I'm guessing that by "Kimmy" you mean me? There's a bunch of people on the forums, and many of them are much better artists than I -- perhaps they'll help you too! I'm not actually so great at critique most of the time.
I split these posts off from the "100 project" topic and moved them to the critique board where it is more appropriate to put them.
I'm not sure what you are saying sounds stupid. Starting in pencil then working in ink is a time-honored method of producing images.
Your tones are all extremely similar. Be bold! Try dark shadows and light highlights. Right now, nearly everything appears to be hanging out in the middle.
I love how your "low resolution" images still manage to capture so very much inspiration. I was getting bored of just churning out pencil drawings of faces. I wonder if sprinkling in a few color attempts like those will refresh me.
Should I nag and say you came here to tackle landscapes, and encourage you to beat your head against the frustration for a little while again? :)
Thank you so very much for your kind words. I never stop being touched when someone tells me that something I built has helped them. It is incredibly motivating to keep improving!
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: http://artistshospital.deviantart.com/art/Human-Anatomy-Hands-and-Feet-97090323
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:
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.
