It's a bit strange to do concept work:

Alien, actually.

The prompt was something along the lines of "Turian + Charr" AND he needed to be humanoid enough to be attractive to humans, Therefore, I have a werewolf-like alien

Very nice, acefreakz!

A WIP of a noir-ish lounge singer and her pianist.

@ kpchoo29

Very nice! Love the dynamic feel of the illustration.

If I may critique... The shadows on the foreground character is a LITTLE too harsh for a character that's fighting in an environment like a desert, where the sand particles are actually very light-reflective, especially since it looks like the metal of the foreground mecha is light-coloured/white (?). You may also want to warm the highlights, make them more yellow-toned instead of the neutral-to-cool temperature they have right now. It'll make the heat of the desert environment more convincing

@ kpchoo29

Meant that the mecha's BODY should not be so dark.

Here's an example:



See the dragon? You can see the reflected light on the belly-side of the body. Even in the rock formation in the background, you can see that it's not entirely in shadow.

Razer has awesome stuff. Wanna buy the ME3 set, but there's a lot of peripherals I won't use >_< derp.

Well, the problem for me is:

1) I'm a collector who's OCD about complete collections, which means I have the "GOTTA CATCH COLLECT 'EM ALL", which isn't healthy for my wallet;

2) I'm a gamer AND a digital artist, so I have some specialised equipment already that makes getting a whole new set of equipment somewhat redundant;

3) Only the headphones may actually be useful to me. The rest, I don't need.

So it makes no financial sense whatsoever to spend thousands of ringgit to get all of those shinies, which makes me sad D:

That's a gorgeous bit of work there, Adam. Very interesting concept!

It's rare that I get to work on ME fanart, so I'm glad when the opportunity comes by

Perspective IS off. Use a ruler to lightly trace how each point of the car drawing align to each other. The vanishing points are all over the place.

@ Ben

Not the outline, dear, but how each point/edge of the shapes of the car, windows, wheels and lights relate to the other points/edges.

Basically your artistic eye has not been trained to judge distances by "eyeballing" yet, so the proportions are all thrown off. If the main shapes are not right, no amount of shading is going to help make a picture look "right".

Example:



This is an outline of the car, broken into basic shapes. The green line is the centreline, where I started my base for building the other shapes. You can see even without the shading (which builds the form, or three-dimensionality of the car), the shape of the car is recognizable, because I tried to stay as true as possible to how each shape relates to each other in terms of size, and how each point of the shapes relate in terms of distance.

As a comparison, this is the outline overlaid on your drawing:



Not sure if you have the paper tilted at an angle when you took the pic, which would make your drawing inaccurate, but you can already see how the shapes are "off".

This post has been edited by DragonReine: May 8 2012, 09:47 PM

I did eyeball, yes. I'd deleted the sketch layer and left the clean outlines in, but I used a lot of measuring lines/points/dashes to measure out the shapes.

The outline is probably pretty close to accurate, but I had practice both in art and in judging distances (I was a competitive tennis player for most of my childhood and teenage years, thinking in 3D and judging distances is part of the athlete thing)

You don't really need to consider how "great" your pencil is, as long as it is of a decent sharpness that you can get good lines, and it doesn't break too often in your hand

And here's the overlay again:



Right now you seem to be still in the drawing what you KNOW, and not what you SEE.

I suggest you try and constantly practice blind contour drawing, if you want to learn how to "eyeball" from real life and draw accurately from memory. It's a good way to train hand-eye coordination, and forces your brain to SEE, and not make you draw what you "know" something looks like

Saying that I don't like tracers is an understatement >:( Especially if you don't credit the original artist. It's just not fair to the one(s) who originally created the art-piece.

The problem with tracing as practice is that it does NOT encourage creativity. Sure, your technical skills MIGHT improve, but since you're still using your own method (unless you have access to a video that actually shows how the particular artist you are copying creates the artwork), what benefits you get are minimal, most of the time.

It becomes a problem when you promote that traced art as "original". Then you're plagiarizing, and infringing on the copyright of the original creator.


----

Anyway, here's a WIP of one of my pieces:

All this armor is turning out to be a PAIN IN THE BUM to paint:



Also, HER EARS ARE LOPSIDED FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU----

This post has been edited by DragonReine: May 12 2012, 08:30 PM

One of the advantages of working digitally: you can just go back and copypaste/liquify/paint over corrections if necessary. Otherwise, you need to eraser-blast/whiteout the area and start over (pencil/ink) or take an X-acto knife to the canvas (paints).

Thankfully it's a relatively small area and I haven't done any detail work yet, and I spotted it fairly early. Otherwise I'll really cry.

Believe it or not, that IS how the hair is like on the 3D model Client was quite adamant on keeping the hair right. So yeah...

Her philtrum IS one of the defining features of her face, actually, although this will be softened in more paint passes, when I add more highlights to the eyes.

Right now... corrections applied, then DETAILS DETAILS DETAILS.



Cropped because client wants more focus on the face.

Less than a minute. I cut, shifted, painted over the odd seams, and pasted it back.

The joys of digital media

Busy busy busy...



(I should probably paint less portraits >.> )