Hello Everybody!

My name is Mauro, I'm 21 and I'm an artist from Argentina. 
I'm currently studying Computer Engineering but somehow along the way I ended up with a hobby relating to a deep fascination with 2D animation, storyboarding and Concept Design.

I have been checking out the forum and I love the sense of community and feedback this place has and am excited to start being a part of it!

About me:
I'm completely self taught and started learning about 3 years ago.

Right now I'm mostly focusing on Gesture Drawing and Anatomy to improve.

My artistic level (I think) would be that I know how to copy very well and also use reference to base my art off of something. I'd love to be able to draw more from my imagination though and not have to rely so heavily from reference but I don't know exactly what the next step should be. Up until now I always felt like I have been moving forward but now it feels like I'm slowly going into a rut of some kind. If anybody has any feedback or advice on what to work on, I'd love to hear what you think. Any studies or drawing exercises would be incredibly helpful as well!

Thank you for reading!

Hi everyone! 

My name is Sam, I'm 22 and I thought it would be a good idea to start utilising crimson daggers for self improvement. As much as i'd like to say I'm new here, it is not so! I joined here about 3 maybe 4 years ago now and was active for a while, participating in some of the contests and joining in with the community, also watching Dave Rapoza's videos and Dan Warren's videos and trying to soak up as much information as possible. I guess as time went on, life just seemed to drift me away from Crimson Daggers. I really wanted to be a concept artist & Illustrator when I joined crimson daggers, all those years ago and I still do now. 

I was studying lots back then, probably in the most harmful way possible to myself by not really taking things seriously and not applying my studies, coupling this with going to University which had I known what I do now about Art education for concept art and illustration in Universities in the UK, I would not have gone and would have gotten my act together way back then and studied from home. But shit ... what're you going to do, I knew jack about what I really needed to do to Improve. So I graduated University and got my degree, finding myself once again back at home and feeling a little lost as to where I was, Who I was and what I was going to do. 

From then up until now it's been a rocky road filled with basically feeling shitty and not knowing how to improve and doing different things, not finishing them. Finding a new path and then finding that the path fizzles into darkness and then finding another path and losing that one too. It's been really hard to stay motivated while that was happening, I felt like I had lost my knowledge of how to study, or what to study or basically how to learn things and improve myself. 

I have been lucky enough to gain a few freelance gigs in this time gap, I worked with Lazerhawk on an album cover at one stage. Then after learning Zbrush and loving utilising that for a while I got a job working with editor Jeff Betancourt who edited films such as "The Poltergeist" "Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon" and more. I feel like these were amazing opportunities to have, although on the other hand I am still not satisfied in the slightest with where I am. 

Then cut to now, I feel like I have found my spark again! I got back into watching some of Dave Rapoza and Dan Warren's livestreams again on Twitch. This time really listening closely to what they have to say on learning, this time with a maturer 22 year old brain as apposed to naive 16 - 17 year old Sam. Things really started to make sense now, and I realised that I have been really overthinking and over complicating things for the past few years, what they were saying seemed to resonate with me so much more. So since now I have a day job which I have to work, I've been making a schedule for myself to study from in the evenings after work and on the weekends pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday. Not to mention finishing at 2:00pm on Fridays so I get those too. 

I work as a product designer for a gothic giftware company, so its not so bad being paid to design and paint still, but really in all honesty. I hate the place, a year in working there and I can tell its just crap, especially with the office politics that go on. Anyway I won't dwell on that. The point is, thanks to Dave and Dan's wisdom I feel now I am somewhat on the right path, I feel like I have found what it is to learn again and feel what its like to have information going into my brain. Which is really a nice feeling to have, I know its not going to be like this all the time as its a bloody long road to go down, but I feel at 22 years old I am finally ready to put in the work. 

My ultimate goal will be to work as a Concept Artist in the Game or films industry and be able to some day work on
some of the types of Game and film that I like. Be it in a studio if that gets my foot in the door or freelance. To be able to reach the levels of some of my favourite artists and feel that I have improved is also a big goal. AS long as i am learning and applying my studies and seeing an improvement from now on I'll be very happy!

This is also why I've come back to crimson daggers. I feel like I need to get more critiques on my work and have it torn apart so I can work on my weaknesses. 

Sorry for the long message people, I have wanted to get this all off my chest for a long time. 

Thanks very much all ! Nice to meet everyone. Also a big thankyou to Dave Rapoza and Dan Warren for all their honest wisdom and no bullshit approach to learning this. Thankyou.

-Sam

   

Howdy! I'm new here (As in I literally just fell in love with this site today-) and I don't particularly know what I'm going to do on here y e t, but I know I'll be participating a lot :''') 

Hmm... I suppose I should introduce myself a lil bit, eh?

Well, I enjoy drawing-//slapped

aHEM.

I also enjoy writing, reading, gaming, nature and uh... The internet, I guess lmao.

My humor is extremely dark, condescending and most of the time centers around absurd amounts of stupidity, not to mention it literally kills all moods. 

On a side note, my writing makes the people who read it smile, as it tends to be generally happy and fluffy~ (Of course, I have my days where I title it something happy, but in reality I just kill everyone as soon as the reader gets attached to them lol.)

hm.

I have a very unrealistic drawing style, my proportions and anatomy need quite a bit of work, as well as my dynamic poses and exaggeration of parts, and my backgrounds are okay at best.

I tend to be hard on my creations, especially when I have high expectations that are immediately crushed.

My goals for the future? To hopefully learn more about color theory, anatomy and proportions, and maybe beginning to sell it then.

My goals now, are to find an art style :''))) 

Welp, I think there is enough about me to satisfy even the most information starving person in the world (hopefully-)
and thus, I conclude whatever mess I made this time.

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    Hi I’m new to the site and have been looking for an art community online. I have been trying to teach myself art and learn from mistakes however never been part of a community to get feedback. I’m not sure why, fear maybe. Anyways.

My goal as an artist is to understand the human form and put it in environmental and situations. Would love to learn photoshop (I have the tools but become easily flustered with it) any advice? 

Thanks everyone I look forward to being a part of this community! 

Attached I have a few examples of my work.

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Hi! I'm dyun from the Philippines. I'm just new here. I join because i want to improve my skills as a graphic artist and also to have friends who are in digital art and to get someone to give some advice and critique in my works.

Feel free to check out my works. I will posting my works in my sketchbook.

Thanks!

I'm a 26 yo South American guy. It took 25 years for me to find out what I wanna do with my life, so here I am now: I wanna be an illustrator and character artist. I'm interested in figure drawing, animals, storytelling and painting, I'm an extremelly boring and down-on-earth dude, so don't expect any kind of joke coming from me ; I like Kim Jung Gi, Moebius, Frazetta and some other guys, but as I said, I'm quite new on this art world, so there are a lot of hot artists I'm yet to discover. I'm currently studying Force in Mike Mattesi's site and I'm having a great time doing it.

I have 7 dogs, 4 cats, a parrot, 4 cows and a llama; my hobbies are gaming, reading and doing exercises.

So... Hiya     I hope you liked me so far 

So I used to be a member a few years back and then well, life and things happened and I stopped being active. So, i decided it's about time I come back and get to work on those art skills. 

I think a quick re-introduction is in order, my name is Rana, I'm a 25 year old aspiring artist, I work as a graphic designer in a big name ad agency, which is fun, but art has always been my passion and I'm pretty sure being a better artist will make a better designer out of me, so here I am :)

I'm gonna start a sketchbook soon and everything. Hope you guys are all doing great.

Hello, haven't introduced yet so Paul here, guy from east Europe. I'll be posting studies, sketches and other stuff i do on my free time aside my full time job. Currently working in small mobile games studio, but it got monotonous doing assets day by day, so joined daggers, hoping to have great time here. 

Main goal is polishing fundamentals and getting that portfolio going. We will see what happens after few years :)

Hello, I'm 31, from Houston, Texas. I decided to join this forum in order to get help since I'm having a lot of trouble learning even the most basic things about drawing . I started taking drawing seriously back when I was 20. I ended up going to a local university for classes. I primarily wanted to study drawing but ended up taking painting, digital imaging and, graphic design as well. This did not go well at all. These classes were nightmarishly bad but, in the opposite way of how most people online talked about their art courses. Instead of having professors who would tear up work or yell at students, every class I had was with ones who would refuse to critique and simply told everyone they were doing fine. Very little was actually taught in these classes and the handouts had minimal information. I tried hounding them for answers but, they simply told me I was doing fine.  By the time I graduated I had a bachelor's degree in art yet, made absolutely zero progress towards any of my goals. I have heard of the degree not mattering but, i had hoped to at least learn the skills needed to get started. Instead, I learned absolutely nothing about drawing to spite my best efforts. I had no contacts and found no local communities that have even remotely similar interests. Worst of all my prospects for getting any sort of job in the field were abysmal. I even tried classes outside of college. My experiences with those were even worse.

I have also had a hard time with books. I recall going through the exercises in Betty Edward's "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and just ending up confused. Supposedly it was intended to help with symbol drawing but, I was not able to put anything from it into use. I'm lost on how to improve.

I checked out the Daggers discord but, I don't feel as though I'm anywhere near the skill level that the people who post there are. I'm still stuck on some very basics concepts.