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[Arx]

It loooooks like you're drawing lines using your wrist. That's tempting and works for short lines, but makes them wiggly when you have to draw longer ones. Instead, practice drawing from your elbow and shoulder - hold your hand perfectly steady, and sweep your entire arm and forearm. The longer lever of your arm will naturally smooth out the janky little twitches and give you much prettier lines.

If you want a hilarious way of practicing it, clench your stylus in your fist like a pre-schooler and draw like that. It forces you to draw from the arm since you can't use your arm.


There is lots of cool stuff and I have read all of it, but I don't have time to individually comment on all of it. @_@ Keep up the good work all you all.

Spoiler: Elven Paladin (click to show/hide)

[karhell]

Excellent points, Arx. I wanted to add that depending on the size of the tablet, drawing from the arm might not be the most efficient method, but then realised I was just making excuses for my own bad habits, and more practice is called for before actually judging. Cheers

Also noice elf, there. How you render hair like that is completely beyond me

[Arx]

Excellent points, Arx. I wanted to add that depending on the size of the tablet, drawing from the arm might not be the most efficient method, but then realised I was just making excuses for my own bad habits, and more practice is called for before actually judging. Cheers

Also noice elf, there. How you render hair like that is completely beyond me

It's a perfectly valid concern, but I think your tablet would have to be something like 3x4 inches for it to come up, haha (that's the largest area I can comfortably draw a straightish line across with just my wrist). What is true is that full-arm movements with the shoulder don't come up as much in digital art as they would in, say, traditional oil portraits, partly because you can zoom out and draw with smaller movements to the same effect. Which is also a great hack for drawing smooth lines!

I don't know that I would recommend the way I do hair to anyone D: But it's actually relatively simple. I block out the colour with a rough brush (you can see it at the end of his hair), sweep in basic locks and highlights with the same brush, and work down brush sizes and smothnesses down to a small hard brush for picking out the escaping strands. I feel like I over-rendered the hair here, actually. There probably shouldn't be so much detail visible outside of the little highlights.

Spoiler: Cruddy value/composition practice speedpaint (click to show/hide)

The lightning is, I think, too strong.

[Arx]

Yeah, I can't really use my shoulder/elbow because my table is too small :/

I just kinda guessed randomly with the colors, and the water colour part was, well, because I used the water colour brush I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to use, or what each tool looks like.

When I'm drawing long lines, I typically don't have anything touching my desk. The side of my hand brushes against my tablet, but that's all. You shouldn't need to rest your elbow on the table.

As for colours...

I highly recommend doing some research on colour theory. There is a lot to colouring, and you can often limp through just winging it, but knowing all the parts is incredibly useful and important.

This is potentially going to sound dickish, but I'm going to say it anyway: only practicing drawing in an anime style is going to stunt your artistic ability. It's said a lot, but I realised while trying to figure out what advice to give you on colouring that a big chunk of it would be "draw working very closely from a photo reference". That's not necessarily achievable working only in a very stylised way. Drawing in a more realistic style will really, really help you get a stronger intuitive grasp of what colours go where, how things cast shadows, and how to simplify things down to lines.

That said, there's nothing wrong with the anime style. You just do need to know that stylisation should be informed by a strong understanding of the basis you're stylising!

On the topic of brushes, my inclination is to say do whatever you like. Try brushes, see what works for you, see what you think gets you good results. It's almost entirely a matter of personal preference.

[BeruangSarkis]

Nah man, always happy to recieve feedback

I actually have a brush pen (did use it in no 9 there) but I'm still struggling with massive blocks of value since I feel I don't have as much control there, whereas hatching allows gradation. Still, mostly an issue of confidence and lack of practice with consolidating shapes and values for better read.
Also I've not had the chance to try Copics, but I'd love to since they look really fun and versatile. That last image was a combination of four rather different things, a G-tec pen for black, a ball-point for blue, a fine-liner for red and  a random highlighter for yellow X) Work with what you've got I guess.

Yeah, I get ya. I had some difficulty with being confident with my lines as well, but a good part of powering through that roadblock is just me going 'fuck it' and just winging it. I went crazy with shadows, blocking it in everywhere and in every piece I did, learning what works and trying not to cringe too hard at what absolutely didn't. I also did a piece where I tried working backwards by doing shadows first and wow what a waste of ink that was.

BUT the important thing is that I learnt something from that. It helped me figure certain things about silhouettes and mood setting with lighting which would definitely take me much longer if I just played it safe. I got all the benefit of being tossed into the deep end without the slight inconvenience of drowning and being dead. Because really, if you think about it there is no tangible consequence to failure in art, just that deep seated shame that every artist is afraid of. And that's just it. A feeling. Once you realise and come to peace with it, you're pretty much unstoppable.

 If you view each painting or piece you do as a stepping stone to greater things, you wouldn't be as afraid of screwing up; making mistakes is a vital part of learning after all. Don't be afraid to experiment and see what works. Be curious enough to try everything and learn. You shouldn't be afraid of failure, but still be cognizant enough to recognize it and be interested to know why it did.

A person smarter than me once said "If you draw something with enough confidence, no matter how it turns out you'll make others believe in it too". To this day I still believe that wholeheartedly. If you put enough conviction into your works it really does shine through. Case in point, the guy who drew the OPM webcomic and Mob 100, ONE. His earlier works frankly look absolutely terrible, but he still wasn't afraid to push his drawings even then, and I ended up being taken on this wild ride even with his sub-par skills. You can see him trying new things every time with poses, angles and backgrounds in his panels, and now his works actually look pretty decent.

I ended up going on a massive tangent here but what I'm trying to say is, don't ever let a lack of confidence or skill turn you down from drawing what you want to. Anyone can be a skilled artist if they just don't let the fear of failure get to them. Easier said than done, for sure, but it's something to think about nonetheless.

These are amazing! Do you have a Twitter or DeviantArt I can follow?

This

Welcome back! I don't remember you, but still hi! :3

This one, especially, looks like an awesome professional illustration.  I've always loved that style of shading, but never got the hang of it, myself.

Cheers guys. I do have a >DevArt< account, but I'm not as active there as I am with my >Tumblr< though.

The hatching took me quite a while to figure; pored though Vagabond, Berserk and other Seinen mangas with similar aesthetic and mood and studied how they did their lines. Most of them can instill such movement and energy in their panels just with proper hatching. Mine is still messy, but it's a step in the right direction at least.

I've got some speedpaint for ya here today

Spoiler: snip (click to show/hide)

Shit, that looks great. You make colors look so effortless lmao

snip

Anime at its core is mostly about pushing boundaries for maximum effect, but you'd absolutely need to know the rules first before you start trying to bend any of them for sure.

@Moonlit, I'd recommend reading through >this< to get a jump start. There are tips there even expert artists need to be reminded of. It's a great resource and I think it'll help ya put the right foot forward.

---

Some sketches of OC stuff I'm working on:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Arx]

Spoiler: Scroll Bandit (click to show/hide)

Fanart for Duelyst. The pixel art in the corner is the original by Unseven, the primary artist/art director for Duelyst. I wanted to play around with transferring the colour scheme directly from pixels to painting, but it just makes it look a little uncanny. Chalk it up to failed experiment, I guess.

[BlackFlyme]

Something I'm working on for class. Still need to clean the tones a bit, give it a once over for what's warm/cool, then colour it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Bleh.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Wait, that got so much darker between exporting the file and uploading it. What the hell?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

The side of my hand sticks against the tablet when I tried using only my arm/shoulder. It's really uncomfortable and makes my hand shake ): I feel like I'm holding the pen wrong. I'm pretty sure I hold pencils wrong as well, tbh.

The grip thing is whatever, but you should invest in an anti-fouling glove. They're pretty great for tablets, and drawing in general.

[Cathar]

Sketch of the last page of the  intro ! Kind of lost my time with a sideproject that I now realize is going nowhere, so back on my baby


Also a sample of what I'm wasting my precious time on

[TD1]

"Given up their grievances."

Good work as always.

[Cathar]

Thanks a lot ! I corrected it on the psd !

[Noyemi K]

New speedpaint

[Egan_BW]

Well that's suitably creepy to look at at 3:00 am on my tiny phone screen in the dark because I can't sleep.

[Dark One]

At first I wanted to draw a heavily armoured wraith for my next project, but I disliked the result, scrapped it and remade it with fractals.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Cathar]

Introduction finished :')

New speedpaint

10/10 would sip a coffee in after midnight.