After many months of distracted but continuous self-learning in 2D field and having no uni background and being novice in this area, I still thought to share finally animage to get some descent critique from more skilled fellow artists :arteest:
Was slightly hesitating to do that here but curiosity took over. This image is drawn from imagination with no reference photos used, sort of exam for myself.
Not the very first one I made but the very first one I publish for critique. Work itself isn’t wip, I am done with this image and will be moving to the next. But it still is somewhat a milestone for me and critique is needed :buttrock:
What is completely off here? If I did something slightly right, what is it? Drawing process slightly took over me at some point and I just forgot what and how I did the stuff.
No digital retouches made, except brightness and contrast. I found scanned image even intensifies and better shows up mistakes. In paper things looks little bit more sympathetic to me :rolleyes:
Welcome to CGtalk. Hope you enjoy and learn lots from here. I’ll just add my 2c about your drawing but bare in mind i’m learning too and i’m not a master by any means.
It’s quite a good attempt. One striking problem is with the anatomy. It seems like you have drawn something off the top of your head. This can be a real problem when you are beginning. I would highly recommend using a reference picture. Take that reference picture, draw a grid on it, and then draw the same grid on your canvas and match it as closely as possible to get the outlines and positions correct.
Here is a picture of some a piece I did last year to illustrate what I mean. I’ve gone a few steps ahead so my grids don’t match perfectly in this one but you get the idea.
Once you have that perfect, the next thing to pay close attention to is value. Thats probably best left for another post.
Aaahaaaa, the grids …
How I didn’t figured out to use them :curious: ? True, that could help tremendously. And yes, I think I am returning back to drawing from references. Thanks for the tip.
I guess I will start with digging deeper with anatomy first, will work out more deeply proportions.
Once you have that perfect, the next thing to pay close attention to is value.
Sorry, didn’'t get what you meant with value :sad:
Composition, beauty level of image itself or something other?
Value, when it comes to painting, means the relative lightness or darkness of a color. Think of a grey scale, like on the swatches palette in Photoshop.
thanks for dropping links. Whole new area opened before my eyes
Shows some direction for me where and what to learn. Guess my time has come to touch this field from now on :arteest:
Yes… it ma be a bit of a boring thing to hear, but you should really draw from reference a lot. Once you do many, many hours of this, you sort of learn the ‘rules’ of drawing, only then can you start doing semi-realistic images without reference… so with a portrait, you will begin to look at what you’ve got so far and notice if e.g. the proportions are way off the average, or if you’ve forgotten to add a muscle in here, or if a pose looks unbalanced, what an eye looks like from a 3/4 view. In a sense, you are drawing from reference until you get a complete enough image in your head that you can then use that for a reference.
It’s an odd thing to get you head around, but when we look at faces, we often do not see what the face literally looks like, but a bunch of landmarks and features, which is why we can still immediately recognise a caricature and think ‘it’s george clooney!’ rather than ‘that guy’s face is totally f***ed’
We sort of learn symbols rather than what we actually see, until you learn to observe like an artist. What I mean is, if you ask a 10 year old to draw a hand, he will draw five sausage fingers spread out, and maybe add in fingernails and knuckles. That’s what a hand is rather than what it actually looks like. Someone who has done a bit of drawing before will probabaly either look at his own hand really closely and draw that, or draw the basic shapes and structure of a hand and refine it with what they know you’d be able to see, until it looks realistic.
In this way, learning to draw is basically learning to really look, and then learning to replace the basic symbols we learn (like sausage fingers for 'hand) with new symbols and rules based on what looks real. By learning these rules you can check your progress and understand why something looks wrong, if it does.
You did the right thing to post here, too. If you enjoy drawing, you will get a lot better at it, and having people point out what needs to improve is a great way to speed up that process and make it more satisfying.
Everything karan said in her post is correct and good advice. Though I didn’t like grids myself, they were a handy tool to help get things in proportion early on. Once you get a bit of practice, you will learn to measure using your eye and wacom pen/pencil/brush held out at arm’s length (e.g. the distance from nose tho chin is from the end of the pen to where I put my thumb, or the angle of her shoulder is like this etc.). Eventually you may get to a point where you have to do hardly any measuring because if something is wrong it will leap out and slap you in the face. Flipping your image horizontally if you’re doing it digitally or looking at it in a mirror if you’re doing it physically is a great way to make the errors pop out so you can correct them.
Hope this was all useful. If you don’t understand something I said, or have questions, ask away and I’ll try to answer them.
Once you do many, many hours of this, you sort of learn the ‘rules’ of drawing, only then can you start doing semi-realistic images without reference…
Semi-realistic images without references - that’s exactly where I am aiming. But I didn’t find drawing from references boring, no. Once into process, it takes you in.
, you are drawing from reference until you get a complete enough image in your head that you can then use that for a reference.
I get it - it is as a memory training more, sort of a “donwloading” references into your head, is it?
…you may get to a point where you have to do hardly any measuring because if something is wrong it will leap out and slap you in the face.
ask away and I’ll try to answer them.
Can’t ask for more at the beginning. Need to work out what’s already been said. I see lots of practice to do before I get back with new post :shrug:
Thanks for useful tips.
I see lots of practice to do before I get back with new post
And here I am back. Maybe I haven’t studied that hard as I myself would like because of time issues but this image I am not ashamed to show off. Once again, it is drawn after some practice and without any references, completely from imagination. Only the pencil and paper.
There are issues I realized myself when looking by the end - big eyes, distance between them too short.
I look upon this image as better than previous and thus thought that I did some progress after all. Not a big leap, maybe slight but still progress.
You’re definitely progressing, and it’s looking better. The key, as always, is patience, and practice.
The grid is an excellent tool, but it’s also very useful to learn the rules of proportion when drawing faces, the average distances between the shapes. There are excellent books that can walk you through that, my favorite is “Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain”, by Betty Edwards. She walks you through how to draw what you see accurately, and has a very good way of doing it. She was teaching at the college I attended for illustration, and she’s a phenomenal teacher.
Another great source are the Andrew Loomis books. They’ve been around forever, and the hair styles and such are seriously outdated, but the instruction in them is world class. They can be downloaded here:
The whole idea is to break a head down to it’s basic shapes - spheres, planes, cubes, tubes, etc, and then once you have the proportions right, you refine the piece with more and more accurate levels of detail - your drawing has the classic beginners rush to fill in the fun stuff, the details, after rushing past the fundamentals. Don’t feel bad, it’s a very very common thing for beginning artists to do. The mindset that you want to learn is to be able to slow down and enjoy and pay as much attention to the broad strokes and shapes as you do the finer details. If you study the human head from an anatomical point of view, learning the shape of teh bones and muscles and tissues, combined with techniques found in the Loomis books, you’ll have more tools to draw from imagination with, along with experience drawing from reference.
As to this specific piece, look at these spots for improvement:
The eyes are way too big
the nose is shaped wrong
the mouth needs some work, the shading is wrong
the hairline is crooked and in the wrong spot.
These are all visual cues our brain looks for, to determine “face”. If they’re off, they feel off to us, as viewers. I think the sequence is eyes, mouth, nose, if I recall right. Ears are in there, too, but they’re low on the list.
Hope this helps! Keep drawing, that is always the best thing, for anyone.
Below is the standard reply I use when I see beginner artists who are asking for critiques in the WIP forums:
It’s really hard to critique works from artists who are still very early in their artistic development, just like how it’s very hard to critique someone’s language skills if they are just starting to learn a new language, because so much of what they do is wrong.
To critique beginner’s work would no longer be critique–it would become instruction in all the basics, because you would have to explain every aspect of the visual art foundation in detail and how they related to the mistakes made in the image–from composition, perspective, values, lighting, tonal composition, atmospheric perspective, color temperature, color contrast, radiosity/color bleed, deceptive colors, contextural color illusions, anatomy, figure, psychological and physiological roots of body language and facial expressions, aesthetic sensibility, hierarchy of edges, brushwork, line quality, visual storytelling techniques, and so on.
My suggestion is for you to focus on learning the critical foundations of visual art–don’t rush into trying to construct your own images because you lack the necessarily knowledge/skill/experience to do your ideas any justice at this point. Head on over to the Art Techniques & Theories forum (linked below in my signature) and start reading the sticky threads–they will help you far more than any critique you’re going to get at this point, because any critique you get would essentially be very condensed and simplified art instruction anyway, and they won’t help you that much if you aren’t learning those instructions in proper context through a carefully laid out learning/teaching plan.
My suggestion is for you to focus on learning the critical foundations of visual art–don’t rush into trying to construct your own images because you lack the necessarily knowledge/skill/experience to do your ideas any justice at this point. Head on over to the Art Techniques & Theories forum (linked below in my signature) and start reading the sticky threads
These two things alone made my day. You can’t get better directions than that on my level!
You won’t see me in this thread for a next 6 months definitely since I know where to go now :arteest:
Thanks, folks!
Pencils sharpen up, Loomis books downloaded (loved them immediately), I am back to papers :wip:
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