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"