i completely disagree with people complaining about mechlin's first portrait. it's a dwarf, it's human enough that it can be called a humanoid, but it is not human. have you seen dnd's rendering of elves? or TES elves? why cant dwarves have unique facial traits? also, mechlin was probably following the game's description of the dwarfette, "her eyes are incredibly wide set"
forget software, grab a pencil
I'm worse with a pencil, if it could be imagined that that were possible.
When I said really crappy, I MEANT it.
And therein lies the rub. What you really need is not fancy software, but about a thousand hours of practice. That might sound like a lot, but remember that you can spread it over several years. Decades, if you're lazy. 
this.
the advice vertigon gave applies to people a little more advanced than you. judging by the only drawing you posted you are either very young or started to draw just recently, therefore you'll probably want to start from the beginning. hands are an excellent subject, very versatile, and people usually carry one spare with them,
(if you don't have a spare one you can borrow one from someone else) but they are not the only subject, you'll want to draw people, cars, buildings... do whatever you like, just follow these four directives:
1-draw from life. carry a sketchbook everywhere, whenever you have to wait for a bus, etc. sttart to draw things you see
2-draw a lot, don't bother with the finished product, don't try to make it look good for someone else, if you get something wrong dont erase it, just draw over it again, these are just exercises, you dont to lose time prettying them up
3-don't draw from memory, memorizing proportions might make your life easier, but will also make you a worse draftsman. it's a necessary step to take, eventually, but it should be more of a priority to learn how to draw proportions from life or reference that to draw from memory. the trick is relative measuring: to draw a complex object you first select a simpler part of it, and then compare it's relative size to the rest of the object, for a human body, take the head, then see how many "heads" can you stack at the person's height, how many "heads" long are their arms, etc. early on you'll probably have to actually
count the heads with your pencil, but with practice this will become automatic, and you'll start to get a better grasp of general proportions
4-patience. this aint easy, there's no improving without effort
@joss:
beautiful
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Topic: +The Engravers Guild+ (Read 378318 times)