[ART] [warning : lots of pics] 2011 with Saura

This was drawn while I was in India during christmas Holidays. I lacked access to the internet rescources which I usually do for drawing so during this time I spent a lot of time drawing my own stuff without focus or reference. Take a look at the line quality here. I can't draw straight lines and I can't even draw a proper oval for the speech bubbles. The proportions are incredibly off.


Something I thought was funny.


At this time I attempted to do a set of cartoony comics called the Otakuworks comic which you can read online here. I did the drawing, one of my friends did the writing.
Otakuworks holds my favourite internet forum, not for the manga related content, but for the small tight community which i have regular conversations with. I consider the site to house my closest internet friends.




After my family returned to india I returned to looking at great artists on the internet. James Gurney's Dinotopia is an inspiration to me and I started to develop an itch to learn how to draw architecture so I could paint nice cities like him.


an attempt at drawing something with warped perspective. It looks bad and I feel bad.


This set and the few drawings that preceeded it were heavily inspired by Shunya Yamashita's artwork, which I have been following for quite a while. His character designs are a delight to look through.



After this I did not go back to digital painting for quite a long time.


Notice Lack of pencil control here.

I begin to gain an interest in learning to draw cars.

back to top

I continued to attempt to design like Shunya Yamashita.

I also attempted to paint this particular design, but later abandoned it.




The Day I joined Conceptart.org and my first submission.


I got introduced to boxstravganza and it changed a lot about the way i view drawing and perspective. This fresh new perspective that he put on it enabled me to progress to a new level of drawing. This youtube video is definitely one of my favourites regarding drawing.


The enlightenment from the boxstravaganza exercises along with Scott Robertson's inspiring drawings pushed me to solve the biggest problems I've had with drawings.

Cars.
Could never draw them.
I hardened my resolve to fix this gaping flaw in my skillset of drawing and began my perspective studies which would dominate the rest of the year.



Webcomic idea i ran through my head regarding some busty bubbly waitress, some intelligent reserved woman and a few other secondary characters.
back to top

Continual boxstravaganza exercises and studies.

My attempt at a Lamborghini using the techniques I learned in Scott Robertson's DVDs.



More Scott Robertson DVD practice.


I grow more confident in drawing 3d shapes but there are still issues that need resolving.
back to top

Frustration level: high.
I was growing increasingly impatiant and frustrated the past few weeks at my lack of ability to see the convergance in two point perspective and my lack of ability todraw a straight line. This caused me to retreate back to studying the very fundamentals of drawing. The ability to draw straight lines, to draw curves and to be able to see and estimate perspective convergance takes quite a lot of training. I have spent well over 300 A3 pages training to gain just this skillset.


After that month of raging at myself for my lack of skill I attempted to draw a car. It turned out nicer than I had expected at the time. Of course, looking back now, it has issues.


For some obscure reason I got interested in doing a set of gestural sketches where I believe I kind of learnt how "style" develops. The set were all done through pose maniacs, but looking back at it now, pixellovely is a superior alternative to posemaniacs for the whole quick set of gestural figure drawing exercise.


My attempt to draw the same identical character. As you can see; I failed. All of these heads look like completely different people. I didn't realise at the time how I should fix this problem, but the solution was very simple and straightforward. Nevertheless I continued to attempt to draw the same identical character for a few more pages, continually failing.


The ability to draw a perfect circle is a skill that I would like to gain. It is something I train for quite a lot.


I did a simple set of studies on the hips and the curves which make up a nice rear end and took a brief look at how the spine and legs control these curves. This is the last time I study the human body in 2011.
back to top

My Deviantart peers have continually noted that my ability to draw hands is weak. This was something I mutually agreed on so I decided to do a set of 100 hand studies.


The end of my 100 hand study.


A brief return to cars.


One day I would like to get into comic book drawing. The ability to draw good comics requires quite a large sum of knowledge and one of them is to be able to draw character expression. The muscles which make up and contort the human face to create the various expressions were not something I had studies at the time so I decided to do another 100 study set of the human head in various expressions. Deviantart is a great place to get photographs for this.




As I mentioned earlier comic book art is something I want to get into, but the thing which always bothered me was the emptiness in the panels in all my attempts to make comics. I decided to get into the art of creating environments. I'm not sure exactly when it started, but my thirst for creating environments of epic proportions was growing. I was growing increasingly bored of learning to draw the human figure and increasingly interested in learning to draw architecture, vehicles and environments.




The idea of taking shapes out of the photograph and drawing them at different rotations with correct perspective was something i developed myself in order to learn the shape of objects better, and the relation the objects have with each other. I started doing this when I realised I couldn't quite draw a set of chairs which lied on the same ground when one was rotated at some obscure angle.


I start looking for unique shapes to try and understand and construct with the guidance of two point perspective. It's kind of fun to do once you get the hang of it, and frustrating as hell when you dont have the hang of it.

I begin to conclude my 100 building study.


I finally figure out what I needed to get done when I was attempting to draw the same identical character over and over. It was my drawing of the base which made up the characters head which needed a lot of study. If I spend enough time carefully constructing and understanding the shape and proportion of the base which makes up my character drawing identical characters becomes a lot more straightforward.


Success! (almost.) Looks pretty close to the same character, but not exactly, still need some practice, but at least I know what I need to practice to get it right.


I started watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic this year. The ponies looked like fun to draw so I decided to do some preliminary studies of horses before I attempted to draw the pony cartoons.


Some bizarre things start to happen in my sketchbook. The wierd shapes on the right indicate my interest in form and attractive design is growing, and my confidence in doing strokes is also growing. The curves I start to draw begin to become more dominant, and my concept sketches start to develop some kind of flow to them.


My confidence in each of my strokes grows further. I'm beginning to draw a lot with a little.


Oh, and I haven't stopped practicing the fundamentals.


More interesting doodles start cropping up all over my sketchbooks.


A design study to increase my visual library. Something concept artists need to develop is a large visual library to call on when they start developing their own concepts. It's just plain hard to draw character concept art for characters which looks good when you haven't spent any time drawing different articles of clothing.


My ability to draw concept art levels up.






I do not and have not yet stopped doing these underlying exercises given to me through scott robertson and moatddtutorial.

The Day I join TeamLiquid

As previously mentioned the pessimism that I lack the skill to land a career in art or engineering had made me extremely depressed.

Watching Day9 and watching MLP makes me less depressed and much happier, but I'm still very moody because I have a very pessimistic outlook on my life and my future.

The day I first joined Teamliquid would also be the day I joined one of my favourite chatrooms. #tlponies to be exact. Here I met GaryOak who was in need of an artist to commission. And so I decided to actually learn how to draw the ponies in the cartoon that I liked to watch so much and after that,I recieved my first payment for the skills which i have spent so much time to gain.
back to top

I also met agonyx90 in the chatroom. He was a fellow who was interested in learning to draw ponies so I decided to offer him some advice. I knew from experience what one needs to do to draw the same identical characters in different angles with different expressions and different poses. I wanted to introduce him slowly to more and more rescorces and exercises regarding drawing.
I wanted to teach him the skillset he needed to draw basic shapes, rotate them around, and then later move onto giving weight to the characters so that he could draw them in motion. The Animation behind My Little Pony is excellent, the way the creatures walk, talk and their hair bounces is fun to watch. I think it's an nice place to study how to give characters "more energy" in their poses and motions. I see a lot of the energy that we used to see in classic cartoons in here.
Cartoons sure were good back in the day.

I will repress my rant on japanese animation for now, the members of Otakuworks know clearly how I feel about that.




All the aspects of my drawing have steadily increased. My studies look clearer and my lines look cleaner.


I attempted and failed to explain to agonyx90 how to make 3d constructions so that he can help himself study the relation same sized shapes have with each other when you put them in 3d space. I admit, maybe i tried to introduce it to him too early, he was gaining skills pretty rapidly and I was pondering on wether he was ready to be introduced to more difficult constructions. I'll wait around a bit and wait for him to master the simpler shapes first.


because ponies thats why.


Increasing my visual library with vehicle designs + perspective studies. I managed to combine two studies into one.


Probably the most interesting drawing in my entire sketchbook.


What I find more interesting than the car or that train which is ghosting in front of the car is that wierd plane to the right. It's like my concepts are starting to transcend the need to make sense.




examples of how my drawings are getting cleaner and my strokes more confident.

Where Am I now

I believe these two pictures summarise the quirkiness that my concept ske3tches have gained and the tightness and confidence of my strokes along with my greater understanding of perspective. Am I done?
No. Far from it.

I have more training to do and hopefully, by the end of next year, I can surprise TeamLiquid with a display of the skills that I have gained.
back to top

It's hard. It's a very hard skill toi get.

What you need to draw:
a functional pair of eyes, brain and hands.

What you need to train your drawing to a high level:
a functional pair of eyes, brain and hands, a lot of time and a damn lot of discipline.

How I recommend you go about it:
Ask yourself what you want to draw and why you want to draw. For each purpose there are different skillsets within the drawing realm you want. You need to decide to choose which skillset you want and train to gain it. Browse Conceptart.org often as well as an array of opinions from seperate artists so you can figure out your training regime.

Dont go to Deviantart for advice. I highly advise against it. The guys that will respond to your questions are highly likely to be people who dont know how to train or what to train to gain skill. The best advice you can get from a DeviantArtist is something parrotted from a superior artist (probably from conceptart).
I have seen the "critiques" that people give on that site. I have seen the advice that people give to each other on that site. It's mainly people who think they know what they need to do to improve but truly don't understand what is important.

there is good advice on Deviantart, but if you are new, it may be hard to understand which advice is good and which advice is bad. there are people on DA who believe that a bad artist can give good advice and that a good artist can give bad advice. This is wrong (unless there is some form of trollage involved).
On Deviantart the users gallery is a direct measure of the validity of their advice, unless that member also visits conceptart.org.

When visiting conceptart.org the opinoin of every member is more valuable. Most of these members train and study art themselves. They know what needs to be done to get better, even if their sketchbook is terribad, if they're a member of conceptart.org, their opinion is valuable.

Compare the guy who ladders grinds, the guy who watches pro replays, practices specific mechanics and practices executing specific builds to the guy who goes to bnet forums for starcraft advice instead of teamliquid.

ladder grinding/randomly drawing without thought= slow improvement
practicing/executuing/training = efficient improvement
visiting bnet forums/visiting Deviantart forums = ...
visiting TL/visiting CA = good advice yo.

Recommended rescources for beginners:
Conceptart.org
Scott Robertson's perspective form drawing complimented by another of his perspective drawing DVDs
moatddtutorials' boxstravaganza
analytic figure drawing blogspot
Practical Light and Color by Jeremy Vickery
pixelovely (for gestural figure drawing)
any books on human figure drawing by Andrew Loomis
FZD on traditional mediums

Recommended rescources for intermediate:
Going to Deviantart for photographs (for visual library building/proportion analysis/perspective study/anatomy study/gesture study etc..)
all of Scott Robertson's DVDs regarding matte surface rendering
FZD youtube channel

I dont have advice for advanced because I'm not that good yet so i lack the experience to give it.

personal tips and tricks:
- textured and cutsom brushes are more useful when you are the one who has made them, also when you understand the shapes you want to replicate and repeat.
- Sparth's technique for laying down quick compositions is nice skill toi have for digital enviro painters
- Sometimes you can use negative space to indicate details as opposed to drawing all the details.
- Anyone and everyone is a critic, it is important that you yourself understand the purpose of why you are drawing and when someone criticises if that is even relevant. You will find more often than not, that art critics are usually just imposing what they believe things should be like as opposed to understanding what the artist is trying to do.
back to top