Hitting a wall with learning anatomy and characters.

GarethStandfield

So i keep getting the same feedback, that my anatomy is not amazing, my textures leave alot to be desired and all around have the name Beginner said alot about my work. 

Iv studied tons and get this every time i make a character, i cant afford mentor ship and am not sure what wall im hitting that i cant pass to get out of that beginner stage an hit the industry as an artist. This is a study i did over a few hours today.

Im not sure if this kind of study is what i should be doing or not but i hope it put on display were im at an maybe whats so wrong with my art that someone might point out. Cheers.

GarethStandfield

I will also link my art station so you can see my other work for an idea of were im at. 

https://www.artstation.com/garethstandfield 

carvuliero

I wonder what have you study exactly ?

Do you have something which is more then few hours old ?

If you want to copy something copy skulls at least you will get something out of it

Can you afford books 20-30 bucks a pop 5-10 second hand or tutorials 50 bucks a pop ? there is plenty of free stuff some of which is actually good tutorial wise or old books that are digitize and in public domain

Joseph_Bramlett

Having looked at your portfolio and the Noctis studied the feedback you have been given is pretty accurate. I think you need to take a step back and evaluate your work and what are the major things that need to be worked on. Lets take the two things mentioned in your post, Anatomy and texturing. For now Ide recommend you pic one to focus on. If its anatomy then do anatomy studies and do tons of them. Look up anatomy tutorials online including muscle and bone breakdowns for artist and do some live drawing of people. Find 3d scans of people and use them as reference to do your own sculpts. You need to develop a strong eye for anatomy and that is soemthign that just happens with time. Texturing is a similar thing where you have to study real world materials and stop worrying about completing an entire character. The way your asking your question makes me think that you are waiting for some one to tell you the fix for your work, that some one will be able to tell you the thing to do to make your work instantly better. I dont mean that to sound rude or anything and i dont think you mean it rudely either. Their is a saying that it takes 10'000 hours to become a master at something. Thats over 3 and a half years if you work on it consistently for 8 hours a day every day. I guess what Im trying to say is pick something specific you want to get better at and practice it a lot. Find all the free online tutorials for that thing and practice it a lot. 

Alex_J

I think it's better to start by studying real life before going into stylization. If characters is your thing make a believable human first. Start from the bones, focus on proportions.

If you are trying to get a job ASAP, it's probably better to put characters aside and do props instead. Getting a believable human is really hard because anybody can tell if the smallest detail is wrong.

JamesBrisnehan

It does actually look like you are improving. Maybe you are just improving a bit slowly. Your FFXV guy seems to have better anatomy than your older stuff on art-station. At least as far as I can tell as an environment artist. 
Maybe you just need to break out of your comfort zone for a while. Instead of doing another stylized cartoony/anime person with soft features, try finding some reference of a person with much more pronounced facial features. Like an old and skinny person, or someone with big cheek bones and deep nasolabial folds in a really hard light, or . . .something. (I don't know). Then apply the facial features you've seen and studied to your anime characters, but softer. I've seen some character artists start by going way over the top with anatomy details, then smoothing things out to look softer and more subtle.
One other thing, eyes are one of the first things people look at when seeing a character, and the eyes of your characters often look a little off. Mostly because of iris position and proportion, in relation to the eyelids. The FFXV guy looks a lot better, but some of your older characters look surprised, cross-eyed, or both. When the eyes and eyelids are at a neutral position, the lower edge of the iris rests on the bottom eyelid, and the top eyelid rests about halfway between the edge of the iris and the edge of the pupil. There are a lot of other little proportional details like that which are important to doing realistic eyes. You have the scale and position looking pretty good for your FFXV guy (what's his name, I want to say Noctus), but the position of the eyelids still need a little work to match the reference. And I know that your older characters are meant to be stylized, but keeping iris position and eyelid shape more realistic can look really good with the kind of semi-realistic style you were going for. Like these:


The same goes for your material and texture work. Just because you are doing stylized characters doesn't mean you can't utilize the techniques used for realistic characters. In fact they could help you a lot. Things like color zones, roughness zones, material definition, micro-surface break up, sub surface scattering, ambient occlusion, edge wear, and more can be used for stylized characters if used in a stylistic way. 

I may not know exactly what "wall" you are stuck at, but I hope some of what I said can help you. I know how frustrating it can be to feel stuck or lost, and I hope you can grow to be the kind of character artists you want to be. But I'm not a pro character artist, and I've only studied anatomy a little, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

Oh and one more thing. I found this Youtube channel the other day that looks pretty good called "Flipped Normals". They seem to know a lot about facial anatomy, (or at least more than I do). Of the vidoes I've watched, I like this video the most so far, it's from their playlist "Improve Your Sculpting!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIKxffo7YsU&list=PLBX-X8mPyxIrlgpiwEPmurv_9nv9seLik&index=7