Obsessive Scribblers

[Rai-CH]

I've used them at school a few times (mainly in my graphic design class). They're fun to use and it's quite easy to blend colours to get nice results, but I find it hard to stop them from creating those ugly bleed marks when you accidentally colour over a dry patch.

I was thinking of asking for them for christmas, but they were a bit too expensive to get a decent amount of colours, plus I don't think I'd use them too much.

 

[Arylett Charnoa]

I haven't, sadly. And I don't really plan to, either.

But ah... if anyone wants to look, I finally updated the OScars. They're finished and everyone's been awarded.

Oh, that reminds me... does anyone have any artistic New Years resolutions?

I've gotten a tablet for Christmas, so mine's to get the feel of digital art and switch primarily to it due to traditional taking me so long nowadays. Also, to draw more drawings, and finally finish all these gifts I owe people.

 

[Rai-CH]

Congrats on getting a tablet, Arylett! :) You will grow to love them, trust me~

My resolution is to learn how to not fail at drawing everything :P I want to learn how to:
-draw human anatomy and proportions, because my people always have freakishly long bodies and tiny hands/feet.
-create decent backgrounds, because I fail at them.
-lineart and shade decently is high on my 'things to learn' list.
-not lose motivation after the sketch phase :|

Speaking of failing at drawing and wanting to improve, I can't get my character's horn that's closest to us to look right. It's meant to look similar to a mix between a ram's horn and one of these shells. Redlines would be greatly appreciated! :)
Link to picture because it's probably huge.

Also, does anyone have any good techniques for linearting hair? It's my least favourite thing to lineart (along with clothes, and basically everything else fml.) so I'd like to learn a technique that's easy, quick and looks semi-decent.

 

[Furiianda]

MIGHT AS WELL JOIN YO

Hi (:

Anyway ramhorns! I love those things! From what I can tell, the reason it doesn't look quite right is because you're trying to draw it from the side when it's really more of a front view. It mostly looks that way because of the tip, though -- the shape starts off right at the base but the tip seems to be curling behind the base in your sketch there. Actually... it kinda looks that way on the other side too, or at least that the tip is at a 90 degree angle to the base!

A good thing to do might be to just look up some more pictures of these horn type things. Ram horns are probably the better shape to reference (though I'm not quite sure exactly what you're visualising with this character) since they are presented in the manner you're going to be using -- that is, attached to the head of something -- and you can look up similar poses pretty easily, as there are all sorts of pictures related to ram horns out on the Internet.

As for shells, uh... this image is kinda good? But.. yeah, again I don't know exactly what you're looking for.
However since I'm bored I guess I'll try to draw what I think it would look like! But forgive me if the lines are a bit shaky, I am drawing with a mouse. And I had a little trouble discerning the direction your character is facing exactly... but er!

Here; the angle might not be quite what you had in mind, as well as the horn, but it's more a loose gesture in the general direction you might want to go >;

 

[Bluberry Bat]

I don't know what's been going on, but I fell out of like.. everything. :c should have been in here months ago, missed artmo /again/. ugh. life, the universe and everything gets a call out for making things difficult, but mostly it's just my fault. baaaah.

Okay, I'm here, hi and stuff... I don't really have any input for people, though, this is bad and I feel bad. I don't know what I can say besides.. "Oh. Yup, that's better than me. I'm completely unqualified to make judgements. Keep doing that thing you're doing. C: *slink off*"

...sigh. well, I've at least the past few days been doodling a lot, pretty much all been my Riolu character Anna (big surprise). Comes in street fightan' and ushanka flavours as is. and something racier that won't appear here. *flee*
Course it always makes me feel bad given my general lack of input, but I always appreciate critique and the like. :c I've gone back to pencil-paper recently to try and actually nail some kind of solid anatomy. I keep making legs too short and strange eyes and.. aaaaa. *flees... for real this time*

 

[Arylett Charnoa]

Give yourself more credit! You're probably way better than I am. You're quite good.

I shall give you some criticism just because I'm in the mood and actually motivated to do something. Whoa. That's rare.

Great job, first of all, with your anatomy. I see you have a good grasp of female anatomy. On that specific matter though, I'd suggest adding maybe some curves or wider hips, because her body seems sort of straight and flat. In both pictures, but more specifically the street fighting one. Her eyes are actually well-done though! And I can say that I think you're quite good with facial expressions. Particularly on the ushanka one. Very nice. Think that's all I've got. You can think about your bad points, yes, but don't underestimate your good points!

 

[Furiianda]

I really like the character idea and design for your Riolu!
But... well Arylett reminded (prompted?) me, female anatomy; I get the feeling the legs are way too short. It looks like they're roughly 1/3rd of her height when they should be about 60% on a humanlike figure. I think you have done a pretty good job with the thicknesses of things, though. And leg length seems a little funny on a Riolu, so I'm not really sure how close to human it should be...
Keep doing your thing, more posts are good (so I don't feel like I have brutally murdered the thread again)... maybe I should come up with something to post, hee.~

 

[Bluberry Bat]

Legs and hips, they seem to be my mortal enemy. :c Riolu have large hips, very large, and so I usually try to highlight them a bit.. but at that point they usually look ridiculously huge, so I downsize, upsize, downsize again.. I guess in the end the even out with her body. I need to find a better medium to that... as for legs.. they always seem to turn out too short, and I don't really know why.. they look fine while drawing, but then I finish and it's like.. argh what?
For reference, she should be fairly human-esque in the setting I'm putting her in - the 'Pokemorph' style tends to apply species traits to a humanoid figure. There are quirks, she still has the reverse-joints, for example, that I have no idea what they're technically called. (Canid hind legs, basically) You can see just about all the examples what I'm going for at PokeCombatAcademy.

Hurf.. still, thank you two. c: I know my primary focus points for sure, now, to practice with. I'm glad people at least seem to like them, as is. I can't really process positives it seems - always sounds like gloating. hurgh.

As an aside, I tried drawing a more dynamic 'fight pose' (mid-swing roundhouse kick, to be exact) aaaaand.. ended up failing astronomically! :3c something about those legs, I can /never/ get right.. and then, the twist of the back was giving some trouble. I don't really have experience with those sorts of poses, though.
So, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for pose references for fighters. The only pose-site I know really is posemaniacs, and they don't have what I'm looking for. (It doesn't specifically have to be in that muscle-structure style, though, just a reference for action shots in martial arts. Image searching, as is... very shoddy and unreliable. :V)

 

[Furiianda]

Hmm...
I know what you mean about the hips, I can imagine them ending up looking really... wrong?
I guess the thing about Riolu is that with the proportions it has (the huge head and teensy torso) the huge puffpants are a bit less noticable.
One thing I can say is that the legs on your drawings are particularly thick -- not that this is a bad thing necessarily, just that that sort of... realism will make it look less like a Riolu, and make the implementation of puff-pants difficult, as that is so much extra thickness! Waugh!
Making them thinner would probably just look unnatural, so well...

This random image I found kinda makes me think, if you just treated those puff things as the thigh area and made them only slightly thicker than the rest of the legs (which is what the thigh area is supposed to be -anyway-) then it'd be a pretty good balance between Riolu and human. It's hard to distinguish those as the thigh on all the official art I've seen so yeah... also this makes me think of Lucario with the more "realistic" anatomy!

Also, just noticed it now, on your street-fighter picture the nose seems too... high, long, pointy? I guess? Or maybe it just needs a sharper angle connecting it to the face. Anyway, I'm not quite sure, so I'll leave you to it. (:

EDIT: Also, with legs, uh... at least aim to place the hip area just above halfway! Like, if you've seen those triangle diagrams (as in where the hips are a triangle with one point at the bottom... well, actually maybe just think of some underpants or something) the bottom point should be about on the halfway-line for the figure.

'NOTHER EDIT: I don't know good reference sites off the top of my head, but at a glance www.human-anatomy-for-artist.com/ seems to be OK. But be wary that a lot of the pictures there are completely naked, so you should probably carefully view them in your own time and clear your history or someone will get the wrong idea. (: A quick look there showed me they had a decent sized section on fighting and martial art poses! Failing that, maybe just search the name of the position or move?

 

[Bluberry Bat]

Ah, actually that is what I've been trying to do - the 'hips' or 'pantaloons' are essentially acting thighs. The 'knee' is actually a small reverse-joint as per the canid leg style, and then the calf acts comes at a slight slant and into the forward 'tip-toe' stance of the feet.
...That may not be very well explained. Hurf, I'll see if I can doodle something that better illustrates that. As for the nose.. well, I'm still kind of playing with the shape of that, no real comment, still not sure how I'd like that to look in the end. (Though I have been liking the sort of pronounced snout, that blends with subtle curves back into the head)

Oh, and that site is lovely, thank you~ :3 As I said, image searching is shoddy - especially since for nude shots, you have to be turning off safe search and I think we all know what a cesspool /that/ turns into, big difference between 'pose and body structure reference' and 'let's see how many penises will fit on screen'. Albeit, no need to worry about nudity with me - besides coming from an artistic background I just generally.. uh.. don't care. It's just the body. But yeah.

 

[Furiianda]

Albeit, no need to worry about nudity with me - besides coming from an artistic background I just generally.. uh.. don't care. It's just the body. But yeah.

Yeah, it was more of a warning if you were on a laptop in class or something and some nude pics suddenly popped up on your screen... ((: and yes, safesearch is the best~

Anyway, was gonna say I know all about the legs (or something) and tiptoedness and stuff, if that's the case then uhh it must be just the proportions (and the posing would make that more difficult o'course). Though I do think about them in a slightly different way (and usually in length ratios of liiike 2 for the thigh, and 1 for the calf and aboout 1.5-1.75 for the ankle) as they're kinda... structured skeletally... like if you were wearing some gigantique high heels and your feet were reeeeeeeeeeeeally long... uh, and your calves a bit shorter.. Iunno >;

Also maybe you'd want to adopt that anime-like style where the nose juts out, slopes in just a little for the mouth/chin until it merges with the bottom of the head (you can see what I mean in that random picture I linked) but... well, maybe you don't. :B That's just the sort of thing I'd consider!

 

[Bluberry Bat]

..well actually I hate safe search because I vehemently oppose censorship and it cuts out perfectly applicable images, but some of the stuff is just 'ffs' worthy. :B

Anyway! proportions. hrml... fucking anatomy how does it work.
Referenced one picture from an offshoot of that site (rather annoying they don't let you zoom or anything unless you pay them l: but eh, I got what I needed I guess) and came up with... this. holy dynamic poses, Batman! hurgh, it all feels... /wrong/, and I couldn't make it feel right, so I'll just prop it up here I suppose. I just don't know. I think the legs turned out better, and overall proportions, but that pose is flipping difficult, and the leg thing we've been talking about?... yipe.
I don't know if I did anything differently about the nose, but... eh.

 

[Furiianda]

(Two person discussion lololol, hey maybe could you PM me/your email/or was it... MSN?)
I see your point, but it's one of those things that's hard to define, I guess? ALL OR NOTHING (and usually I find what I need with safesearch up and get spared from a myriad of unpleasantries! But, you know, I don't actually google up human anatomy that much >;)

Ooh, those proportions are looking a lot nicer, I think (:
A couple of things seem off to me, hard to place ones really. The left leg (raised) seems to be at the wrong angle, compared to the other leg; should the back of the leg/foot area be around the other way? It's a difficult pose, to be sure, and it's a bit hard to place where exactly the legs are.

Uh, and going up from there... hate to point this out but maybe the left buttock is drawn too low? It seems more like it's matching up with the other (right) rather than the raised leg itself. As well as, it seems to add a lot of fat that doesn't match the slender upper body... though I imagine that's all part of the pantaloons and something didn't seem quite right either way you did it? I am having trouble visualising it, right now.
Her right leg (grounded) seems... like the thigh is at the wrong angle maybe? As in not matching the lower leg, there. But... oooh... I like those cute little patterns you have going there~ C:

The arm almost struck me as being too far back, but it's not horribly off position or anything and it'd make a lot of sense if the character had to swing it a lot further to keep her balance. So, uh, kudos?

 

[Rai-CH]

Furiianda, I just realised that I never thanked you for your help! D: So thank you, I finally figured out what was so confusing about my characters horns (for some reason I always drew them curling in front of the base, which made no sense) so I ended up changing them to be easier to draw from all angles :)
Those reference pictures were very helpfull too~

@Little Bluberry Bomb- I agree that there is something off with the legs ,but I can't quite place my finger on what it is. I think it might be something to do with the angle of the body seems to be different to the angle of the legs. Maybe show a bit more of the back?
Other than that, your picture looks fine :) You did an amazing job drawing such a hard pose like that!

EDIT: ninja'd by much better advice (:

 

[Frosty~]

Woah woah woah I sort of disappeared completely I need to stop doing that.
I don't know if I want to read through everything that was posted since I last came here because there's a lot (although a fair bit less than I expected), but I will say that your Riolu drawings are really good. It makes me miss drawing on paper. I've been relying far too much on digital art recently :c

Another annoying thing that I'm relying too much on is Quavimator. It's really useful if you're drawing a difficult pose, but I've been finding it difficult to draw good looking dynamic poses without it recently. I've been trying to wean myself off of it and only use it when I really need to, but it's kind of annoying xD

Uh, also I'm hosting a round of Werewolf (a variant of Mafia) on another forum and it'll be including art in the updates. I drew this last night for the opening post and I'm pretty happy with it :3c

 

[Missile]

*Mini bump*

Anywho, being a big fan of Ace Attorney, I've wanted to draw a few of the characters. However, I'm not good at anatomy. I'm okay with it, but I'm not the best. I was wondering if anyone could help me out? I've tried searching for a few guides, but to no avail.

 

[Phoenixsong]

*Mini bump*

Anywho, being a big fan of Ace Attorney, I've wanted to draw a few of the characters. However, I'm not good at anatomy. I'm okay with it, but I'm not the best. I was wondering if anyone could help me out? I've tried searching for a few guides, but to no avail.

/interjects

Anatomy, huh? The thing about anatomy is that it's... kind of a really broad subject! It's not really helpful to try and look for "anatomy tutorials" because something like that would turn up only very general results, if any, and general tutorials are rarely of any use to anyone. The best way to learn proper anatomy really is simply to observe life/photographs and do quick sketches as often as possible; if you want to get really serious, then consider looking at medical anatomy references (or similar resources "for artists") and paying attention to skeletal and muscular structures. That's a bit trickier to get the hang of but really pays off in the end. I know that sounds like general advice in and of itself, but it honestly is the best way to learn, and you can always zero in on observing specific people/body parts/expressions/whatever when you want to practice in more detail.

Tutorials and advice are generally best for when there's a specific technique or area that you're having trouble with, say, dynamic hands or facial expressions or something--and even then, the good artists all say "k try this and try this but mostly go draw moar from life now". It'd be easier to get you the help you think you'd need if you were to point out the precise areas that are giving you problems, or else just go ahead, try a picture and post asking for crit. Specific advice is always more helpful than vague, general advice, and just doing a lot of drawing from life/photos/bah is the best way to hammer down the basics and general stuff so you really know the specific areas you need to focus on.

And this seems rambly and unhelpful and probably is because I've been perpetually tired lately, but I'm posting anyway! Hopefully you can scrape something remotely useful out of it!

EDIT how many times did I use "really" in that post.

/disappears again

 

[shy ♡]

*Mini bump*

Anywho, being a big fan of Ace Attorney, I've wanted to draw a few of the characters. However, I'm not good at anatomy. I'm okay with it, but I'm not the best. I was wondering if anyone could help me out? I've tried searching for a few guides, but to no avail.

I'm gonna agree with Kratos and add that the best way to improve on anatomy is, as annoying as it sounds, to reference photos. Yep. Photos and photos of skeletons. If you want to draw a human, reference a photo of a human, or of a human skeleton, or both. There really, really, really is no better way of learning.

 

[Missile]

/interjects

Anatomy, huh? The thing about anatomy is that it's... kind of a really broad subject! It's not really helpful to try and look for "anatomy tutorials" because something like that would turn up only very general results, if any, and general tutorials are rarely of any use to anyone. The best way to learn proper anatomy really is simply to observe life/photographs and do quick sketches as often as possible; if you want to get really serious, then consider looking at medical anatomy references (or similar resources "for artists") and paying attention to skeletal and muscular structures. That's a bit trickier to get the hang of but really pays off in the end. I know that sounds like general advice in and of itself, but it honestly is the best way to learn, and you can always zero in on observing specific people/body parts/expressions/whatever when you want to practice in more detail.

Tutorials and advice are generally best for when there's a specific technique or area that you're having trouble with, say, dynamic hands or facial expressions or something--and even then, the good artists all say "k try this and try this but mostly go draw moar from life now". It'd be easier to get you the help you think you'd need if you were to point out the precise areas that are giving you problems, or else just go ahead, try a picture and post asking for crit. Specific advice is always more helpful than vague, general advice, and just doing a lot of drawing from life/photos/bah is the best way to hammer down the basics and general stuff so you really know the specific areas you need to focus on.

And this seems rambly and unhelpful and probably is because I've been perpetually tired lately, but I'm posting anyway! Hopefully you can scrape something remotely useful out of it!

EDIT how many times did I use "really" in that post.

/disappears again

Thank you so much! I'm very grateful that you typed all of that out, it was extremely helpful! I'll be sure to look at the skeletal and muscular structures or humans. I hadn't even thought about that! Once again, it was very helpful, and then you ever so much! I'll remember all that you've said. Thanks again~

I'm gonna agree with Kratos and add that the best way to improve on anatomy is, as annoying as it sounds, to reference photos. Yep. Photos and photos of skeletons. If you want to draw a human, reference a photo of a human, or of a human skeleton, or both. There really, really, really is no better way of learning.

Thank you! It does seem that using reference photots is best. I'll be sure to look at a variety of photots. Thank you once again!

I have a question.

WHY IS THIS THREAD GETTING NO ATTENTION AT ALL.