Arch's Book of Stuff

[ImSkeptical]

Hey man, some really great drawings/designs in here. A lot of cool shape breakups, very Japanese which i like :D.

I think if you wanna work on something, it would be your lighting skills, more specifically direct lighting. Like a lot of good draftsman, you have ambient scenarios down okay, because they work off your strength where you can design your values around those cool shapes with your different materials and clothes. But direct lighting seems to give you a bit more trouble. I tried to do a paintover to try demonstrate



So first I just made it b/w because it's mostly a value/value design problem. Next I decided what was in light and shadow, and roughly placed it in. I think you were pretty much there, mostly i placed the face in shadow and designed the cast shadow over her with a bit more complexity, trying to show off more forms and not just make it fade off as a tangent to her collar. Then I upped the contrast a bit on the new breakup of light and dark.

Next row, now I had decided what was in light and shadow, I continued to try design those cast shadows of the light, note her hands, legs, and the cast shadow of her left arm onto her torso. This is where you can really give a strong sense of lighting, it's quite subtle, but I think attention here makes a crazy amount of difference. Then I changed the levels to show your design better.

The last one is me thinking maybe you might see putting her face in shadow as a cop out, so I tried my best to design what I think direct light would look like in that scenario. But I want to stress it is a choice, you can use just local value, i.e., her face being lighter than a wall to pop her face out, or you can design how direct light falls on her face.

Although I'm not the best at making up direct light, I think what helped me the most was studies like this



I haven't done them in a while, but I remember doing them was a huge breakthrough for me in understanding cast shadows and direct light better, as well as making sure to emphasize that difference if it was called for.

Sorry for the long post, hopefully it was somewhat helpful! Keep being cool and working hard :D