Forum posts by Kim

Hi DBZ girl,

I commend you on trying to work more on your anatomy skills! Many artists who are interested in a certain style, especially cartoon or manga styles, will use that as an excuse not to study the basics. When you do decide to return to your genre of choice, you will have a distinct advantage over this crowd.

I'm noticing that hands seem to be a challenge for you. I wish our hands & feet practice tool were done, so I could give you that link to help you practice! But in the meanwhile, here's a link to hand drawing tutorials, and exercises that people have found to be helpful in their own struggle to perfect hand anatomy: <a href="http://artistshospital.deviantart.com/art/Human-Anatomy-Hands-and-Feet-97090323" rel="nofollow">http://artistshospital.deviantart.com/art/Human-Anatomy-Hands-and-Feet-97090323</a>

Hope this helps!

Proportion definitely seems to be a challenge here, especially where the head is concerned but other areas as well. I think you will have a lot of improvement with what Josh has suggested, working on mapping out the body in general shapes just to get size and placement correct before refining begins.

Perhaps you would find it useful as an exercise to spend a few of your practice sessions doing NO details, just trying to create the body through shapes that are proportional to one another.

Also, for some quick rules of thumb, you might find this video helpful: http://www.youtube.com/embed/xdNQR7xYW5k It's scheduled to appear in the technique blog later in the month, but I thought I'd mention it since you seem to be struggling with this issue right now. :)

Fascinating to watch. I so rarely see what people actually are doing with these tools! Do you ever do underlying structure work before starting on the outward form? I saw some rough sketches that were then fleshed out, but it looked like it was more of "what you saw" than what was under the skin.

I'm so used to drawing with pencil and paper that I was utterly tickled to see you use the paint bucket to change the background to black or grey depending on the value of the reference image.

Huh! That came out really interesting, reminds me of pixel art. I'm impressed with your sticktoitivness Sylvester. I've been allowing work to wipe me out. I have a long weekend coming up, and can't wait to get back into it!

Hi there! yes, this is definitely something that I want to do. However, because all the images have been generously contributed by photographers, I am prevented by a horrid snarl of copyright and licensing issues from moving to other format s at the moment. That's why I want so badly to start raising the money to hire our own models -- the first project would be creating the hands/feet/faces problem areas practice tool, using photos I have the full rights to so I could offer the tool in multiple formats whenever I had time to develop/funds to get help creating them. But if that proves successful I want to go back and start getting our own database of images, with models we hire, so that I can do the full range of anatomy tools in alternate formats minus the licensing issues we are swimming in now.

I wrote a lot about this plan in the "support us" page. You can find a lot of details about the barriers and how I hope to overcome them on that page.

Because tags can contain harmful scripts, very little HTML is allowed on the forums. The img tag gets removed because the forum is trying to protect itself from potential security problems. To make up for it, we've got an <a href="https://line-of-action.com/faq/#forumimages" rel="nofollow">alternative method of posting images</a> :)

I'm trying! Honest I am!! I will be bringing my sketch book with me this weekend. I have to travel. Hopefully I will have time for it on the train and etc.

Hi Tudore,

Can you post links to your images so that we know what we are critiquing? :)

Oh, I see, you linked some of the words. My bad!

I've been having trouble keeping my commitment to draw every day... I am interviewing new office assistants over the next week so I'm hoping that help is on the way and I will be able to stop working quite so late quite so often.

That book does indeed look good. I might put it on my list of things to pick up if it is helping you!

Thanks for those thoughts, bsjones. I will keep them in mind for the future and see what can be done!

It is ever so difficult to make yourself stick with the basics... It's human nature to want to move on to the flashier, newer things. Just keep reminding yourself that it's like doing stretching before dancing, or training before a marathon... The more you do the basics, the better your big flashy stuff will be in the end!

Hi Mikoko, I edited your post to make the links into links. When you're writing a post, you can highlight the text you want to hyperlink and then click the "link" button. If you're on the visual tab it looks like little chain links. That will automatically do the link stuff for you. :)

It looks like you're off to a really strong start, and are packing a ton into each practice session.

I'm sorry I can't say more about the game, I don't think I can say more without NDA issues.

That's right Vyse! We can all make time for 15-30 minutes in our days if we decide that it really matters to us and make it a priority. It will pay off huge when you turn around in a year and discover you've made HUGE strides as an artist... And all that time that you don't practice is time you can never get back!

Sylvester, I'm totally in love with that still life. You should definitely continue to pursue that avenue.

And hi Vyse! I took a peek at your blog, and added a reminder in my calendar to check again in 30 days to see how you're coming along since your post said you felt like you could stick to it better if you felt like someone is watching... So just know I'm your accountability buddy now! ;) Looks like you're off to a great start, though.

Mikoko -- I almost assigned myself a nearly identical challenge about this time last year. I love bees! I was gearing up to do concept art for a game, but it got put on hold. So here I am doing faces instead, as I encounter them as a challenge a little more often than bees... But I do really love bees, always have since I was a kid! Looking forward to what you produce. :)