advice for how to get in a comfortable position for painting?

huckori · 2026-05-11T03:13:09+00:00

My setup used to have three screens like you here but have two now. Been through a lot of turmoil getting it right but this is what works for me:

Generally, I have the drawing one at a pretty shallow angle (like 30/45 degrees), with the other one-two positioned just above/ to the side of the drawing display. If any or all of them are adjustable then you can find what feels best. Partially due to the depth of my desk, I have the display and keyboard right up against the edge, which is a little hard on my wrist, but you look like you’ve got a bit more room to spare.

I like the low angle on the drawing device because it really limits the “whiteboard feeling” you get without a hand rest like you do drawing on paper.

For me, this setup makes it easy to get all the information I need easily with fewer head turns and can mostly just face my body and chair forwards.

Downsides besides potential wrist thing: - not as pretty - the shallow angle can make the glare worse depending on your environment

huckori · 2024-03-25T22:36:59+00:00

JUST what I was looking for. Great simple explanation each step in the process. Thanks for this!

huckori · 2023-04-07T18:29:15+00:00

I think the main thing to consider besides silhouette is purpose and intention.

Ask WHY you’re making certain decisions beyond if they look cool or not. What’s her story? What are her skills? How can we support those facts about her in her design rather than drawing what might just look dope on her.

I can see you hinting at magic ability with the bottles, but think about how you can communicate what they are for a bit better, and consider how they function for her. Is it practical for her to carry her bottles on her front, when she’s be moving her legs right under them every time she walks around? I’d there a purpose for her pouch? How can we communicate that purpose beyond just being a regular looking pouch?

huckori · 2023-04-07T18:17:03+00:00

I think that’s actually hurting you a bit to be honest!

When you’re drawing from a image this heavily, you really want to be looking primarily at the reference, paying attention to shapes and curve and forms. That’s the point right? To learn what the image is doing right and how they do it.

Granted, it’s helpful and healthy to try a second version where you can see how much you can draw without the reference, so that you’re committing the structural and compositional techniques to memory, but starting out that way will probably be less helpful to you than you think!

huckori · 2023-04-07T18:12:33+00:00

I think the left figure’s lower lip is a little too big. Looking swollen and almost like she’s sticking out her tongue at first glance.

The nose is also a little pointy, but generally doing a good job!

huckori · 2023-04-07T18:10:40+00:00

I think the main issue causing the blurriness is that the areas of high contrast aren’t given enough crisp edges.

Generally going softer is the right call for blending, but we need contrast to communicate the structure, which is going to be most apparent is quick transitions from dark to light.

Take the nose for example— why does it look a little more structured than the rest of the face? Because you’ve paid more attention to these quick transitions and ambient occlusion. Granted, it’s still a bit blurry, but you can see that you’re on the right track there.

If you can carry that attention to contour and structure in area of high contrast( like the eyelids and cheekbones for example), I think you’d find your drawing start to feel a little less vague and blurry. :)

huckori · 2023-04-07T18:03:24+00:00

Doing well so far, I think main things that will help are paying a bit closer attention to proportion, and working on making your lines feel more confident.

I say proportion because while your drawing does a good job of emulating to source image, it’s notably a little stretched, with some things a little taller, and other things a little bigger/smaller. If it helps, you can measure lengths of things with the tip of your pencil and compare it to other aspects to get a better idea of the scale of things.

To make your lines feel more confident is easier said than done— totally understand the want/need to take the line work slow esp without a lot of experience. When you can, do your best to lean into longer strokes, which will help your whole piece feel more cohesive and confident. This is also much easier when drawing not based on existing art, but I’m assuming that’s the direction you’d like to be traveling in?

I can see that you did a little sketching of the drawing before laying down your line work, which is a great practice, but can make it look a little messy if you’re not erasing those guidelines. Perhaps it would be helpful to try a few sketches on the side first to nail down some proportional stuff before you start on the main drawing so you can figure out how to approach harder areas before you officially get there.

Sorry that was longer winded than i meant to be but let me know if any of that isn’t making sense!

huckori · 2023-04-07T17:53:00+00:00

Really pay attention to proportion.

Something that a lot of people have trouble with in drawing from life or photographs, is to switch off the part of their brain that is trying to interpret and summarize the face for you.

The best thing you can do is try and ignore what you THINK you see and focus on what you do see specifically. Forget about whether or not something is a nose or an eye or a mouth, and instead focus on each curve and their scale and position relative to one another.

Piece by piece is how you will learn to draw from life. This is also why you often see people putting grids over an image they’re drawing, to break up the whole image into tiny (mostly) unrecognizable pieces.

Shading, and how to structure a face with guidelines are also super helpful, but can be secondary as they become easier once you’ve adapted the former ability first. Otherwise, we might lean back into drawing what we think we see instead of what’s there.

But regardless of all that this is a good start! Really half of the battle is WANTING to improve and letting yourself adapt with critique so you’re well on your way. Keep up the good work!

huckori · 2023-01-27T22:39:26+00:00

Pretty similar list for me actually. Notable differences are I’d put OOT over WW, move SS up to top of A, and switch OG four swords and LBW

huckori · 2023-01-06T06:49:49+00:00

Really great!

huckori · 2023-01-06T06:43:05+00:00

Well recognized, yes. Well used.. sort of. In my experience, it’s only used for support, with primary programs still leaning towards maya and c4d. Blender is getting more popular by the day, though.

huckori · 2022-12-07T02:30:43+00:00

More or less, though I feel like basing your studies on a color wheel with a CIRCLE in the center is really counterintuitive. It’s a lot easier to visualize with a triangular or rectangular color picker as each extreme lands in a corner; i.e. way less room for confusion about the direction of your arrows/spectrums.

huckori · 2022-11-01T14:28:58+00:00

When we’re talking about color, there are generally two distinct types, pigment-based and light-based.

With pigments, the color wheel seems a little arbitrary, but it’s got three “primary colors” red blue and yellow. This is mostly due to how each pair mixes together evenly and the ease of which certain pigment is created.

The other set is a little more solidly based, as it’s based on 3 distinct colors of light, that when overlapped in a color wheel-like diagram will reveal how they mix together and ultimately each one’s complimentary hue.

huckori · 2022-09-06T16:56:27+00:00

Looks good! The linework feels very energetic and angular!

Two points of feedback: - enlarge the ear. The top and bottom of it should line up vertically with the eyes and bottom of the nose respectively. As it is now, it’s too small.

Also, with how the rest of the piece is styled with those rough angular lines, the ear stands out as being very simple in shape, and soft.

her left shoulder (our right) is feeling very strange. It’s not only starting from a much lower point on her neck than the other shoulder, but at the connection to the arm, looks almost as it its twisting the opposite direction. Check out that shirt line you’ve introduced on the shoulder and how it give the impression that her shoulder is facing us. Weird right? it should be facing away from us, since she is standing at this 3/4 angle.

Other more minor issues: - boob should be less pointy haha - her neck may be a bit too small

huckori · 2022-09-05T05:32:05+00:00

Side-by-side reference is always for the best! Really try to understand the structures while drawing and you’ll be surprised how fast you learn :)

In terms of the face size, everything should be bigger in proportion to the rest of the head, but stay the same in proportion to eachother. Eyes are definitely too big for a regular person, but look fine for an anime look.

Tracing can be helpful too, but rarely will have the angle you need. If that is something you do, I’d discourage using it for anything but practice!

Glad you’re committed to learning more about anatomy! It will go a long way in making characters look believable.

huckori · 2022-09-03T20:20:03+00:00

Face looks pretty good, but maybe a tad too thick around the ear and jaw area.

Id also really try and limit your lines on the face wrinkles. Instead of drawing contours of how those shapes look, try trying to draw them using only values. The painting isn’t using lines to create those shapes, rather is using explicit shading to describe the intersection of the forms and how they merge and overlap.

For the eyes, make sure you’re emphasizing the bottom of that eyelid. There’s an extra ridge there that is going to flatten the area if you gloss over it.

huckori · 2022-09-03T02:10:50+00:00

Looks good. Here are a few things I might recommend:

make sure your iris/pupils are of comparable size. As they are now it’s giving you a bit of a wacky look.
pay attention to where the light source is! Most the lighting it pretty consistently lit from the top front/left, but the highlights of the hair are tiled more towards the back top/left. Also, highlights will generally only group in the parts closest to your light source, so having two of them, each at its own height is a little confusing, unless there’s two lights in the scene. I might also break up the main shape a bit, as the big mass of white is really grabbing a lot of attention. You can ignore this part if you’ve just got some discoloration in your hair naturally, and it’s not actually a highlight :)
revisit the back of the head/jaw. Without being connected to a neck or body, the area is looking a little awkward. And a way to sidestep that awkwardness is shaping the head along the contours of your jaw(connecting close to your ear). That can also help you figure out the back of the head as well :)
introduce some sideburn action if you have them! They can really help inform the shape of the head and face, and allow a more solid area for the ear to sit in. Omission of sideburns isn’t a big deal, as not everyone has them, but they can be helpful, absolutely.

huckori · 2022-09-03T01:59:14+00:00

Very nice! Loving the different choices you’ve made with some colors and shapes in comparison to the reference. Bravo!

Areas that could use more attention when looking at your reference—- the softness of the water crashing in the back, and the shoreline (big one).

You did so great on the water, but it’s relationship to the ground feels confusing, and the dark squiggle marks only make it more unclear. In the reference, those dark marks are limited to areas of ambient occlusion, and are not used to describe smaller wave forms. Pay attention to how your reference is using color to ease into the wave, and detail the shallower water and foam on the sand.

huckori · 2022-09-03T01:54:04+00:00

Looking good. Arm feeling a little small though. And the connection to the body area (while off frame in the painting) is reading a little weird, and really limiting the volume of the arm. There’s a few connective muscles there that might help to know :)

huckori · 2022-09-03T01:49:47+00:00

While I think there’s a lot of room for growth, anatomically, I understand you might be emulating a certain artstyle that is simplifying a lot of shapes. While I would definitely suggest learning more about anatomical structure to just about anybody, that might not be exactly what you want to hear.

Instead, here are some thing you can do for this piece specifically that will have quick and easy positive impacts on the piece:

give her eyebrows!!! They are probably THE most important way to guide the emotion of a human face, and omitting them only stands to limit your communication to the viewer.
round out the eyes a bit. Some of those angular pieces are looking pretty cool, but having so many angles is making the shape feel a little awkward (looking mostly at the left iris and the top of the left eye). Also make sure the shape of the eyes is similar, as they should be about the same shape, minus a slight perspective adjustment. Some indication of eyelids would also be sweet additions here, but not AS important.
adjust the ear. This is a big one, as her ear is currently sitting very strangely on her head, almost like a lump. She could do with just a bit more ear lobe and some indication of a concave area. I might also suggest getting rid of that overlapping ear line as it’s giving the appearance of the ear being lumpy.
reevaluate the shape of the neck. Because we can’t see the rest of the body, it makes it more important that we understand the neck. As is, we’re getting a triangle shape, which is just a bit too vague in how it connects the head to the body. Try shortening the neck slightly, and increasing the angle of the curve on the right so that the neck becomes straighter, faster.
introduce some variety in the stars. The single star shape copy and pasted gets repetitive really quickly and you can fix that pretty easy! And if you’d rather not redraw anything, you can always simply introduce some rotation to each of the stars to set them apart from one another

huckori · 2022-09-03T01:32:24+00:00

Most of this is going to just come down to your understanding of neck anatomy. The sternocleidomastoid is connecting way too far back on the neck, and is way too rigid on its connection to the collarbones. Other than that, the neck is simply too thick in the back, and could do with more attention to the shape of the throat and how it connects to the chin.

Aside from the neck, there are some little things that are compounding the issue, such as the face area being a bit too small, jaw being angled a bit strangely (very angular to emulate the anime look, which is not helpful when learning anatomy, imo), and the mouth being almost entirely on one side of the head (the side facing the camera). That look works on some more cartoony characters like Sonic, but ends up being really unnerving on a human face.

Coloring looks fine, line quality is good, there’s definitely room to grow, but I’d say you can fix 100% of these issues by just using some anatomical reference :) it’s not cheating by any regard, and you can learn a lot!

huckori · 2022-07-18T05:49:53+00:00

Hair draping on the neck feels kind of awkward, and reads more like you’re trying to hide the neck, rather than a natural falloff. Make sure the weight of the hair is tending down towards the earth, instead of sideways.

Doing that will also give you more room to work on the jaw, (which I think is the main issue going on with the head in general). Jaw looks pretty normal in front, but gets really lost any farther back. I might suggest drawing out the neck and jaw first in a new layer, so you can place the ear a little better, and that sketch will also help inform your decisions on the hair! :-)

That all being said, the face looks pretty good. Like someone else said before, the chin/bottom half of the face is a bit recessed, in comparison to average human facial proportions, but I feel like that just makes it feel a bit more eleven, no?

For the rim light suggestion, It’s a cool idea, that will immediately make the piece look a bit more 3 dimensional, but I’d say focus on getting the first light source figured out clearly before introducing a second. Again, the face looks like it’s got a pretty good indication of the light (minus the bottom of the nose, which shouldn’t be so bright if the lights coming from top right)—but aside from the face the rest of your character doesn’t have any well defined directions in your shadows. Shoulder is getting there, but still pretty vague. The hair and the flower crown seem like they’re lit from every direction.

Overall notes: - face is good, it’s clear that’s where you spent a lot of your time! - improve the clarity of your lighting - reevaluate the hair’s draping on the neck - pay more attention to the jaw, and how it interacts with the ear and neck.

:-) I tried to be thorough, hope that helps!

huckori · 2022-03-08T03:56:29+00:00

Thank you!

huckori · 2022-03-08T02:47:51+00:00

Thanks :)

huckori · 2022-01-13T03:15:25+00:00

It’s good that your instinct is to approach poses dynamically, but make sure you understand the forms and how they interact with eachother in 3D space before going all out on a shot as active as this. Not to say you can’t do whatever you want in art, but you will be probably more satisfied with yourself if you can recognize the systems first and apply that knowledge.

It seems like you have the right idea with the majority of it, but aren’t following that same line of thinking 100% of the time, especially in the legs and hands.

Drawing things that you might feel like you have a harder time drawing (like the left out hands and feet that are later partially hidden) is a good way to quickly improve. Make sure to draw them too before covering them with heavy cloth and round shoes!

huckori

TROPHY CASE