StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm trying. Unfortunetly, I suck. I can't even get the #$%_)%* shoulders right. It never turns out right. Ever. I think I'm going to kill myself.

Seriously, though, any tips? Pointers? Aside from the 'just keep practicing' line?

Sadly, I think the old "keep practicing" line is the only one.


Professional artists, manga artists, etc all acquired their skills through YEARS of fanatically dedicated practice. It doesn't come easy.

When I was little, drawing cam easily to me. Now I prefer drawing mechanical stuff over organics, and I usually do it on a computer. It's so much more precise that way.

Hehe, the best art I can draw is stick figures...
I'm not too bad with photoshop though. Learning some 3D stuff too.

Go to books a million. Trust me, there are plenty of figure drawing books around $20. I just picked a new one up earlier about how to draw comic figures.

Well, I'm working on a manga style myself.

I've found that the How to Draw Manga book series has helped me out a lot. I currently have nine of them.

But yeah, you need to keep drawing to get good at it. It's breasts that I have a hard time with, but shoulders can be a real bitch, too.

I can draw a head fairly well in profile. Beyond that I'm awful.

The best art book I found was the classic "How to draw comics the Marvel Way" by Stan Lee and his top artist. It actually gave you lots of technical tips and lessons on how to begin drawing figures correctly and how to pose them for best effect. Brilliant stuff.

I can't draw symmetric eyes. I can't draw eyebrows symmetrically. I can't draw breasts. But I do fairly well with real-life people. Only suggestion: Keep practising.

My suggestion?

Get a mirror.

Seriously.

You've got a perfect model, sitting right... well, where you are. Can't draw shoulders? Take off your shirt, and move your arm around a bit to see how the musculature forms around the bone, and how shadows and pits and grooves and edges work. Then try to draw that.

Feeling secure in your masculinity? Pick up one of those Muscle & Fitness magazines. They display the musculature of the human body FAR better than an anatomy book. Highly exaggerated, of course... but it helps identify individual muscle groups, and as you practice, you'll figure out what smaller muscles look like. Remember, an arm or a leg isn't a cylinder. It's covered in fat and muscle, which hang and sag and move in odd ways. An arm held at an angle will look a lot different than an arm held at the side.

And you're going to have to learn to think in three dimensions. A face isn't flat. If your characters keep coming out looking like primates, it's probably because their faces are completely flat. Imagine what it would look like if you bend it around a bit... the eye that's further from the point-of-view would look smaller, and you'd see different parts of it, for instance.

Don't try to draw a line for ever curve on the human body. Don't draw the bridge of the nose, for instance, if you're looking at it straight on. If you've got a light enough touch, shade it in. If not, leave it blank. Same with cheeks and muscle lines.

Study faces. Notice that the forehead often takes up 35-45% of a person's face, and that their ears are about level with their eyes, and that their nose would be a couple inches below their eyes. Remember that a person's nostrils will, ideally, be facing down, and if you're looking at a person head-on, you probably won't see them at all.

Remember that there are tiny folds of eyelids above and below the eyes, and often shadows underneath the eye and underneath the eyebrows. Fill these shadow spaces in. If your person's face looks too flat, it may be because you just made it look like a drawing on a flat surface (heh...). Fill in a shadow underneath a person's lower lip, instead of drawing it in. Darken in a bit of the underside of their upper lip, also, instead of drawing a line separating the difference in skin colors.

Beyond that, you really need to learn the musculature of the human body, and get a handle on perspective. If you can, I'd recommend taking a Beginner's Drawing class at your local community college (or High School, if you're still that young).

Oh, and keep trying. You're going to get a lot of failures before you start having successes. So did Einstein.

In addition, you may want to do some contour and blind contour drawings, as well.

Oh God. I forgot about contours. I always hated those things. After you master the contour, and the blind contour, try using your left hand (or right whichever one you don't use).

Discussion on the merits of drawing vs CG split

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=11077