This is fairly horrible work, but I'd appreciate your input...

#1

I’m 15 years old, and do a little bit of 3d modeling. However, I’ve never reallly been able to draw. While I don’t exactly buy into the argument that one can’t be good at 3d without knowledge of drawing, I do think It’s important I learn. I haven’t yet purchased books, taken classes, or anything, but for a short time I’ve been practicing in free time on drawing.

Today I decided to sit down, find reference, and see if I could accurately draw from a picture. My results, spending a few minutes on each drawing then a little longer coloring each sketch, are:
http://i1.tinypic.com/nwheyv.jpg

I didn’t trace (I imagine that’s clear, by how poor they are) and worked in Photoshop 6 with a genuis mousepen tablet. Reference was used for drawing, but not coloring.

Any advice, critique, or direction would be greatly appreciated.

#2

Make or buy a sketchbook and draw with that. It gives you better feedback and digital drawing can sometimes make a work look better than it really is.

I suggest you skip coloring for now, that’ll just complicate things and take your mind away from the real issues like form. Just use greyscale shading for now.

What you need to focus on for figure drawing are 3D forms. These are basically the 3D primitives you find in your 3D programs, cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, etc… These are combined or distorted in various ways to form the human figure.

#3

One of the advantages of working on a PC is that you can easily clean up your line art, which makes it much easier to colour on top. Just start a new layer, and draw one line over all the sketchy feathered lines, then delete or hide the bottom layer :slight_smile:

I think just from the colours you chose to reflect the light and the placement etc, you do have a lot of promise here, it’s just unstructured the way you are going about it. <pimp mode> I did a tutorial which covers the whole process from figure drawing to colouring, which I think might help you get started with constructing your own process if you’re interested http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=316473 ^^, and if you start an anatomy thread on Rebecca Kimmels Anatomy forum, she is full of great advice on how to improve your figure drawing, it’s great to see how people develop throughout those threads. </pimp mode> ahem.

Anyway, good luck :thumbsup:

#4

although these sketches aren’t great, they do show promise. you have a general eye for proportion and form and you aren’t afraid to make a mess.

sketch by Hand and you may get a lot better

#5

which is a very good thing imho. I think they look good for a few minute sketches. keep it up:)

#6

Thank you all for your replies. I’ll keep working, both digitally and traditionally.
Edit:

I tried to draw some of the images from the “I5 Minute Sketchathon” reference thread…

http://i1.tinypic.com/nx3vqs.jpg

After a few of them were finished, I overlayed them on the reference to find major mistakes. I marked those I found in white, over the drawing. Most of the arms I drew were terrible (well, moreso than normal…) :sad:

#7

Really, don’t worry about those poses being slightly off, you’ll never get it that close - a lot of mine have had much worse flaws themselves, but through clever use of shading etc. you can make it look much more accurate.

The best advice I can give you is one that I was given a few years back by an art teacher: Trust your eyes. They are usually very good at telling you if something is off - if it doesn’t feel right, change it. And if you can’t see it - chances are it’s not too obvious and can easily be concealed. Focus more on getting the actual piece to look good rather than mimicking the reference too closely. :thumbsup:

#8

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