That's pretty sweet! :O What's the wood background from? Desk? :P

Thanks! It's an old-ass wheeled table next to my desk. It's a nice change from the chair seat, huh? :P

Hey, you're drawing again.

Yeah, drawing close up stuff will help you learn texture and detail work if you ever want to go digital. It helped me out a lot on the few traditional mugshots that I actually finished. You should know that what you're posting here is probably about what I would have managed with a BPP right before I bought a tablet.

Going from here to real pro-quality stuff just means sitting down and experimenting with a medium you can actually change and erase.
It'll let you refine much more and be much less frustrating than throwing it out when you screw up. If you watched a video of me drawing something epic from start to finish, you'd probably have doubts I had any idea what I was doing for most of it. I take plenty of opportunities to drastically change things all at once and just /undo/ if it looks like crap (It usually does and that's why I take so long :).

Yes it's weird but so would I

Yes, I actually hate working with only ballpoint pen and recyclable plates, but it's just all I have when I'm at work. That and 30 minutes. :P Now ideally, I won't be working on something super amazing at work during a short 30 minute lunch break, I'd be doing it at home, where I have all of my conveniences available. After drawing a lot with ballpoint pen only, working with pencil and having the ability to erase is amazing, as I discovered when I drew that halberd minotaur pic a while back. And yeah, you can tell there are places where I'd have loved to be able to erase and redraw, such as that really dark section by the tip of his muzzle, and that wonky "13" where I accidentally wrote a 0 instead of a 1. :V

When I drew this current picture, I got really excited because it was the first time I put this much detail in just a doodle, or even just a sketch, or really just ANYTHING, and it's actually kinda mindblowing to know that this is roughly what you were doing early on. :P Really, the next thing I need to do is just finish one of my many unfinished pictures that are laying around here, and see how I feel about it. However, the reason it takes me so long is because I never feel like working on them. :P (This is a problem I'm still working on, it affects all of my projects, not just art)

And good, I'm glad it's not just me who wants to be weird. :P

Ok, so I decided to see what I could do with a pen and 30 minutes.
Hopefully you can learn a bit from this;

http://tinyurl.com/n89nczr

I wasted most of the my time figuring out how the scale pattern was going to look instead of making an evenly textured one (I already have tons of practice here, though). I obviously did not have much time for shading after that, so this is only partially done.

I laid the facial structure out with very light polygons and dots, rather than circles/blobs.
It's way more precise when you're used to wireframe stuff, and you can 'commit' to lines without having a bunch of hairy stuff hanging around them afterwards. If you do game design, make some really crappy low-poly count models, then use them for refs when you do anatomy.


The only other difference is I put more contrast into the shading than you did. This isn't something that takes much skill, just stick some darker areas where they would naturally be. Also note that I had the flash on when I took that picture, which tends to make contrast look a bit better.


One thing I have noticed about your art: you seems to have more natural ability at posing than I do. It's probably hidden well most of the time, but posing is something I struggle through with every image, trying to keep proportions right, trying to avoid shifting back to side-profile shots, etc.

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But is it better? Well honestly, given what's in my gallery I hoped it would be!
But it's *marginally* better. If you told me to draw it again a year from now I doubt it would improve much.
You can't hope to get better overall if you limit yourself to 30 minute doodles. I know it's hard to get motivated, but one thing I figured out- don't rely on caffeine all the time! I completely stopped drinking coffee at work because it caused me to crash by the time I got home. I make a cup of tea whenever I need some type of gittyup, and that usually works just fine.

For 30 minutes, that's not bad. :P Ok, in reality, I'm not hard-limited to 30 minutes, it's not unknown for me to accidentally take a 40-45 minute lunch break because I want to draw or because I lost track of time. It probably does amount to 30 minutes after buying food, walking to the outdoor balcony to sit (customers are scared of the outdoors, I swear), and eat. Either way, I think it's really cool that you tried this out. :D

The reason I didn't shade very much is because I wanted to try adding a whole bunch of detail and texturing in this sketch, and in doing so, I would create some implicit shading by just varying how much detail I put. The other reason is, when I try to do "normal" shading, I usually overdo it and the sketch ends up looking really muddy. :\ Then again, pen is not my ideal medium. :P I know I keep mentioning it, but the halberd minotaur pic I did really is the best demonstration of what I can do when I'm using all the materials I'm comfortable with.

My current technique is to start with some kind of "flow" line/curve if I'm doing a full body, or I can skip it if I'm just doing a bust or something. I'll add the circles to that, and the circles will just help me get the proportions/locations correct. Dragon heads for me are two disjointed circles, a large one for the "base" of the face, and a smaller one that marks the size and endpoint of the muzzle. Usually another line marks where the line of symmetry is along the muzzle, if I'm having trouble visualizing it. From there, I just keep adding circles and ovals in the locations of where the various facial features should go, and only once I have most of this laid out is when I start adding the "actual" shape and structure. The body is similar, a large circle for the chest, another circle for the hips, and then I check to make sure the body length and proportions are correct and I adjust as needed. Then the four legs start as circles where the shoulders and haunches are, four flow lines for the four legs, circles added where the joints go, proportion checking, etc. I'd love it if I could just visualize this whole thing as a wireframe in my head and be able to plop it down easily, but this is what I've found to work the best for me right now. I may still try it later though, like if I ever get to the point where I can skip the circles.

You know, someone told me I was good at posing before. It might've been you, it might've been someone else, but never the less, thanks! The only thing I can really say is to make sure the pose flows well, because it isn't hard to have an arm or leg bent some weird way and not realize that it wouldn't be possible (or comfortable) in reality. That and poses are really finicky, because something as simple as your arm being outstretched or even at just a slightly different angle will have an effect on your entire body, not just the arm. I always wanted to attribute that to "flow", but really, it's more physics and the subject trying to accomodate for the slightly different weight distribution.

Yes, I don't intend to only draw during lunch breaks, I swear! I only do that because I don't want to suddenly be 2 months out of practice because my lazy ass didn't want to draw after work. :P Speaking of which, it's funny you mention the caffeine, I've actually cut it out of my daily intake because I suspected it might be messing with me in exactly this way. :P I'm still tired and lazy when I get home though, but I think that's just from the nature of my job; I run around and stand behind a counter all day, with my lunch break really being the only time I get to sit down. But hopefully not getting messed up by caffeine will have some positive effect. :P