I said it before, and you told me to shut up.

Fine, I'll say it again.

Try to add shadows to all your future drawings. Complex colouring is the key to becoming "better", or at least that's what ME THINKS.

I really don't know why you harp on this. I'm primarily an animator. I am not a painter and never claimed to be. Putting shadows on line drawings is tedious and unnecessary for drawings never meant to be heavily rendered. I don't have time right now to learn to be a painter when I'm trying to break into the animation industry, not the illustration or fine art industry. Maybe one day I'll heavily render and shadow everything to your liking, but I'd be wasting time focusing on it when that won't get me a job.

Well, other than that... maybe you should try drawing realistically more often. Strictly for practice.

I do life studies in my sketchbook yeah. Otherwise everyone does realism so I'd rather avoid it as my focus save for the Extinction project.

Drawing more tits and boobies

That's what my porn account is fooorrrr

as in the burbs, silly goose

I would love to do more storytelling stuff. It's a lot of fun and though I'm pretty terrible at it, I might as well try.

Time and money. Always time and money. :'|

Maybe do some chiaroscuro studies b/c when you shade the light seems to come from nowhere. Your drawing is strong, get that rendering up to speed.

My only beef with doing those sorts of studies at the current time is that to me it'd be a 'waste of time' because I'm not trying to be an illustrator or a fine artist. I would love to be a jack of all trades one day, but I'm barely managing to produce any drawings not alone 40+ hour paintings and 2+ hour studies. One day I'll teach myself to paint/render, but in my view, it's not what's going to land me a gig right now which I desperately need before I'm A.) Damaged goods to the industry and B.) My student loans start knocking and I need a 'real career job' to pay those bills, tho I appreciate the advice.

I don't know. I just can't seem to fit working on every branch of art (drawing, lighting, painting, colouring, design, etc) in the meager hours I have after working 10 hours a day in an office. So I gotta hone in one what will get me hired? I don't know it's hard. :'|

Well your drawings have shadows and they look wrong because you don't chose a light direction and stick to it. I'm not saying you need to become some painter but at least do a couple of cube studies or something or stop using shading in your portfolio. If all you want is animation I think the answer is pretty obvious that you should do a shitload of really good animation? Just nail that, I mean if someone is looking for animators they'll look a at your reel not your sketches.

Sorry about the situation though that is hard. But hey you're employed and I doubt think you'll be damaged goods or anything. Half the guys in the industry struggled like crazy to get in after working other jobs.

Well what I have on Fa doesn't reflect what's in my actual portfolio, and the cross hatching i use is rather minimal. I'll admit that I use the 'x marks the spot' technique to roughly follow where a light source might be. I'm not sure what you mean by 'cube studies' but if you literally mean a square, I'll be honest and say I feel a little insulted, lol.

Yeha, it's all good. I just meant that my school taught me if you don't get hired a year out of graduating, you're considered "broken" by the industry and passed over in favour of "fresh" graduates. It sucks but it seems to be the truth. I missed two employment opportunities because of visa issues so that sucks, but now that they're cleared up I'm waiting until my current job ends so I can just gun hoe on a new portfolio/demo reel. I dunno. I just feel a lil stuck, you know?

Dude I don't know what you want lol. First it's like 'oh I'm FAR too busy for difficult studies' then it's 'I'm above cubes'. No you're not. No one is above cubes. A cube study is where basically you draw a 3D box on a plane and then fucking light it faithfully and accurately from imagination (including cast shadow on the plane, I don't think I've ever seen a cast shadow from you.) If you think that is too easy then make the cube out of metal, or add other items casting shadows on the cube, or whatever. The only purpose is to get your brain thinking about light and how it works. This sounds easy, I assure you it's not. But it's a hell of a lot quicker than drawing a whole study. You can do maybe 2 or 3 a halfhour and it really does help.

'X marks the spot' is better than nothing but it has a couple of problems. An X is a 2d shape so it exists ON the page rather than IN the fictional 3D space of the drawing. This means your drawings will look like bevels rather than 3D forms (which is often the case with you). 2nd is that it has no direction to it at all. Every light source in the world has both a location and a direction. And you might say 'oh it's radial! radiating! every direction!' but this means you will never ever light from a spotlight accurately, or light from the sun at sunset accurately.

A solution if you still want something to mark your light source is to draw a cone somewhere inside the picture space. The point of the cone is the light direction, and where the cone is is where the light is (or in the same direction if the light is the sun or something way outside the frame). Simple, but at least it has a defined angle in the 3rd dimension.

But all this is meaningless if you don't give a shit about lighting lol. Still I think it's a useful skill potentially, what if you need to light a 3D scene or cell shade some 2D?

Maybe more important for you is to cut some fat from the reel and replace it with grade-A awesome. I know you're busy, but maybe do some relatively small animation projects. Walks, idles, runs. Maybe some sprites, or attacks. Games also hire animators, and other media people will still look at those and appreciate the skill in them if they're good.

And do realistic humans. OMG 90% of the stuff getting made is about humans not quadrapeds or furries. I know it's not your passion but seriously.

I worded that wrong, so I apologize. I don't think it's "beneath me", I just have such low confidence in my stuff that what my brain hears when you say that is "your stuff sucks, go back to cubes and spheres" which I know isn't the intention. You reminded me of some exercise where you take cubes and do all sort of materials to practice textures and such. Perhaps I'll eventually do that, too. They're short enough exercises like you said.

Mhm, true! I once upon a time knew abot the cone - I think in life drawing classes and such - but since I don't paint/don't like to render, I kinda ignored it. I'll bring it back and see if it improves 'graphic' lighting and such.

It's not that I'm actively OPPOSED to lighting and rendering, it's that there are people 10000x better at it then me and it will likely never be a skill I'll need in the next 1-2 years to put food on the table. That's all I'm sayin'.

I'm working on the animation thing. It's slower than art because, well, it takes longer, but that's why I'm looking forward to this job ending so I can actually work on shit. As for games....from ll I see they don't hire you unless you're "passionate" about gaming, which I'm not because it hurts my eyes/I have no time for it anyway. So I doubt I'd ever be hired on a game in the next 5 years. Never say never, but it's not a goal for me since they don't ~want my kind~ anyway.

I practice humans in sketchbooks...but you're right they're not my passionate. I just don't get inspired to draw em outside of like Marvel characters. I'm not good at em and everyone else draws humans better, so it's like well, at least I'm better at animals than them sort of deal. 90% of games getting made are humans, I'll agree, but a lot of animal work is in TV/film and that's where I prefer anyway since re: game studios wouldn't want people who don't like games anyay

I'm sorry I think I came off harsher than I meant to >.< I'm just Australian sorry for the swears. Plus I know you're not opposed, didn't mean to imply that.

Yeah, I mean I know humans don't appeal. But the thing is you'll be severely limiting your options if you can't do them. Even shows where there are lots of animals will likely have some human characters too. You don't have to be as good as people who it's their main thing, but if you get the proportions and some basic anatomy down it'll really help your chances I think. Plus, if you want you can think of humans being an animal and apply animalistic behaviour to them if that would make it more interesting to you. Animate some Tarzan type guy fighting a bear, or maybe mythical creatures like centaurs that are part human.

Good luck to you mate.

Oh no it's cool. Fucking internet makes it hard to understand tone.

Oh yeah, like I said, I totally draw humans in my sketchbook, I just don't get many inspiring ideas to include in art all that often. I'm trying to put em more and more into my stuff tho! Just building my confidence in it before I show anyone, you know?

Thanks man. I'm doin what I can, just plugging along!! That's all you can do~