chubbycat's Improvement Thread

chubbycat

Hey there! Welcome to my improvement thread I'll be using as I embark on reaching my goal of becoming a concept artist

Like most people here, my general goal is to become better at digital art, and like a lot of users on here, I'm at the beginning stage where drawing had previously been nothing more than a hobby. I've been lurking these threads for quite a while now and I see the same advice pop up in every beginner thread:

"Stop doing personal work and go back to learning the fundamentals. Learn from people better than you so you don't teach yourself bad habits."

I have taken this advice on board and I'm forcing myself to strip back to basics and revisit learning via tutorials. So far I've only been watching the (free) tutorials on ctrl paint. They have been very helpful so I was wondering whether or not anyone would recommend paying for the other tutorials on the site? Additionally, I would be very grateful for any tutorials or websites anyone can recommend .

Goals (not in order)
- Learn and refine rendering skills
- Cleaner line art
- Become comfortable with anatomy, facial expressions, clothing and consistently drawing a single character.
- Learn perspective
- Learn lighting and its effects.
- Dabble in learning environments so they can aid in my illustrations

Style I want to achieve
While I do want to be quite diverse with my style, I want to focus on learning semi realistic and modern comic book style.

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To get back into things, I've been working on some still life images and quick figure studies shown below. This was a great exercise and I am planning to carry on doing them but via traditional as well.






I hope to post on this thread daily. Any feedback, critiques and advice would be greatly appreciated.

chubbycat

So much for daily lmao, but I'm back and more focused than ever before.  

I've taken this month learn how to draw faces and have begun to dabble in learning the anatomy of the neck too. The neck has always been something that's terrified me - especially in profile view. I didn't manage to find a whole lot of information out there, but I did follow a few artist's advice. While I'm sure the anatomy isn't perfect, I now feel more comfortable with how the neck works, which was my main goal. 

Any crits or advice is very much appreciated . Once I've finished learning the neck, I plan to move on to torso anatomy. Anatomy is a very weak point of mine, so it will be something that will be consuming my entire life for the next month or so. I'm starting from the head and working my way down to dem toes.

Face and Neck studies: 






 

chubbycat

Another female face study. Overall, pretty happy with how they turned out. The addition of greyscale helped me understand the contours of the face a lot more. Not perfect by any means, but it surely was a lot more fun than just staring at lines.