Lizardman's art journey to glory!

[Demon Lizardman]

did a color study this time, need to work on my hues and values.

[Demon Lizardman]

Some new stuff

[John]

Hi Lizardman.

Saw your copies of photos. I am not exactly sure what you're trying to get out of those exercises.

Just in case you haven't stumbled upon these:

Accuracy training: http://www.dorian-iten.com/accuracy/
Value study: http://www.dorian-iten.com/value-study/

Hey man, you proved you can be consistent for quite a number of days. It's sad to see you taper off again, just to be back at it again after a couple of years! If this reaches you, I hope you get back on the horse and try to make drawing more than a burst, but a habit.

[neopatogen]

I agree with everything what John said :)
Did that value study from Iten's website yesterday, just had no time to upload photos yet
Keep going Lizardman, and btw hope to see some more lizardpeople in your Sketchbook later :P

[Demon Lizardman]

I AM BACK FROM THE DEAD, also here's some new stuff.

[Demon Lizardman]

Did some back studies, trying to see how the Scapula fits. Need to be less sketchy
Also did a portrait of Phoenix Wright because why not.

PS: I've been absent for a while because Ive been posting my work on CA.org until I found out it was shut down. So now, I'm relocating to here. Glad to see the place is still up.

[darktiste]

Sketchyness is not a issue unless your going for render the important thing is committing to apply what your study to your own work or else it won't go into your muscle memory .Work in a way that if you go back to see what you did it clean enough that you can understand what your looking at.What is the most important in the way you work is to make every line count.Sometime less is more.

[Demon Lizardman]

Did some quick animal drawings form quickposes and I'm starting the dreaded 250 box thing.
Not proud of my work today, so any advice would be helpful.

[darktiste]

The application of the hatching isn't really clean it show either leak of commitment or leak of control.By commitment i mean that your not being deliberate enough you work to fast instead of work methodically.It not the speed of the pen stroke in itself that is the problem it the spacing between the line that an issue.

[Demon Lizardman]

If you mean leak, as in lack, then I guess I was rushing through the crosshatching after I was done with boxes. I wasn't sure how much time I needed to spend on each box. This entire page took me around 35-40 minutes to do, so I was feeling kind of bored by it. That, and sometimes when I am drawing a straight line, it goes off course and goes in a different direction, making some of my lines sketchy.

I don't know what's wrong with me, int he video he suggests to make sure your angles/lines will eventually meet up at the horizon line, but sometimes my hand goes automatic and it just goes off without my brain input. It feels like two different entities are controlling my body at times. I need to work on my hand to brain correlation.

[darktiste]

If you mean leak, as in lack, then I guess I was rushing through the crosshatching after I was done with boxes. I wasn't sure how much time I needed to spend on each box. This entire page took me around 35-40 minutes to do, so I was feeling kind of bored by it. That, and sometimes when I am drawing a straight line, it goes off course and goes in a different direction, making some of my lines sketchy.

I don't know what's wrong with me, int he video he suggests to make sure your angles/lines will eventually meet up at the horizon line, but sometimes my hand goes automatic and it just goes off without my brain input. It feels like two different entities are controlling my body at times. I need to work on my hand to brain correlation.

Perhaps it would be best if you do less of cube and take the time to do them correctly.Speed come from practice but constance in your work is a is a priority over speed.The problem is we tend to compensate with quantity when we can't produce quality.Quantity doesn't necessary mean you produce a consistent result.So what we learn here is that constance in your work is more important than quantity and speed.

Now the problem is how to be conscious if you are distracted by other thing will drawing.The problem as you have experience it is you become rapidly bored by the repetitive task of drawing the same thing over and over again.It not a secret that drawing can be repetitive but what generally make it interesting is to have variety of exercise to do.If you work with 100% of your mind you produce quality but you become also bored really quick.So it harder to work for long period of time.

So take pause it can be really taxing for the brain when you work consciously rather than semi consciously something you seem to be experiencing.What i mean by semi consciously is that your focus on two thing rather than one.For example your drawing and think of eating a sandwich later don't do that you have to focus your attention on constance in your work.But someone cannot achieve constance in is work if he doesn't understand what he trying to do or how to do it.

I am gonna stop there as to not bore you.

[Demon Lizardman]

Did another drawbox page, 9 this time around, trying to focus on quality than quantity. Still need to work on finding the perspective. Also, did a study of finding the ribcage and waist in these images. Might do more tomorrow.

Also did a thing between 2 video game characters because why not.

[bluehabit]

Those animal sketches look great, forms read well. Like the Wario vs Heavy concept!

[Demon Lizardman]

Thanks man for the comments. If you have any suggestion on what I should improve, I'm all ears.
Here's some more boxes, a self portrait and another study. This time on the back and scapula. Might try again later, I'm trying to find where the blasted thing is. 

Also, going to be doing the 100 portrait challenge, so I hope you like seeing lots of faces.

[darktiste]

The neck of that guy look rather long but i can't judge without the reference.

[Demon Lizardman]

The neck of that guy look rather long but i can't judge without the reference.

It might be a tad long but I have a fucking weird neck

EDIT: Also just realized my eyes are a bit too big

[chubby_cat]

Hey! Nice sketchbook so far. With your most recent portrait study, a reason it's not matching the ref is because you've elongated the face a lot, especially in the chin. You've made a massive space between chin and bottom lip, which ends up pushing all the other features further up the face and making the nose is shorter than what it should be. It's great that you've started adding shadows to define volume, but be careful with how clear it reads - your shading on the outer corners of the eyes is very confusing because there's no real sense of what is shading, and where the hair starts (which just makes it look like the hair line starts at the end of the brows)

My real takeaway is just to watch your proportions in your next studies. The whole measure twice cut once theory. It all comes down to looots of practice and observations. Keep up the good work and looking forward to seeing more!

[Demon Lizardman]

Thanks, will try to work harder on checking my proportions.
Sometimes when I shaded, I go a bit crazy and it ends up making parts of the drawing feel messy and unnecessary. Hope to improve that.

More portraits, more boxes, more anatomy stuff...

[jondawo]

Hey there,

it's cool to see that you revived your sketchbook after your long break. 
You said you felt like your shading was making your drawings look messy. Something that might help with that is taking more care to decide where you really want to place your shadow shapes and being careful not to shade outside of those areas. At the moment you're mixing up the difference between shadow values and just subtle differences in form or local value. You can make life easier on yourself by grouping up the values. For example saying everything that is in the light is one value everything in shadow is a clearly different value and then making sure not to let those two mix together.

Ehh i hope my explanation was understandable... if not feel free to ask.

I attached a quick draw-over of your portrait and just erased your shading in areas that are actually being hit by light. I think it reads more clearly now.

[darktiste]

I think right now your biggest issue is the hatching is done on multiple pass in some kind of second think it i would say it mainly due to a matter of not understanding how to create a value gradation with hatching and going over again to try and adjust the value.Right now there a problem of your texture reading as both shading and texture.Right now your hair show that you don't understand how to approach drawing hair there contradicting flow that make the hair mass ready as being flat in certain spot where they instead follow the form of the head.But the biggest issue is in the beard the hatching is all over the place and you can't necessarily tell if he having a bad beard day or if it some shading.

I recommend you do some master study on the subject of hatching to improve your hatching.But i also suggest you try to only map the value change you can observe on a face.I feel that overall there not enough value change and understand how to properly render hatching to help you form read as being 3d.You do like i use to when i knew not much about value staying with a uniform mid range value and sometime a small hit of black on the eye.You need to go from a 3 tone thinking to a 5 tone thinking.But try to nail the 3 tone thinking first.This mean simplifying the value range into 3 step imagine a 33% light grey and a 66% mid grey and a 99% dark grey as your darkest value.Once you can accurately see those grey inside a gray scale you can start to blend .

Here you can observe a 6 tone grade scale with no blending as an example of what i mean by value gradation.