Scratchings on paper

[Meuniere]

Hi, new member here; I'm a 16 year old, still in High School, but I hope I can get better through everyone's help here!

The first two pictures in this post are skull studies- thirty seconds to a minute, references from skullsunlimited.com. I went with contour lines today. Permanent marker (which is dying) on the back of white post-it notes.

The last is a sketch from way back in August, it's of two of my cats and Henry Townshend from Silent Hill 4. I've since studied human anatomy a lot more but I don't have any to show you, unfortunately!

(also, I hope I'm doing this right ;__; I'm horrible with stuff like this)

[Meuniere]

Not much today- just a digital painting of a griffon thing. (I really need to do some life studies....)

[Jasper Flick]

So, what do you want to do? Realistic painting? Cartoony stuff? Anyway, Loomis or Bridgman are your men for human anatomy.

Check out http://www.posemaniacs.com/, especially the 30 sec drawings, if you wanting to draw lots of humans.

[Meuniere]

I'm not quite sure what I'm going for- I guess a style that's recognizably mine. Though studying realism will help, I don't want my stuff to look too.... well, real.

Thanks for the site! I checked it out, but I didn't look at the thirty second drawing thing until you pointed it out.

Last night, I did a few 90 second drawings. Then I did a 2 minute drawing of my cat, fluffy.

I also painted one canvas out of ten for my rabbit project.

[Jasper Flick]

Ah, watch out for the pit trap called "style". It is far more important to learn to draw well than to develop a distinct style. If you have something you consider a personal style right now, it's really just a collection of mistakes and limitations born through ignorance and imitation. It's harsh, but true.

If you become a good artist you can't help but develop your own recognizable personal quirks. It's not really you who defines that "style" though, it's the observers that'll recognize your handiwork and influence.

In other words, what you really want to become is a great artist! That's a nice goal!

And it's good to hear that you don't want your stuff to be too real. We have photography for that, don't we? It saves you a lot of hassle. It seems that abstraction and you are going to be nice friends.
Here's a little secret: Everything is composed of basic shapes, with multiple levels of increasingly smaller details on top of them. How "real" you want to get is just a matter of how to proportion the basic shapes and how much detail to add. Everything starts with the basic shapes though, keep that in mind.

[Meuniere]

Thanks for the kind words, Jasper!

I... didn't actually really draw anything new (I spent all of yesterday wrapping up gifts), so I included three pokemon doodles I've been working on for something on DeviantART (I'm negativezerro over there, btw!). It's... a pretty lame attempt at colour theory, but I added purple for the shadows of the yellow pokemon, red for the green, and... I just used darker colours for the mushroom one.


I also put my raccoon ear/tail set from Halloween in this set; I made it for my friend. I... tend to sew stuff in my free time (if you guys like this, I'll start including my costume stuff!) so this dumb 1-1.5 hour project goes up here, too.

[Jasper Flick]

The complementary shadow colors is nice thinking. However, it's not very noticeable, there's almost no shading to begin with. Putting a purple background behind the Ampharos is sweet though. Eye-catching and vibrant. Keep digging for color and lighting stuff around here!

I must say you can't get much out of thumbnails like that though. Draw the entire subjects! Get the whole critter correctly proportioned. Pick a lightsource and color/temperature, then apply shadows and highlights. You need to think 3D in order to pull this off convincingly in any pose you'd like.

[Meuniere]

Yeah, the meme was to draw all of your favourite types of pokemon in the slots- they weren't really made for the full pokemon, unfortunately. However, I'm gonna take your advice and colour this full sketch of my Luxio. (I got Pokemon Diamond for Christmas)

There's also a pencil sketch (something like an hour, I think?) of the band, Blackfield. My reference was inside the Blackfield II booklet. The guy on the left is Steven Wilson, and the guy on the right is Aviv Geffen.

[Meuniere]

Coloured Luxio:

[JohnID]

why is luxio's shadow backwards?
Edit: Just realizing that probably isn't a shadow...

[Meuniere]

It's not a shadow, no; it's a Luxray. XD Sorry about any confusion!

[Meuniere]

Not sure how mature content is dealt with here; so I'll just link to the thing I drew last night.


here!

[eminkey2003]

Just a tip: Deviantart wants you to sign up before you can see mature content, so try uploading your image to imageshack.us, photobucket, conceptart's attachment manager, etc.

About the sketches: I think you could loosen up the shapes a little-- they're very hard-edged and straight. Figures are full of all kinds of curves and different lines. Do some more life drawing and you'll see what I mean.

[Meuniere]

Okay, thanks- I don't think I could upload it to photobucket/imageshack because of mature content rules there, so I'll just upload it here.


As for the shapes- I think you're right. :C I have a very hard time thinking of things as circles and lines, I tend to think of them more as triangles and angles. I draw from life a lot (mostly my cat) but I still can't seem to get out of this mindset.

[Jasper Flick]

That's probably a sign you're not thinking 3D but 2D. It's not a bad start though, what you have to try it to get those angles to twist into the paper. Start doing simple perspective drawings. Horizon line, vanishing points, some grids and cubes. They're the basics, you can build entire universes with those. After a while you'll get to circles and then spheres, and so on.

[Meuniere]

an alligator.

[Shad0w666]

Nice drawing dude!
Definetly keep practising your skills, draw as much as you can.. ( that's what i try to do... ) Keep it up!