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[bombzero]

I think it outdoes the other ones a little bit

(Also, original reaction drawing from Bombzero, because fuck memes)

[GoombaGeek]

Here are a couple social justice comics I've done.

[Dbuhos]

Warning, huge as fuck compilation.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[coolio678]

Warning, huge as fuck compilation.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

the guy on the right kind of reminds me of cyanide and happiness, if it were more detailed. awesome work!

Also, I finally got a tablet yesterday. However, I'm not very creative, so I drew the closest object to me, which was an old ipod.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

this is done in artrage 2, if anyone is wondering

[Dbuhos]

Another compilation, mostly Blacklight fanart.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Araph]

*Applause*

How do you make it lineless like that? Whenever I try sketching something and then freehanding over the sketch while shading, it turns out cruddy.

[bombzero]

How do you make it lineless like that? Whenever I try sketching something and then freehanding over the sketch while shading, it turns out cruddy.

I can answer that one!

Step 1. draw linework.
Step 2. reduce opacity of linework to ~70-80%
Step 3. block in main color sections.

From here there are several feasible ways to go about it.
You could either erase the linework as you go correcting any issues that arise.
Or, for the more technical route that preserves your linework use a layer mask to hide the parts as you go.

From there you kinda work like normal except you might want to put more emphasis on the lighting than you normally would.

EDIT: Oh yeah, practice and time, those matter too. The more quickly you try to do something the worse the result is likely to be.

[Robocorn]

How do you make it lineless like that? Whenever I try sketching something and then freehanding over the sketch while shading, it turns out cruddy.

I can answer that one!

But I knew the answer

For redundant advice I'll fill in.


The images are more in order of layer than chronology but  I can explain.

First I looked at pictures of horses, lots of horses. Horses don't have lines, you see.
They don't have horns or metallic exoskeletons either, but that's easier to fake.
Anyway, having looked at twenty-ish pictures of horses and rejecting a whole bunch of shitty sketches
I came to the linework you can kind of see in panel 3. It was sloppy and mostly disregarded.
Now I can deal with it mostly chronologically.

Panel1: This is a lazy background. Most of the foreground is bright green so I figured red would work. I had previously taken a colors cheme from colourlovers.com which I use because I am lazy.

Panel2: I lay out the silhouette of the horse somewhat according to the linework and defined it from the background. A lot of this explanation could probably be summed up by saying I blocked in colors repeatedly and tried hard to ignore my linework, but I've already typed 150 words and am dead set on stealing five minutes if your life.

Panel3+4: I do some overly elaborate photoshop trick to make my line art match my shading so I don't have to pussyfoot around my lines while I paint over them. This seems to be what has bothered you in the past. I don't know what I did other than color inside my lines and try really hard to make sure there was a hard distinction between the two areas of tone. I guess just make sure you're using the hard brush at this point. The silhouette compensates for a lot of my weaker coloring at this point.

Panel5: This time I just added a bunch of fine details with a smaller brush and more extreme colors. Most of the changes are to the head. A sort of unspoken rule is that people will give a lot of leeway to detail on the trunk of the body and the background and stuff, but if you mess up the head and hands, everybody notices. Learned that from the androidart tutorial way back when. Have you tried asking people who know what they're talking about, cause so far you've got bombzero and me.

Panel6: I added a bunch of cloudy red stuff below the horse and green stuff for a kind of "mane" The red cloud was really necessary to offset all of that green. At this point I realize how much I hate that horn but figure the 2000x2000 image will mostly be seen at 75x75 so I let it slide.

Panel7:I add cool lightning and more clouds in the foreground so I don't have to draw hooves in perspective.

Now you've got a semi presentable digital painting that looks really good in comparison to the last 3

EDIT: Oh yeah, practice and time, those matter too. The more quickly you try to do something the worse the result is likely to be.

There was some parable I wanted to source but I can't seem to. So I'll paraphrase.
"There was once a king who wanted a picture of a chicken.
He sent for an artist, and the artist told him he would have it ready in two years,
The king agreed and the artist descended into study of chickens.
When the artist came back in two years time the king asked "Where's the picture?"
The artist asks for a piece of parchment and produces an utterly perfect picture of a chicken within two minutes.
The king is flustered and asks why he needed all that time.
The artist responds that it took him two years to learn how to draw a chicken in two minutes"
In retrospect, I think it came from the animators survival kit

Anyway, the moral is that practice trumps time virtually always. Shit that takes me 40 minutes now is better than what took me three hours a year ago.
If you're afraid that people will dismiss your bad art, just don't show it to people. Nobody's so insecure that they need to show every scribble to the world.

Boy this is a really long post

In summation "Block in colors according to a defined silhouette, what are you doing reading this you should be practicing"

[bombzero]

Have you tried asking people who know what they're talking about, cause so far you've got bombzero and me.

This made me laugh, considering that both you and me pretty much brute force bullshit our way through creating stuff until it turns out right. 
EDIT:
Just a little work in progress sketch.

I think I'm getting slightly better at anatomy, right arm and hand are a little odd though.
The left shoulder is more or less correct, shoulders just look weird when significantly raised.
Shoulders might be a little too wide for females still, but counterbalanced slightly by increasing the width of the hips.

Any opinions on the clothing? does it look decent?

[somebody]

Her left shoulder isn't attached to her body and her legs are way too long.

Also boobs are attached to the chest, they aren't circles that come out off of it.

And it has no neck.

I could point out more but those are the biggest IMO.

[bombzero]

her legs are way too long.

If you're going by human anatomy, yes. However she is, for one, leaning slightly forward at the waist, and two her lower leg is only about as long as her torso is, that is pretty similar to human anatomy and so is the ratio of lower leg to upper leg. Not that anything non-human has to have human anatomy you know...

boobs are attached to the chest, they aren't circles that come out off of it.

And these aren't circles coming out of it, not sure where you're getting that from, perhaps the fact that demonstrating such a thing with linework is slightly tricky?

Her left shoulder isn't attached to her body

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, go look in a mirror and raise your shoulder as high as you can. Besides raising the left side of her torso an inch or two I'm not really sure what you are talking about.

And it has no neck.

Her head is leaning forward, covering the neck from the viewer's perspective.

P.S. I don't mean to sound like a dismissive asshole but that's what's liable to happen with replying to half-formed criticisms that don't offer anything particularly useful.

[Shook]

This made me laugh, considering that both you and me pretty much brute force bullshit our way through creating stuff until it turns out right. 

Huh, so apparently it IS common practice to just dick around with something until it looks right. Fancy that! I suspect i might be doing more dicking than most in order to achieve desired results, though. Case in point: this took 2-3 hours. But hey, i'm unaccustomed to working beyond pixel art scale (done pixel art/spriting for ~4 years, regular mousedoodling for a few months), and i'm actually drawing with my off-hand, so yeah. Not that i think it would get any better if i switched to my dominant hand. :U

AS FOR YOUR LIZARDGRL, you're obviously aware that her shoulders appear rather raised (i wonder why, though, i'd get a horrible headache from sitting like that), but another thing is that her legs and feet appear rather large compared to the rest of the body. The feet could just be perspective (she's facing the camera, after all), but them thunder thighs, bro! I know, non-human anatomy, and legs ARE a lot thicker than arms, but i think these might be a little bit too thick.
Other than that, though, i'm seeing a tremendous improvement in your art. Kudos! c:

@Dbuhos: Hahah, lovely as always, your lines and shading are exemplary! Also, did you just like... Draw a Quarian Kefka? QUARIAN KEFKA PALAZZO.

[Jopax]

Dicking around until it looks right (also known as "winging it") happens usually when you don't understand the way something works, or how to get a certain result (like say me and most PS functions, don't really know why or how most of them work as they do but trough trial and error I can usually get what I need). The moment you don't need to dick around to make something usually means you know enough about it to accurately render it (again, happened to me with metals and their highlights, watched videos, images, tried it myself but one day it just worked and ever since I can do somewhat properly metals). That's usually the moment you should start working on other stuff you need to dick around with until they look right.

At a certain point in time you should theoretically know how everything works and how to get there, that unfortunately means you're about halfway done to becoming a master engraver

[Svarte Troner]

I drew this on a piece of receipt paper at work the other day. He had us staying until 11 on Christmas eve....

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[bombzero]

Dicking around until it looks right (also known as "winging it") happens usually when you don't understand the way something works, or how to get a certain result (like say me and most PS functions, don't really know why or how most of them work as they do but trough trial and error I can usually get what I need). The moment you don't need to dick around to make something usually means you know enough about it to accurately render it (again, happened to me with metals and their highlights, watched videos, images, tried it myself but one day it just worked and ever since I can do somewhat properly metals). That's usually the moment you should start working on other stuff you need to dick around with until they look right.

At a certain point in time you should theoretically know how everything works and how to get there, that unfortunately means you're about halfway done to becoming a master engraver

This is about exactly how I figured out most things I know about art at the moment.
Step 1: Brute force it, get irritated, toss out results.
Step 2: read some stuff on it, try again, get irritated toss out results.
Step 3: sleep, wake up, do normal stuff, get bored, try again, nail it (more or less)perfectly.

AS FOR YOUR LIZARDGRL, you're obviously aware that her shoulders appear rather raised (i wonder why, though, i'd get a horrible headache from sitting like that), but another thing is that her legs and feet appear rather large compared to the rest of the body. The feet could just be perspective (she's facing the camera, after all), but them thunder thighs, bro! I know, non-human anatomy, and legs ARE a lot thicker than arms, but i think these might be a little bit too thick.
Other than that, though, i'm seeing a tremendous improvement in your art. Kudos! c:

One of the most irritating thing I've had to deal with in art is different communities having radically different opinions on what is "correct".
Most of the time it seems like conceited ignorance due to embedded conceptions of how something with no groundings in reality is supposed to look in their head (An extreme problem in furry-centric communities), but other times, like in the case of this thread or the Data Realms forums, yall seem generally able to accept that something is in fact not a real creature and thusly does not have a "perfect" way to draw it.
You in particular Shook, along with Adriaan over on the Data Realms forums seem to get this better than most people, thanks for that.
[/rant]
That being said, The legs issues was a minor mistake born of an attempt at perspective, I'll take that under advisement.