opinions por favor

[wnt_to_lrn]

ca n i get an opinon on my character? note I would like for you all to know i was going for a some what off proportion caroony look alittle like the incredables

[Nezumi Works]

As mean as it sounds, learn the fundamentals of drawing before jumping into character design. You've got a long way to go.

[Falchion]

With Nez as usual here. Check out some books on the fundamentals of anatomy. Don't stylize until you know what the hell you're drawing.

[wnt_to_lrn]

well i knew what i was drawing but i see wat ur saying

[wnt_to_lrn]

ok then ( with out the swears) tell me whats wrong and plz note tht its a cartooned style

[Nezumi Works]

Everything is wrong. There's no attention to form, there's no perspective, there's no attention to line work, it's basically a child's drawing. Cartooning requires a knowledge of the basics of drawing, none of which appear in this drawing.

At this point, I don't know if you're serious or trolling. If you are serious, then go find a book like Preston Blair's Cartoon Animation, or Draw the Looney Toons and learn everything in them. Then have another go at drawing a character.

If you're trolling, well, I can't be bothered.

[Truepinkas]

This particular forum is about growth and learning, so with that in mind:

Cartoons are an abstraction of realism, more specifically they are most often extreme simplifications of realism. To make those abstractions convincingly, you need to understand the unsimplified form.

What isn't working?

The anatomy is off, and it does not look off in a stylized, purposeful informed way, it looks off in a 'I'm drawing what I think it looks like but I'm not really sure' way.

The coloring is rushed/sloppy. I'm fine with the fact that there is no shading to speak of, but the solid colors aren't even solid.

There is no sence of volume or form, not even a flattening of form.

The line art is kind of sloppy, you have different line weights (thicknesses) but they seem random and more a factor of chance than purposefully accenting elements through different types of lines.

Trust me, the fastest way to improve on drawing humans, even in a 'cartoon' style is to study anatomy and get a solid grasp on the forms that you are attempting to simplify.

Perhaps it would help for us to see some examples of a style you are striving for?

[Falchion]

ok then ( with out the swears) tell me whats wrong and plz note tht its a cartooned style

Okay, without the fracking "swears"... What you're trying to do right now is essentially trying to turn a bicycle into a Formula One racer. Sure, you can slap a fracking shell onto the bicycle, but that's not exactly what you're trying to do, right? You have to work up from a basic transmission to a combustion engine and then work from there. Likewise, you have to start from the basics of art: human fracking anatomy. You learn how to draw the fracking dangly bits and floppy bits right. Only then do you start thinking about trying to make them dangly bits look like something from a badly-done skin mag.

I think I covered that pretty fracking well.

[Jack the R]

Don't knock the advice you're getting, these people are trying to help you.

What you need most of all is a mind adjustment - not just so you can listen to people, but to realize you've got to do hundreds of these sketches, literally hundreds, if you want to get good. It's impossible to take one of your first drawings and advise you on what you need to do to make this one drawing pro or get to a pro level in the next few drawings.

This one gets scrapped, we point you to the beginning of the path, then you practice practice practice practice.

[wnt_to_lrn]

ok see this was the help i was looking for . you see guys im only in high school i havent been to any school for art jus high school classes of art. all i really asked for is advice and the second go round yall gave it to me and i am in deeep apretiation of it. o and secondly idk how to color right and suggestions? and 3rd.....whats trolling and i would like for yall to know i only take my drawings serious.

[Falchion]

Draw it larger and with thinner lines. Make sure your lines are clean. And refrain from "coloring in" like an elementary-school kid. You want to build up colors and layers, not just rub a crayon across your work.

But first, to Loomis! Hope you're not adverse to looking at male or female dangly bits all day, kiddo.

[Nezumi Works]

Aside from Loomis, studying cartoons is a good thing to do if you're interested in a "cartoon style". However, you want to forget entirely about "style", and concentrate only on structure. How things go together. One thing you should do in addition to studying anatomy is to go to this page and this one, and download all the images (click each one to get the full size version). Then draw what you see, pretty much all the way through. What you're trying to learn there is the structure, how things go together. So that bean shape all the bodies have? That's your friend. You'll be doing that a lot if you're cartooning. And any style you go for, it's all gonna come down to those same fundamentals, so learn them well.

Don't do it instead of realistic human anatomy, though. You've got to do both, just like the pros. Believe me on that, I'm an animation student and have a four hour life drawing session every week. And you know what? It's not enough. So draw real people every chance you get, because it'll be incredibly useful later on. Even if you can't do life drawing classes, just draw people in a cafeteria, or on the bus, or wherever. Seriously, in a couple of years you'll be grateful for doing it.

That should be more than enough to get you started.

Oh, and Jack is giving you far too easy an impression of the learning process? Hundreds of sketches? No way! More like thousands. They say that every artist has 10,000 bad drawings in them, and you've gotta draw them all to get to the good stuff. Well, that's the truth, so get sketching!

[Tony Wallace]

Aside from Loomis, studying cartoons is a good thing to do if you're interested in a "cartoon style". However, you want to forget entirely about "style", and concentrate only on structure. How things go together. One thing you should do in addition to studying anatomy is to go to this page and this one, and download all the images (click each one to get the full size version). Then draw what you see, pretty much all the way through. What you're trying to learn there is the structure, how things go together. So that bean shape all the bodies have? That's your friend. You'll be doing that a lot if you're cartooning. And any style you go for, it's all gonna come down to those same fundamentals, so learn them well.

Don't do it instead of realistic human anatomy, though. You've got to do both, just like the pros. Believe me on that, I'm an animation student and have a four hour life drawing session every week. And you know what? It's not enough. So draw real people every chance you get, because it'll be incredibly useful later on. Even if you can't do life drawing classes, just draw people in a cafeteria, or on the bus, or wherever. Seriously, in a couple of years you'll be grateful for doing it.

That should be more than enough to get you started.

Oh, and Jack is giving you far too easy an impression of the learning process? Hundreds of sketches? No way! More like thousands. They say that every artist has 10,000 bad drawings in them, and you've gotta draw them all to get to the good stuff. Well, that's the truth, so get sketching!

Just as anecdotal evidence of this, I remember the summer between middle school and freshman year, my best friend and I thought we were making a video game (somehow all this constituted was a bunch of weird sketches, but I digress...). During the course of that summer, we drew easily several hundred sketches, mostly dumb looking monsters hastily scribbled in marker which we thought were awesome some reason. But the "main characters" were humans, and one of us had to learn how to draw those too.

So, I pulled out every catalog my mom had and started drawing. It wasn't the same as life drawing, but the repetition and observation taught me things about the human form. By the end of the summer, I went from drawing completely flat, two dimensional marker scribbles that vaguely resembled a human being, to being able to draw fairly realistic people, although they were poorly lit, with no sense of light source, shadows that were in the nearly white range of greys, and no real sense of anatomy (without a reference) but it was a huge improvement.

I should see if I can find the before and after, just to give an example of how much you can improve with diligent practice. By senior year I was winning art shows and scholarships, and I daresay I had less skill when I started than your work here.

[Jack the R]

Color? I've drawn 20 practice faces this morning, and I can already draw. You don't need to be thinking about color yet. You've got to have something worth coloring first.

Sorry if that's harsh, but you came here wanting to learn . . .

[Tony Wallace]

Okay, so as promised, some self flagellation for the purpose of illustration.

1990


And below, 1991 and after that 1993. Still not great by any means, but there's progress there, and you'll experience progress of your own if you're willing to put in the time.

[wnt_to_lrn]

lol tell yall the truth after reading all this not but 2 hours ago i had my friend come over and do body positions and i did rouch sketches of him. im thinkin about taking a fine arts class right along with the computer art design class im taking nxt yr

[Nezumi Works]

That's a good start. For a really good idea of what it takes to become a good artist, go to the sketchbooks section here at CA, and have a look through a few. Everyone here is on the same road.

[wnt_to_lrn]

ok THNKS GUYS YOU REALLY HELPED I WILL RE WORK ON MY CHARACTER LATER I HAVE DESIDED NOT TO TOUCH MY SKETCH BOOK TILL I WORK ON THIS HERE THNX SON

[devlin_pascal]

Okay, so as promised, some self flagellation for the purpose of illustration.

1990


And below, 1991 and after that 1993. Still not great by any means, but there's progress there, and you'll experience progress of your own if you're willing to put in the time.

That much improvement in ONE YEAR!?

My god...I may have to replicate this little experiment of yours myself...are the examples from '91 and '93 from reference or from your head?

[Bai Fan]

TOUCH YOUR SKETCHBOOK. Don't be NOT touching your sketchbook. Draw from what you see. All the time. In fact, stop reading this message. Go get your sketchbook right now. We will wait...

Good. Now sketch your table and monitor. When you are done with that, scan it and post it in a sketchbook thread. Then get a mirror. Sketch the reflection. Then post that. Then sketch what you see outside your window. Then post that. Then go sketch a naked girl. Then get her number. Then post the number so we can call her. Then post the image. Then go sketch your pets. If you don't have any pets, sketch your neighbor's pets. If your neighbors don't have pets, buy them one... and then sketch it. Then post it. If you don't have neighbors... Draw a tree, cause you are in the middle of nowhere.

When you are done with all of that, go sketch something.

[Tony Wallace]

That much improvement in ONE YEAR!?

My god...I may have to replicate this little experiment of yours myself...are the examples from '91 and '93 from reference or from your head?

From a reference to be sure. I was a 15 year old boy, so I needed every excuse I could to analyze "references". The first one is of a model named Patricia Ford, from a Ujena Swimwear catalog (Yes, I remember all this stuff. ) and the '93 was of Stephanie Seymour, with some modifications to the face because I had a specific character in mind.

I'm noticing that the image looks a little dithered or some other early era photoshop filter, probably to reduce pencil stroke, so this one probably marks one of my first attempts at scanning an image and playing around with it in photoshop. In fact... I opened the file again about 12 years later (after a major hiatus from art altogether) and got the urge to "finish it" out of my head (with some help from a photo of rocks I took at the beach ).

It's a total mess, but it sort of marks another step in development. I figure if I'd been practicing in the interim, there would have been a much bigger bump in improvement.

Alright, didn't mean to hijack this thread, so thus ends the art history lesson of shame and (hopeful) redemption.

[Nezumi Works]

Bai Fan is absolutely right. See, the thing about your sketchbook is that's not where you put finished pieces. That's where you do your thinking. That's your mad science labratory where you do fiendish experiments and try crazy things out. Maybe they don't work. That's fine, you just turn the page and start a new experiment. Try out different sorts of lines, practice your circles, draw shapes and try to draw whatever you see. Your sketchbook should be an extension of your brain, and there's no such thing as bad between its covers. It's how you think with your hands.

And when you're ready, when you've built up some skill, then you can try to do some finished works, stuff you're ready to be criticized on. You'll be able to, since you'll have a couple of dozen sketchbooks of experiments backing you up. That's where confidence comes from, and there's nothing that makes good art like practice and confidence.

[wnt_to_lrn]

ok guys this is what i got so far.... i kinda felt like a stalker lol jk

[Falchion]

Were you drawing dwarfs or midgets by any chance? Check them proportions...

[Bai Fan]

Yeah, feeling like a stalker happens from time to time. You get some weird looks. Although, you also can get some dates out of it. I say it is a good start because you started, but the main thing I see is unless you are at a nudist colony, you are not drawing what you see. Stick some clothes on those people!

I have attached a few random pages from one of my sketchbooks to show what I am meaning. Go for pose, clothes, likeness, environment, etc. Statues make for good drawing subjects because they are usually pretty anatomically correct and don't move that often.

[Bai Fan]

So, see what I mean? Out drinking? (not at your age) Be sketching. Shopping for new shorts and see a statue? Be sketching. In the Emergency Room? Be sketching. Sketch what you see, how you see it. Pay attention to how things relate to each other and how things overlap.

I draw a lot of profiles because that means the people aren't looking my direction and I get more candid sketches... which tend to be a lot of profiles.

[DarkSenshi]

Considering where you've started though, the sketches you put up are an improvement. Keep up the good work in studying and practicing! Feel free to add upon your sketches, (clothing, expressions, etc.) and if you don't like how something looks, the eraser is your friend. I deplete my pencil's erasers like no tomorrow. (Also keep in mind, to draw believable clothing, you need to draw the form of the body first, to see the fabric's effect on it.) I'm shutting up now. ^^;

[wnt_to_lrn]

k kool thnx the porortions always get me you know? but i was drawin my friend and he is heavy set how u deal wit tht

[Bai Fan]

I would disagree with that. I don't think you need to draw the anatomy before you draw the clothes, just understand the anatomy.

[Falchion]

Get skinnier friends. Or porn mags.