Future goals
Create something liked enough to sustain a career in this.
Favorite animation
Princess Mononoke, Akira, Shiki, and Hunter x Hunter.
Favorite artwork
Claymore, Dorohedoro, and Deadman Wonderland.
Wanted to practice some posing this time. It looks similar to the previous one fashion-wise because this is the base female outfit for something I have planned. Basically, I'm going to try to establish and reuse characters and settings for practice from here on, many of whom are from a side project that may or may not see the light of day. That way, my practice can kinda build up a light story of it's own. Next up will probably be the base male outfit design, if nothing else jumps in priority.
Finished the drawing with some very minor tweaks to anatomy, added clothing, and shading. Bg is still a simple plane, but works well enough to help sell the shot.
Yeah, so in the end I wasn't very happy with how the previous drawing turned out, so I wanted to at least try to remedy it a little. Thank you Nass in particular, as I did check on your referral to the Sycra guy's drawing stuff, and I did a quick sketch of a pose with foreshortening using the coil method he shows. I've not tried this before, and it's still baffling how to align stuff in 3d space, like getting the hips right, how to show legs bending and elevating, and especially how to have a waistline on a torso that's foreshortened, I guess it has to be really subtle or something, haven't figured it out yet. Anyway, here's the sketch...and if it isn't complete garbage as a baseline, I would like to turn it into a drawing, we'll see if that happens.
This was mainly an exercise in doing texture for wooden and leather surfaces, those being the walls under the counter and its supports, and the leather pants of course. I also tried to throw in a little perspective, as the girl is supposed to be leaning forward a good bit on the counter, but I don't know, it feels just a little off. Also, I think I did the shirt better this time, though it still could look better. As always, feel free to let me know any suggestions you have for improvements I can make.
> Abyssal Yoma Yeah! I'll check out your illustration then! You're right, it is something that takes a lot of time to really nail down, so we can't expect ourselves to do it perfectly right away! I'll keep that in mind while critiquing your work, too. Since you're practicing and improving all the time, it's good for me to remember that progress is incremental, not all at once! But you're doing great, so it's hard not to get excited and want to point out everything you know? haahahaha and perspective is one of the trickiest aspects of figure drawing! If you want a learning resource, the youtuber sycra does fantastic tutorials on anatomy in perspective! Anyways, keep it up! You're improving steadily!
> Nass Thanks for the feedback! I tried re-working her torso to have more perspective, and that version is the one uploaded in my illustrations. It's a bit better I think, but perspective is one of those things that's hard to nail right away. I won't have it in all my practice stuff, but I'll keep trying to dial in the right proportions on similar poses. It's a needed skill after all, or else everything's going to look really flat in manga panels and such. Anyway, thanks again for the advice.
I thinm the leather texture is absolutely fantastic. The perspective looks off because her back stays the same width until her butt which is suddnly much bigger than the rest. Youre on the right track, so my advice is make it a little smaller and show the slope of her back as well as it curves into her butt and gets closer.also, her top half should look more like she is leaning, so the shoulders are hunched more and everything is more like she's laying on the surface. But great, great job on the textures! Keep practicing!
Been a good while since I actually sat down and drew something, so here's what I did to get back into the groove of it. I wouldn't really say I improved, but at least I didn't regress that much.
> Abyssal Yoma Yeah! We gotta give ourselves credit so we don't get discouraged! And you definitely are improving!! I'm really excited to see your progress!
> Nass Thanks! I'll try to keep improving a little with each drawing, and keep reminding myself that I'm far better than I was a few months ago.
This definitely has an edgier, grittier feel to it! Keep practicing!! The anatomy in this isnt bad at all, and i like the design! Just keep working on clothing folds and such. You'll keep improving! But good job. Its always an accomplishment to pick that stylus or pencil back up and continue!
I was practicing drawing hands and faces, and it turned into a fan art of Shin from Dorohedoro. I think it turned out fairly well, but feedback is always appreciated.
Basically, I was so annoyed at how bad the skin was on the previous one, that I decided to make a semi-tutorial for both me and others to use. I'm really pleased with the monochrome linework version, as that only took about 45 min to draw, which is significantly faster than before. I'm mainly posting the in-progress version, because I want feedback on the color palette so far. The detailing part is key, so that's going to take a whole other session, or maybe even two, we'll see. Thanks for reading!
Finished version's been uploaded now. I can't replicate the fine detail that Hayashida can yet, but at least it looks decent enough.
*Second pic is the ref image I used!* I'm calling it good on this drawing, there's always another one to practice on. Overall I'm pretty happy with this as a first step, but the most obvious point of improvement I can see is getting good at drawing skin the way Hayashida does. Which even when I have a work of hers up for reference is quite difficult. The monochrome parts look fine for now, but my eye and technique for color still has a long way to go. I have an idea for another drawing I want to do to challenge myself, and it involves a fan art of Makoto from Blazblue, so that might be next.
I know, the skin is fairly atrocious. I set a time limit for 1 hr to do the skin tone, as I can't work forever on one drawing, and this is the result. It's a very specific style of coloring skin that I'm going for, and there's a trick to it's balance I haven't grasped yet. Whatever the next drawing I do is, I'm going to give it another attempt, and hopefully it'll turn out much better, as I think I can see what I did wrong and how to fix it. And among other things the shoulders are too wide and the left leg's kinda wrong, but at least the new style of eyes looks decent.
This is almost done now minus the skin tone and a few tweaks. I really like how the beret and jacket turned out, but let me know what you think. The hair looks alright, but I think it could maybe be better. Updated version to come soon hopefully.
This is a practice drawing I'm working on, with a reference image from some Harajuku fashion. It's done done yet, but I thought some of you might like to see the progress as before. I'll post the ref image I'm using on the finished version for comparison. Hope to get it done soon.
> Nass> Nass Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad the textures on it so far look good to you, as I'm still learning what brushes are good for that stuff. It feels good to finally have a drawing with semi-decent anatomy and proportions, due to throwing away my misplaced pride in not wanting to draw off reference. Blind free-handing turns out to be a lot tougher than it seems, so none of that for now.
you did an amazing job with all the clothing textures and silhouettes! I'm really impressed by this, and by how recognizable the fashion is!
So, I've done a few small practice drawings for the new line-work I'm trying out and it's going alright, but next I'm going to start using some actual pictures to practice drawing clothing, because I'm not too good at fashion design, and more importantly I don't want to ingrain bad drawing habits on clothing wrinkles and stuff like that. I'm planning on pulling some reference images of Harajuku fashion, because those tend to be fairly varied and complex. Below is a cropped image of my first attempt at the new style. It's not quite gritty enough, but I don't think it's a bad first attempt.Thanks for reading this post.
*The pictures posted are not mine and serve as reference only! They belong to their creator Q Hayashida, with all rights reserved.* After a month or two of floundering around thinking about what art style I ultimately want to aim for, I've made a decision. I don't want to go for the photo-realistic, glossy, or cutesy type stuff that is the most prevalent. While it does looks nice, it's not what inspires me. I forgot that I already had my answer long ago and was just ignoring it. I'm going to make a personal commitment to try to have an art style similar to Q Hayashida, whose work is featured below. This is the kind of stuff I look at and really feel a sense of awe, and it's no stretch to say that if I hadn't come across her work, I probably wouldn't have made the leap to try to become a mangaka. Is it going to be extremely hard? Absolutely. Her art is almost unimaginable for me. I'm not quite sure where to even begin, so I may ask you all for advice or tips if needed.
> Abyssal Yoma Alright, well, do what you think will bring you closer to your goal! I'm excited to see your improvement!!
> Nass Thanks for your continued feedback and support Nass. I've always been the type of person to just "wing it" on things, so my practice probably seems pretty jumbled, as I'm still getting used to the structure required for this stuff. For instance, I already want to practice the realistic anatomy/form, gritty linework and detailing, and nuanced coloring/shading all at the same time. I don't know if it's a bad idea to do that, but I feel like if I have an art-style in mind (as I do), it'd be better to direct practice towards that goal at all times and not let it stray. In any case, in regards to everyone who reads this, I know you're busy with your own stuff, but I will ask one favor for now. Seeing as how I'm trying to improve drastically, if at any time you feel like something I post didn't have all my effort behind it or hasn't improved on anything, let me know in no uncertain terms. I'll try to do the same courtesy to others, of course being as nice and civil about it as usual.
Well I think it's a really awesome, detailed and graphic style to shoot for, and I absolutely believe you can do it! This person obviously has a very keen understanding of realism, form, anatomy, texture and well-thought-out details, so you should probably dive into learning those things as quickly as possible. Photo-realism is one thing, and I understand not wanting to always draw in that style, but this person probably could if they wanted to. They are manipulating what they know about realism to do a specific style, so if you don't know realism, it'll be much, much harder to get anything close to this style. So, yeah! Go learn some realistic anatomy and form and stuff!
I wanted to one-up my previous drawing, and I think I did a decent job of it. Tried out getting used to wrinkled clothing as well as a new mouth design & shading technique courtesy of some reference drawings I like. As far as the hands go, I think I improved, but let me know if they still look bad. I've also decided that I will try to do a color version because I do really need to practice that as well. Thanks for taking the time to look at my post.
This is just a sketch of a generic character to keep up practice. Thought I'd share it because I kinda like how it turned out. The hand might be a little too small, but I'm getting better at drawing them. Anyway, if anyone takes an interest in this I might be coaxed into actually trying to color and finish this drawing. I've not yet actually "done" anything in color, so no promises on it looking good.
So, all things considered I kind of think it's a bit underwhelming, but maybe that's just because I can visualize way way better than I can draw. Anyway, the wait was mostly because of getting slightly distracted with trying to design a crucial bit of (complicated) attire for my manga, and I might go more into that later. Thanks for keeping up with this small project of a drawing and as always feedback is appreciated. I'm thinking of doing some more large and detailed drawings, but we'll see where that goes.
> Abyssal Yoma OKay! Then allow me to change that critique to a compliment, because you nailed it! Seeing that it was intentional, I have to say it's not easy to manipulate a character's age and have it read, so I'm impressed because I obviously saw a twenty year old when I looked at it! Very good job! For the breaker box try just continuing the shadow from the ground to the breaker box! Good work!
> Nass Thanks for the continued helpful feedback. To go point by point, first I'm glad the scale seems okay. I'm still struggling with getting proportions right as you pointed out, and that's probably what I should work on the most right now. As for her leaning, yeah she's supposed to be leaning on the breaker box, but it actually is kind of hard to tell that, I just didn't know how to show it convincingly enough. As for her looking older, I was going for a bit older of a look, like early twenties or so, because that's the age of many of my manga characters and I wanted the art to vaguely tie into them. I'll try to keep up the work.
I don't think it's underwhelming at all! The first thing I noticed was that this characters size and design fit really well into this environment- they don't look separate at all. So good job on that! She is leaning a little bit far- is she leaning on the breaker box? I like the outfit, and all the details came together pretty nicely! I looked up the character, and tho it's fanart this character really does look a lot older. A grown-up version of Earth-chan. If that wasn't the intention (It might have been, so sorry if you did it on purpose and ignore this!) then you might benefit from, not anatomy, but learning proportions based on gender and age. In this case the reason it looks older is because of the wide chest and shoulders, which a woman will develop, but Earth chans canon design is veeeeery childlike. That's my only critique tho! Keep drawing, keep practicing! You have a talent here, and I'm excited to see how you'll improve in your manga!
WIP of adding in Earth-chan, or at least my version of her. I'm not going for an exact one-to-one drawing, but I am trying to make it close. Saved the hardest part for last, since how I draw the face is going to be important for tying the scene together. Feel free to let me know how it looks so far.
> Nass So, the story behind choosing this character is as follows. About two months ago now, I was watching through the episodes of Concrete Revolutio, when this character showed up. Earth-chan, if you haven't seen the show, is this lonely little robot girl that sleeps up in space listening to the world below. When her programming detects trouble, she swoops in and acts as a Hero of Justice, but she's found annoying by pretty much everyone else in the show, as her brand of justice is so inflexible. She's also voiced by Taketatsu Ayana, and she has this hard to describe voice that is one of my favorite VO performances in recent memory. Long story short, the character really grew on me, and like all my favorite characters, she didn't exactly have a happy end in the show. Her motif of being a lonely and unloved robotic Hero fits quite thematically with what my upcoming manga is about, so I knew that she'd be the perfect pick for a fan art, which also doubled as practice for drawing.
It's looking good so far! The body is really stylized so I won't give critique on it- I'm excited to see the final product! It's coming along really nicely! What's the story behind this character? I'm curious hahah
So, I think this background is pretty much done. I'm not entirely sold on how I did the water, the cage light and cables look acceptable I think, and I just did the grassy hill with a low opacity canvas brush. Let me know if anything looks like it needs to be improved, because after all, this is my first time doing a background and I could use any feedback. Next step is to actually draw Earth-chan on another layer, and I'm not sure how long it'll be until that gets done. I might put up a rough posed sketch of her to get feedback before fine-tuning it.
> Abyssal Yoma Alright! If you like it better this way I won't expect you to change it though so no worries! SOunds like you have a lot to do! Projects are so much fun- I can't wait to see yours!
> Nass Thanks again for the feedback. I think I understand what your recommendation is, and I'll try it out and see how it looks. I'll try not to take too long on the next iteration, especially since there are about 1000 other things I need to start doing visual design work on for my main project.
I think you seriously did a great job! The details, the perspective, and the atmosphere are all complete and well done, and I'm excited to see the final version! I love the water- one of the most convincing parts for me, so GREAT JOB on that! One thing I would recommend is to lower the opacity on the brick shadows, since the bricks themselves are white, the shadows are a little too dark, and since they stand out so much it makes the bricks shape a little soft. But that's about it! So I'm excited to see how the final turns out, and definitely post as you go along, it's a lot of fun!
Just got done with this iteration of the bg. Next it to finish the cage light and lay some wiring across the top part. And yes, there is going to be a character at some point. It's Earth-chan from Concrete Revolutio, and she's likely going to be posed leaning with her back against the breaker box. I'll try to make it look cool, and it'll give a good sense of scale for the tunnel, which isn't actually that large. Thanks again for taking the time to keep up with this project.
I'd like a trained eye to look at the perspective lines and make sure they look good before I do much more. The curved lines on the ceiling were a little tricky, but I think I got them almost right. Did some more detailing on the breaker box, and started doing the hundreds of tiles with the same kind of look as the concrete blocks. I'm also curious if you can spot the symbolism I worked into the tiles, as I'm wanting to put a few "subtle" things in and that's one of them. Thanks for taking the time to look at it.
> Abyssal Yoma YES I could see it! I'm pretty bad with symbolism because I always question whether I'm seeing what they wanted me to or if I got it wrong- so it doesn't mean the symbolism was bad on your part! I, for one, would love to see your progress, so I can't wait to see your posts! Will this background have a character in it at some point?
> Nass I appreciate the response. As for my attempt at symbolism, the first guess was right, it's supposed to look like slightly squashed and broken hearts. Perhaps not the most subtle or well executed way of doing it, but I didn't want the tiles to all be the same color, so I thought I may as well do something fitting with a pattern. I'll keep the work up on it, and I'll probably post one more in progress version of it before the bg is "done", just in case people like seeing progress on drawings like this.
All the lines are going to the same place, as far as I can see, so it's good! I really love the ceiling- curved lines give me life hahaha Also AMAZING job on the details of those tiles- it just looks so thought out and meticulous, really brings life to the sort of rugged feel this whole setting has. I couldn't catch the symbolism! I see shapes, but I don't know if that's what you're talking about... Are they hearts? Swirls? Sorry for not getting it! >.>''''
This is the WIP of the background for the fan art. I really wanted it to be in color, but it's going to be in monochrome until my coloring skills develop drastically. I used some "texturing" techniques I picked up from Dorohedoro, and I think it looks alright. Let me know what you think. Oh, and I also caught on to making the dimensions of the drawing bigger to make the fine detail not have such aggressive aliasing on it, as that was bugging me in other stuff I drew.
OKay the first thing I noticed here is all the tiles... That takes serious patience and it looks fantastic. I love background details like tiles, brick, poles, all that because there's something so satisfying about it. This definitely pulls it off for me. I also love the detail in that breaker box and the brick's pitting and cracks. The whole thing was obviously thought through. There's not much perspective to this, but on things like the box and the pillar the third dimension lines aren't reaching back to the same vanishing point, which throws off the depth and feel of it, so just make sure in backgrounds that you have your vanishing point decided and it'll bring in another level of realism! Great, great job!
Nass, I took your advice and make it much curvier, with the help of some reference images. I think it turned out pretty well as far as the body goes. Obviously I need about 500 more hours of practice drawing shoes, because wow are they annoying to draw. I'm going to be modifying this base outfit with some accessories and a holster, stuff like that. Took about 3.5 hrs to draw, and I'm wondering how long it would take other people to do, just of of curiosity for benchmark purposes. And like I said, I was originally thinking of making characters much more slim, but I think if I can reproduce this or better, I'll stick with this style of drawing bodies.
> Nass> Nass Sincerely, thanks for the enthusiasm. It really made my day that someone is interested in my work even if it is just a few generic sketches. I'll be keeping an eye on your work as time goes on too, hopefully your new manga turns out well when it's ready to be shown down the line. As for me, sketches for the background I'm wanting to use for my fan-art are up next, and oh boy, that's going to be a train wreck as I sort through ways to color, texture, and apply lighting effects. It'll be good practice though.
Wow, wow, WOW! You have a really amazing ability to rapidly improve! I love it! It's awesome! I'm really, really impressed with how you immediately were able to incorporate those suggestions! I love her vest- it really looks like fabric hanging off of something, which might sound weird to notice, but I have a hard time with that, so good job! Just keep doing what you do, I'm sure you'll get better rapidly!
A sketch for a design I'll be using in my eventual manga. Got it "done" sooner than anticipated. Let me know what you think and any criticism or advice you may have. This is just the first iteration, as I will be adding more to the sketch over time.
> Nass Thanks for the input. This is literally only the third full-body sketch of a person that I've done since starting drawing a few months ago, so the anatomy and all that definitely going to keep looking weird for a while. I am kinda planning to have characters drawn in a somewhat "Clamp" art style rather than realistic, but yes I am definitely far off from either right now and need to practice with your feedback in mind. And since you asked, the manga is going to be a "superhero" story, only insofar that there are people with powers and the word "hero" doesn't mean much anymore. I know, sounds generic, but I'm trying to put an emphasis on interesting characters and world-building(like 200+ hours on it so far) to make up for the semi-cliche premise.
You give such great feedback- I'm glad you posted something! It's a nice design, for an action I'm guessing? The only critique I have is to practice anatomy- especially proportions and bodytypes for athletic, attractive females. The feet here are too small, and I think things like her chest and waist are too square and sharp for someone with a beautiful, toned body. Even if it's a "non-feminine" body type with little to no curve. Hope this helps! I'm intrigued and excited to see what your manga is like!
Won't be posting any of my writing or art on here for quite some time still, but I thought I may as well make some sort of contribution. Here's a playlist of some instrumental post-rock/metal that I made on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx3omK0aoN3X_1H9tgURDFuiobHTlu-kC . I pretty much always have these on when I'm writing and they help greatly with getting some nice flow going. Curve is the best album on the playlist, in case you're wondering.
> Nass Thanks for the vote of confidence! I'll try to make this a finished drawing sometime soon, hopefully in the next day or so to keep up a consistent pace.
Wow, this looks really cool! It looks stylized, and I think it's great as a baseline! Your progress is so impressive! Good job, seriously! I think you really achieved something here!