character next. Did some anatomy/gesture studies on some Mahmud Asrar illustratioons to get comfortable with a more comicbook female form.



Studies on proportions and style for Phil Noto faces. Still can see hints of my own style, and old anime and J Scott Campbell influences



And a quick sketch of Pixie (and an original character) since one of the Noto/Dangergirl studies reminded me of her.