unknowz

Lots of great advice here. If I may add, you might be feeling a bit discouraged because you're attempting to do too much at once. You have to find a way to make your progress more evident to yourself, which in turn will help with your motivation. How about this : if your ultimate goal is to get good at drawing wolves, why not start with parts of it? I.e.: start by drawing wolf eyes or paws or whatever and do only that until you get good at it. Since each part is less complicated to master in itself, it shouldn't take too long for you to start seeing results. Then it's only a matter of time before you know how to draw an entire wolf. (of course, putting all the parts together is also a piece of the puzzle which will require practice) Oh, and tools don't matter as long as they're not restrictive. Good luck!

Thanks, and this sounds way better in my opinion.

Pretty good, although I have a feeling it might sound better if the notes were played a bit slower. Which program did you use by the way? I'd be interested to try it out.

I had a bit of free time so I did some sketching in order to figure out my answer to your question. I agree with you, the hardest part is probably getting the distances right (eyes to nose, nose to mouth, mouth to chin, etc..). I've included both the original sketch and a hasty paint over in SAI, and as you can see, you don't have to spend a lot of time on a computer to improve the image by quite a bit. Of course that might be harder if you don't own a graphics tablet.

The face sketches look pretty good! I know first hand how hard it can be to draw a face from the side. I think the main thing you should try to do now is to clean up your linework. There's a couple ways you could do that, but the easiest one is by scanning your drawing and then using a program like Photoshop to draw over your sketch. There's a ton of free tutorials on this exact procedure. Here's a good one :

^ Multiply tends to work better than color for that. I agree that getting the colors right is pretty hard. There's 3 things I do that can help with that though : 1- Picking a palette and sticking with it (i.e.: picking colors only from the palette, not the image) 2- Using the adjustment filters once in a while (color balance, saturation, curves, ...) 3- Overlaying a uniform color over the whole painting at a low opacity. Helps to link everything together. ------ Your art is pretty nice. Not too many good digital painters left around RS forums these days :( . I like the way you sketch things, and you seem to have a fairly good understanding of proportions too. If I had to criticize one thing, it would be the slight blurriness that seems to be shared throughout most of your drawings (with some exceptions, like that excellent hand rendition). Perhaps spending just a little more time fixing the coloring/shading would improve things greatly. Good luck. I'll be checking this thread :-P

There is no such thing :blink: -- Bamboo is definitely the best entry level tablet you'll find. However, if you get more interested in the field of digital art, upgrading to an Intuos is worth it. Then there's the Cintiq, but the opinions are mixed on this one. Some people like the fact that you actually draw on the screen, but I've seen a lot of people argue that it lacks the precision and feel of an Intuos.

Unless they track your character after seeing you sell artwork on a forum, there's indeed no way for Jagex to enforce that rule. I think the best solution for everyone is to keep it private. That way the forum doesn't have to deal with Jagex being angry with them, and the buyers/artists are better protected. Of course, I don't mean to encourage people to break Jagex's rules. This will always be an unsupported, at-your-own-risk business.

Don't know, the arm looks fine to me. The muscles could be a bit bigger I suppose, but other than that I don't see the problem. Gotta remember that there's other underlying structures that can't be viewed from this angle too. As for the tiger, it's only a sketch, not a fully rendered drawing. I'm afraid I'm not too good with further detailing using traditional media (for now :wink: )

Why draw anatomy? Because figuring out how muscles move during action has always been one of my weak points, and I've figured that it would be logical to start by knowing their general placement.

So, some of you might've been wondering if I had quit drawing. The answer is : of course not! :mrgreen: I have however slowed down drastically due to school, but I still draw in my sketchbook occasionally. Here's 2 drawings I did this week. I might post more later depending on me getting access to a scanner again. A tiger Anatomy of the arm&leg

I actually liked the car scene at the beginning, but I agree it would've been better to have something that linked it with the rest. (besides the music) Nice job though, beautiful image and sound quality.

I would suggest steadying your camera before anything else. Not bad though, especially for a first try.

It's not that the effects you're using can't improve a picture, but you're doing the same thing over and over regardless of the source image. For example, creating a depth of field (DoF) effect can be incredibly effective, but it definitely isn't a kind of trick that can be used anywhere. I'll go a bit more in depth since you asked for critique : The first picture was actually an appropriate one for a DoF effect. The only thing that bothers me is that some parts are blurred when they shouldn't be. Specifically, the ledge on which she's standing should've stayed sharp because it's in focus while a part of the barricade below stayed clear when it should be blurred. That alone should demonstrate why video editing software is insufficient for what you have in mind. A simple radial blur effect wasn't enough, some touching up was needed for a convincing effect. Contrast is also a valuable asset to focus the viewer's attention, but apparently you chose to increase it everywhere. What you could do instead is to increase the contrast only for the things you want the viewers to focus on. The last two share the same problem : they shouldn't be blurred at all. The 2nd to last can't have a DoF effect because pretty much everything around the character is close and is therefore in focus. As for the last one, you don't get blurring on landscape shots with no defined focus. It's not all bad though, I do like the 3rd, 5th and 6th ones :) 3rd has a nice mood to it, the only thing I would try is to darken it a bit. 5th makes me think of an explorer in a dark cave. Too bad he doesn't have a lantern though, that would've been the perfect justification for such contrasted yellow-ish colors. And the 6th makes me think of assassin's creed :o

If you're going to blur, leave the foreground sharp and create a depth of field effect. Now it looks like those cars were pasted on a blurry picture. Nice vector though.

Well around here, university typically ends about a month before everyone else.

So I decided to dust off my tablet and get back into drawing since I'm done with biochem. I was kinda rusty so all I have to show you guys is some black&white practice sketches. First off, just some random manga-ish portrait, nothing too complicated. Then on to a full body one. Usually I don't bother with clothing unless I want to practice drawing folds or something, but since I wanted to post this, I turned her into wonderwoman :P. Tried to emulate the old american comics style. No reference though so it might not be really accurate, but it's good practice. And finally, a mock-up manga panel. Actually I did this one a while back, but I don't remember posting it. Believe it or not, this one probably took longer to complete than the 2 others combined. Making lines sharp and clean is something I've never been good at. Some people can do it on their first try, but this took me hours of cleaning up >>.

You could do that, but only if you already have a full sketch complete. Else you might spend a great deal of time detailing stuff only to find out that the general drawing just doesn't work. As for the orc, my main critique is that I think you should plan things out before you shade. I can see that you wanted your light source to be somewhere around the top left, but the shading isn't consistent with that choice throughout the picture. Also, you've employed what I call the "gradient shading" technique. It might sound cool, but it's actually something you want to avoid. Basically, with some exceptions, what you've done is shade the orc like if it was a piece of cardboard. The best way to fix this is to break down the structure into simple shapes so you can figure out how to make them look 3D. For example, a nose is a bit like a half pyramid with a flat edge, an eye is a sphere, and so on. Once you start thinking like that, it gradually becomes easier to give depth to your drawings. Your next piece looks promising, I like how the sword looks. You might want to fix his posture a bit though, he looks off balance. Good luck.

Those wings are very nice. You definitely nailed the shape there. If I had one advice to give you, it would be to think about which colors you are using. Right now, they're way too saturated and also quite generic (i.e: green grass, blue sky...). That's not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes experimenting with new colors can lead to great outcomes. However they're definitely too saturated, try adding more gray into them. A bit more contrast wouldn't hurt either, but it's very common that a drawing will lack contrast when the artist isn't fully confident. I'd say give it a try, but don't be too disappointed if it doesn't work out at first. It will come with time.

Haha I'm pretty much done. It's very rare that I'll completely clean/tidy up a painting. It just bores me to death.

I found this unfinished painting on my old laptop yesterday, and I figured I should finish it. So here you go. La Vouivre (there isn't really an english equivalent, closest would be wyvern) is a woman who lives in the woods and guards a great treasure. In some books she is accompanied by an army of serpents, while in others she is given the ability to transform into one.

5 hours :blink: The colors are good, but the main thing that your painting does to me is to drag my eyes to the left all the way to your profile. You'd need some elements that pull back the viewer into your painting.

Contest on the mmo flyff to design a monster. Winner gets to see his concept implemented ingame and wins a prize. Here's one I did

Hmm maybe it's because I remember an older version of Blender. Could be better now idk. Either way, I don't really see the point in learning blender instead of zbrush

What do you mean? Well let me put it this way : Blender = technical Zbrush = freedom to create straight away without having to worry about a billion non-intuitive sliders/settings/numbers/etc.. I'm not saying programs like Blender are bad or useless, but they're really not my kind of thing. I might have to learn how to work with them out of necessity later, but I'd rather avoid it if I can.