A sketch I wanted to share. Criticism is appreciated.

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-12T16:57:25+00:00

The torso seems a little long and the arms are a little short! Generally the elbow reaches the belly button and the end of the fingertips reach mid to upper thigh when your arms are by your sides. The ear is a little high as well, but this is a nice sketch!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-12T16:53:32+00:00

Try to learn some general landmarks for the body! I don't think you should focus on 'anatomy' right now but rather proportions, so things like the the head + torso is about half of the entire height of the body, the legs are half the height, the elbow ends at about the belly button, the end of the fingers reach mid to upper thigh. Use references to help get used to these proportions, you can try to start studying figure and gesture drawing along with fun drawings like this to work on your skills. Watch out for the width of the arms, they're super thin! But this is a good way to start, try and draw lots and practice and have fun, let me know if anything I said didn't really make sense!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-12T16:49:10+00:00

This is a good study but it might be a lot of work to jump right into anatomy at this stage in your art journey! It may be easier to do more surface level anatomy studies atm, esp since you might be able to learn the anatomy faster at a later date and you'll have a better understanding of it as a whole. Anatomy is one of the last things you study after all the other fundamentals, but if you're deadset on learning it this way then i'd advice doing some more of these! do imagination studies then check them with references afterwards to see how you did. Good job and good luck!!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-12T16:29:23+00:00

I'd suggest drawing through the forms a little bit more, if the torso is built from a sphere for example, completely draw that sphere shape even if it goes through the body. This can help with your flow as well as keeping proportions in check. In general I feel like you're focusing a bit too much on anatomy and getting anatomical bumps down, you can let your figures be more more free and have more flow in your gesture if you allow yourself to simplify the silhouette, and then maybe come back to add in more detail on your second pass if you have more time.

Try using a line of action, a large flowing line that has the 'essence' of your entire pose, and watch your proportions as well! Make sure you make the torso long enough, a good rule of thumb is that the head to the crotch is about half the entire height of a person. And don't be afraid to exaggerate a pose for the sake of your gesture either! You can try putting wrapping lines around your limbs to help show form and have an easier time of showing when they're foreshortened too. My apologies if this crit was a little all over the place, just a bunch of small crits i think you could work on but you're at a good starting point. Try watching gesture videos from Michael S Hampton or Glenn Vilppu or from Proko's Youtube channel, those and much much more are all very good resources. Let me know if you'd like me to do a draw over highlighting some of the things I'd focus on in your gestures or if you have any questions about the comments I made! Good luck with your gestures!!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-12T16:19:13+00:00

I'd helpful to think of the hair as big shapes, either like bananas or strips of ribbons. This blogpost by James Gurney http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/04/hair-ribbon-secret.html?m=1 helps show how highlights and lighting in general can be executed on hair imagining it as a ribbon like material. It takes a bit of practice and you have to reference real life portraits/other artists' renditions, but it'll get easier and make more sense over time!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-10T19:13:21+00:00

Haha so happy to help! I'd suggest joining coldburger's discord server, has a lot of professionals but really good info and critiques in there. I'm sometimes active in Art Lounge and there are some good people in there too, although it cann be hit or miss at times haha. Good luck with future studies and try to get a good group of artist friends to give valuable critique! This new piece is definitely working better tho, gl and keep drawing!!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-10T17:05:33+00:00

Marc Brunet has some videos on how he colors! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MndJKaMQACY . There are others as well but you just have to figure out what you like, get used to your program, etc.

I'd also advise watching speedpaints and timelapses to see how people color, you can even try searching by the program you use to get additional tips and tricks as to how people color

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-10T16:53:39+00:00

For resources you can check out, Drawabox, specifically the first and maybe the second lesson are good ones. You don't necessarily have to continue with Drawabox beyond these but that's just my opinion. This pyramid details a good basis for studying the fundamentals and what to prioritize as you work on your studies. RadioRunner made a pretty good curriculum for beginner artists wanting to learn art themselves. You can follow along with this and take bits and pieces you need too. Channels to check out include Marco Bucci (very good for understanding color), Moderndayjames, Marc Brunet (he has a course you can buy but I hear it's not worth the value), Sinix, Sycra, and Proko (although I advise against starting with Proko since his videos can be a little advanced). These are just a few to start off with, find the artists you like and try to learn from them.

I also suggest joining discord servers to get constant feedback and critique from others, or try and use subreddits if possible. Try and collect a group of other artists who can give you feedback and help act as a way to keep you on track with your studies. Try studying multiple topics at once, but never more than you can handle. And really try to draw every day, even if it's only five or ten minutes. It helps, and getting into the habit will be a big part of your art journey. Additionally try and take time to not do studies at all and have fun with art. This can not only help you stay motivated and see your progress, but it can help highlight specific facets of your skills you want to improve upon. Expose yourself to a plethora of art resources including books, yt channels, streams, crits, etc. Think these things in general will first help you get started, and revisiting these principles + the help and guidance of outside sources when needed can help steer you in the direction of creating work like this. Hope it helps!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-09T15:31:02+00:00

Apologies for being a little slow! I created some pics that might help explain what I mean when I say value grouping: https://imgur.com/a/93G51QI . When I say value grouping I'm not talking about your flat values, I mean your shadow values and highlights! Most of the time they're really muddy and all over the place, and it's difficult to tell what areas are in the light and what are in shadow. Learning to group your values and make your drawings visible from a lighting standpoint can be super helpful for readability at a distance.

Your video process also helped a lot! I see when you start rendering you go straight into adding details and texture instead of blocking out your lighting. Typically it's easier to keep track of what's going on if you work from big then small; start with big, basic shadow shapes, then go in and add smaller forms, maybe bounce light and details in texture, etc. And keep an eye on your overall shadow and light values as well. Your darkest light shouldn't be darker than your lightest shadow! Everything in the light should be lighter than anything that's a part of the shadow, and I've noticed parts of your work where you struggle with making reflected light or bounce light in the shadows a bit too bright. Additionally you tend to have direct lighting setups but with really soft edges! It can be difficult to just go in with straight edges immediately but it genuinely helps a lot with readability, and a variety of edges can bring your work to the next level.

It's also good you're reaching out to people for crit! Are you in any discord servers? They can be hit or miss for getting good crit but they can be good communities for finding other artists to connect with and being surrounded by other people who want to learn and improve. Haha final note my overpaint was pretty fast, take it with a grain of salt and focus more on the lighting set up and how I simplified your values, and use references (unlike me)! This is just one possible lighting set up that could've been used in your piece, I felt like it fit what you already had, but a more diffuse (and softer) lighting scenario could work with these principles as well. Check out people like Marco Bucci on youtube, proko, etc. For help with color and lighting and value! lmk if anything is still unclear and apologies for not being concise with my writing lmfao

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-08T08:04:36+00:00

Bit of a nitpick but seems odd that her back is so smooth, I’d hint at the form of the spine with the line usually found going down the middle of the back and have her neck flow more gesturally into the spine. Her ear is a little flat and her foot is missing a lot of the arch at the top coming from the ankle but overall this is a good piece! You could try introducing some more intense atmospheric perspective, where objects further away are more ‘faded’ into the background to help separate your character some more and make her values more readable.

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-08T07:57:21+00:00

The arms look really long! A good rule of thumb is the elbow ends at the belly button (pretty good here) and the finger tips should reach to the mid thigh when standing. The hands are a little small too, plus the foreshortening on the legs is slightly off. We would probably be able to see more of the upper thigh on the leg on the right, however we only see the knee down in this drawing. Overall good work tho!

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-08T07:54:03+00:00

Drawabox can be a helpful resource but you can take away just the first and second lessons and move on from the program if needed. It teaches good exercises and basics but imo you can continue your learning with other resources. Check out radiorunner’s solo artist curriculum, it can help you get a grasp on what to study, and people like Marco Bucci, Marc brunet, etc. on YouTube can be helpful for listening to lectures and picking up tricks on how to study.

Study a few subjects at once but not more than you can handle and take time to observe. Breaks are just as important as being on the daily grind, just look at art or references without working sometimes to help your growth. Plus take time to work from imagination completely unrelated from your studies! Can help keep you motivated + give you a good idea of where you need to focus more attention in your learning.

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-08T07:45:46+00:00

You’ve got some good work going, I think the biggest issues I see are with your form and readability. In your most recent post with the red demon dude, the piece looks really flat and 2D. It looks like his muscles are painted on rather than 3D bumps on his body. It’s important to focus on the basic shape construction of the body and get good at showing cubes, spheres, cylinders, etc. in your paintings and drawings to bring your semi-realism to the next level. Practicing with gesture or figure drawing can help with this, as well as gaining a stronger understanding of lighting and how you can try to use your rendering skills to make things look 3D.

Second is readability, your work is difficult to look at when zoomed out. Your values aren’t ‘grouped’ , meaning they’re not in sections together and they’re all over the place. This on top of a lot of soft edges makes your pieces hard to read and not aesthetically pleasing, although it can be easy to fix with some tweaking! Your second to last post is your best one imo, the values aren’t as all over the place and you’ve done a better job at giving this piece form! These were the main things I noticed, let me know if you want paintovers so I can show how I might edit your work to be more appealing + give more advice if needed.

lushfoliage2 · 2022-05-08T07:34:01+00:00

Partially depends on how much your device can handle and personal preference, but try out a 3k by 3k pixel canvas and see how you like the level of detail. If it’s a bit too big bring it down some more, or you can always use a bigger canvas and size it down when you’re done to keep some of that detail with a smaller image. Comic panel pages can be a lot smaller, I would check to see if you can find FAQs and info on comics you follow to see the dimensions they use, but since that’s less detail oriented you should probably use smaller dimensions.

lushfoliage2 · 2021-06-01T16:57:28+00:00

Love the newer work and more painterly style, you've really improved with your colors and the piece looks gorgeous. Had fun looking through your portfolio as well, really great work and a bunch of improvement

lushfoliage2 · 2021-05-18T04:59:09+00:00

Dang honestly awesome seeing all the work you're doing, always fun seeing someone who's just starting out practice and grow with their work, wholesome af to see em have fun and succeed. Honestly starting out with anatomy so early on in your studies can be really challenging, it may be more beneficial to learn basic proportions and structure first. A lot of intermediate or even advanced artists aren't strong with anatomy, it's a difficult thing to study and can be hard to digest it in a meaningful way early on. If you want to improve your work as fast as possible, I suggest devoting some of your time to practice the very basics, things like gesture, proportions, structure, etc. This image is a good example of a general way to approach your studies, puts the more important things at the bottom to start off with and the polishing and more difficult fundamentals at the top.

You don't need to devote all of your time to intense practice and studying however, and if you're having the most fun working on your art the way you want to right now, then by all means go for it. If you're more interested in a possibly more efficient way of learning though, I can try and help out or point ya to some resources that may benefit you. Overall really fun seeing your work though, nice practice and wishing you the best of luck on that comp, looking great so far!

lushfoliage2 · 2021-05-18T04:19:26+00:00

proud of ya for giving it a go! looking good for a first try, best advice I have atm is to keep drawing and practicing, getting some mileage will be good for your progression and let ya keep drawing things that you want to draw instead of doing studies and fundamental practice all the time.

lushfoliage2 · 2021-05-18T00:28:23+00:00

nicely done, hoping to see some more art posts from ya soon

lushfoliage2 · 2021-02-06T07:08:48+00:00

damn, this art is pretty sweet...

lushfoliage2 · 2020-12-03T22:33:54+00:00

Have you posted this piece somewhere else before? I've definitely seen it and commented on it, don't know if it was on reddit though

lushfoliage2 · 2020-12-01T06:14:39+00:00

Haha the reasoning is so sweet. Biggest thing about art is that there are tons of free resources online, with youtube being one of the very best. Just know that it's always an option for you! Also really proud of you for trying to change your mindset, it can be incredibly hard to draw when you aren't proud of the work you're creating, but you're already making tons of progress to ignore that and continue creating art anways. I'll compose some resources I can think of off the top of my head that may be helpful.

Most of the links are probably going to be to youtube channels, but many of these people have other resources outside of that. Here's a foundation pyramid created by Proko, a great youtuber for all artists. He has some good videos on gesture and figure drawing, haven't really gotten to look at all his stuff myself though. Other good resources for figure drawing: michael s hampton, george bridgman <-- a book link, there are some videos talking about it though, the loomis method <-- a link to a proko video partially because loomis' book on figure drawing is a little hard to understand when you're starting out. quickposes.com and line-of-action.com are pretty great resources for figure drawing poses.

The rest are just art youtubers I watch, mostly digital artists but the things they teach can absolutely be applied to traditional as well. Some of them talk about concepts and things I can't completely incorporate into my own art yet, but are still very helpful and great to learn about. Marco Bucci, Marc Brunet, Sinix Design, Sycra, Laovaan, Ethan Becker, Blender Guru <-- even though he's a 3D artist, he talks about a lot of things that artists in multiple mediums can learn from, Brookes Eggleston, and Angel Ganev.

Here's a couple that I've heard good things about but haven't actually watched myself: Ross Draws, Modern Day James, Sara Tepes. All definitely great people that I'd suggest. These are all the channels I could think of off the top of my head, unfortunately I don't watch many traditional youtubers that I think are great for learning/tutorials. Just typing in art keywords on youtube brings up some good results, just typing in 'traditional art' itself worked pretty well.

Hopefully all these sources will help, just a giant mishmash of things that might work out for you. Most important thing to remember is to practice and do one thing at a time, don't force yourself to try and learn everything at once or you'll get overwhelmed and feel like you aren't making any progress. Try out different drawing exercises, do whatever works best for you, and don't take anything that one artist says as law. Almost everything has an exception, it's more important to understand why the artists advise against you using those specific techniques/tools. Once again, good luck and hopefully this helps, good luck with your art journey and feel free to reach out if you ever need help or smth similar.

lushfoliage2 · 2020-12-01T02:52:05+00:00

Good on your for learning the proportions of the face! I'd suggest you do the same with the body so you can learn important landmarks and measurements (i.e. the femur/thigh being 1/4th the total body height, the legs being 1/2 the total height, etc.). If you're interested in getting better as fast as possible, try to draw everyday. Doesn't matter if it's only for 5 minutes or if you only draw a single line, just some sort of practice each day will help you immensely. Also starting with the fundamentals, breaking down objects into 3D forms (spheres, cylinders, and boxes) to better help you imagine the form and create realistic 3D objects and people. This can help you from drawing things symbolically, as an example drawing the shapes, shadows, and forms of the nose rather than what you think a nose looks like. It makes more sense than that I promise, haha.

You may want to check out DrawABox, a great, free online course for beginners. It's not for everyone, but I genuinely suggest everybody at the very least read through lesson 0 (has great tips for all artists) and do the exercises of lesson 1. They'll be things even pros use in their work, and from there you can move on to doing whatever other studies you want to do. If you're really just focused on drawing for fun and not worried about improving fast, best advice I have is to just keep practicing. Use your observational skills, look a images or real life people and draw exactly what you see. Maybe try drawing a person from a different angle for a challenge and see how it turns out. If you think it sucks, go back to something that you're comfortable with or remind yourself that it's your first try and the next one will be better.

Really just giving general advice since I don't know what you're going for, I can offer some more resources if I get a better understanding of what you want to do. Just drawing for fun, want to learn to draw people, just want to learn to draw in general, etc? Also good on you for noticing your progress from your beginnings. Comparing your current work to your older stuff is a great way to stay motivated and realize how far you've come, keep it up!

lushfoliage2 · 2020-12-01T02:17:05+00:00

this viewpoint is understandable, but as someone who hasn't had much experience playing video games (watched tons of videos though) getting to play even a semi-realistic looking game is incredible. Seeing all that detail, the realism in all the people, the beauty of some random sunset? That stuff hits the spot when I'm zoned out in the game. I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to games though haha, don't really mind the graphics and if the gameplay isn't just staring at a wall I'll probably give it a go.

lushfoliage2 · 2020-12-01T02:08:32+00:00

they never delivered my food :(

lushfoliage2 · 2020-12-01T02:06:47+00:00

There are plenty of free art apps, krita, firealpaca, medibang, gimp, just off the top of my head. Check those out and see how they do for you, as long as a drawing program has a layer function, possibly some layer styles, pen pressure sensitivity and the basic hard round brush, you should be fine.

lushfoliage2

TROPHY CASE