Back to 2D - learning the basics first [advice is welcome!]

THE 5

So I got vacation now and finally want to push my art skills. I have not done much 2D art yet since I were very obsessed by 3D art and now I feel like I can't (or don't want) improve my 3D because I just lack the basics of 2D.
I stopped my attempts at doing any 3D art till I am finally happy with my 2D skills.

There are several other threads of people learning and showing their progress like this one by frell.
Some take the critique PC offers and use it at their best, some don't. I hope your are not tired of these threads already and consider giving me some tips 'n' tricks too.

Also check my buddys sketchbook, he goes the same route as me atm and is glad for any critique too
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86867

I am not quite sure were to start my journey yet, so I broke it up into three parts I want to address.
General: Especially humans and anatomy but also how to draw anything in general.
Perspective: Blends with the basics of object drawing, especially for scenes and landscapes.
Shading: Probably the area where I am least experienced, barely shaded my pen and paper stuff.

I really lurk polycount a lot and what I have heard so far is that it is somewhat the "best" to do int in this order:

General:
1.) stickmen/skeletons/blockout:
Build people (and Objects too) from primitives that are easy to draw and imagine in 3D space. Draw them in different poses and perspectives while keeping an eye on proportions. It is better not to start with "dragons and spacemarines", but with things that really exist and your got lots of reference for. Reference is key! (<-- This is something I tend to completely ignore!)
2.) shilouette:
Add some mass to the skeletons, don't go into details like muscles, faces etc. yet.
3.) anatomy: (current goal)
Muscualture, face and so on are studied and developed in this phase. It's probably the hardest one to master. Life drawing curses or drawing photos of real people is recomendet here. At this point also clothing and the physics of cloth unusaly mix in.
4.) in-depth anatomy:
Get some anatomy books and study them.
5.) perfection:
Tackle your weak-spots, get out of your comfort zone and practice the stuff you suck in to master them.

Perspective:
1.) vanishing points:
Drawing simple shapes in the 3D space, rotate and move them arround. Add more vanishing points later on. 4 is max and leads to "fisheye" perspective, right?
2.) ???:
???
3.) master perspective:
???

Shading
1.) draw photos:
Trace the shilouette of objects then put the ref image next to the canvas and build the rough shading, add details as you go. Usualy black and white for the beginning.
2.) study textures and materials:
Analyse the materials you draw and memorize how the react in the light and dark (specular, gloss, etc.)
3.) colour theory:
warm/cold, bright/dark, I'm still far away from this.

This is jsut what I heard and read here on Polycount and elsewhere. Maybe I sould even start before any drawing and practice straight lines and curves. Thats why I post here, for you to give me some advices on how to tackle 2D art. To give you an overview of what I can /can't do here some pictures.
older works:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/old_armour1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/old_character1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/old_infiltrator1.jpg
newer works:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/new_character1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/new_golem1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/new_sniper1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/new_character2.jpg
latest work:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/new_character3.jpg
recent "studies":
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/Study-Landscape1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/Study-Landscape2.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17364025/Images/PC-learning-2D/Study-character1.jpg
(Note that I massively failed at NOT doing dragons and spacemarines.)

Next year I might start studying Design at my university. They request applicants to send them 30-40 of their works. Thats not a problem for me since I got lots of "okay" 3D art and some decent 2D stuff.
The 3D art is mainly weapons, which might not be what they want to see and the 2D won't impress anyone, so I realy want to use this vacation to build a solid foundation for my study and to produce some better works for the application.

I am willingly to start over and learn drawing from zero (I dont feel like I mastered anything yet anyways).

Please don't suggest me to buy even more books, I already bought serveral ones about anatomy and figurative drawing back the days and also got the Books of Andrew Loomis. I fell like they are to advanced at this point, besides of Loomis stuff.


EDIT:
I think thats the last realy solid thing I did:

and this maybe

MainManiac

that shaded statue is awesome, if only I could draw with my tablet =\

THE 5

I think this will mutate to some kind of Sketchbook. I still hope for critique and advice though.

Dayly Sketches
18.7.2011 1)
Posemaniacs, not sure if thats the right approach, maybe I should go more basic.

laperen

its really nice to see someone willing to learn from the root

yes 2d is actually an ESSENTIAL skill before doing any 3D at all

3d may look nice and flashy but without much if any 2d experience, even the best 3d tools will be useless, almost like driving without a license, its pretty much just asking for trouble

well, through my drawing experience, 2 things helped me most, perspective and proportion. im more of a modeler so my focus is more in these 2 parts

perspective helps you with visualising objects from different angles

proportion helps with telling the actual size of one part relative to another, the lenght of the body to the lenght of the thigh for example

combining the 2, you should get your proportions right from every angle of perspective

applying these in 3d, you should make sure you get the proportions of your model right from every angle, one way to do this for characters is to check the silhouette

we can take your latest daily sketch:

drawing 1170, shoulders arent wide enough, the legs are straighter than you think, showing you need more practice to grasp perspective

drawing 1427, the outstretched arm is straighter than you think, and the angle of the body is wrong, same with 1170, more practice to grasp perspective

drawing 7395, the body is curved to your right and the indent on the waist should be on the opposite side, and the leg on your left is too short

drawing 996, the best attempt so far, but the leg on your left is straighter than you think

when doing live drawing or figure drawing, it is important to let go of your preconceptions and focus completely only on whatever is infront of you. do your best to keep 1 figure drawing under 5-10 mins for best results. as the time decreases, you will see a definite drop in detail, this is fine, the purpose of figure drawing is to get used to proportions in the blink of an eye

your ideal pen/pencil strokes should be contnuous and long, drawing without your wrist, and eventually your elbow, locked to the table or whatever surface you draw on, this is to focus on control, this is achieved through any drawing practice you do as long as you do not lock your wrist, and eventually your elbow, to the drawing surface

shading in 2d is more on lighting so i wont go into that, im not that good at it, but your statue is pretty damn good, i only hope you learn from it how light falls on an object rather than blatant copying

while doing all this practice you might want to research on bone and muscle and how they move, gravity and balance, to have more natural poses and be able to make your own imagined poses more natural

nothing more to say than all this is accomplished through a sheer amount of practice, so practice away, heck i took 3 yrs to reach my current level so this is no easy feat

THE 5

Thanks a lor for the input laperen, thats what I love about PC
What you said about 3D art is just what happened to me. All the fancy materials shaders and post-processinf effects look so delicious at first, but in the end they did not make my "crappy" art look better, thats why I am heading back to the basics.

I noticed some of the errors you mentiond too, the areas did not "feel right" to me. I think I developed that basic sense for shilouetten and such already back the days but I still lack the ability to actually apply it.

laperen wrote: »

perspective helps you with visualising objects from different angles

proportion helps with telling the actual size of one part relative to another, the lenght of the body to the lenght of the thigh for example

combining the 2, you should get your proportions right from every angle of perspective

I definately lack these. I can nail down Proportions when I take a lot of time and review my drawing over and over aggain.
Like the Lineart in the OP, I think thats quie ok but it took me several hours!
I can't get the proportions right form the beginning and totally screw up perspective usually. The only way to fix this is practice as you said

laperen wrote: »

the purpose of figure drawing is to get used to proportions in the blink of an eye

so I definately will "just practice" the next weeks.
My goal is NOT to produce any fancy, fullblown art but get a sense, or moreover a understanding of proportions and perspective.

For my drawing technique, I am a total wrist-drawer, thats why I realy had problems with my large 36cm Tablet when I first used it. I still struggle with it and for that reason I want to go back to pen/paper for my learning process.
I read that drawing from the ellbow is something a artist got to master to make life easier, yet I am somehow sceptic that I can learn this. I don't know if I should raise my ellbow over the table and try to keep my wrist static while drawing. No idea how to teach this to myself and how it shall look like when I try it.

My goal is neither shading nor real anatomy at the moment. I got several anatomy books and a decent understanding of musculature already. Once I nailed the basics you mentioned above, good anatomy should just be a matter of time I think.

Recently I did a lot of painting in Photoshop, mainly focusing on the shading since my lineart sucked anyways. Also the study of the statue gave me some insight, sure not as much as I wanted though, it was quite a bit of plain copying involved. When thinking of shading at my current niveau, I think of simply drawing the hard shadows on the surface since this adds to the perspective and volume of bodies a lot. I won't go into real shading at this point.

laperen wrote: »

nothing more to say than all this is accomplished through a sheer amount of practice, so practice away, heck i took 3 yrs so this is no easy feat

Yes, I am totally up for practice. I find that my art lacks this seriously and it's no fun at all to produce "art" that you don't like yourself. This fact realy motivates me to let the 3D and fancy stuff rest since I won't produce anything good anyways.
The more advice you guys can give me the better, I will try to spent as much time as possible on the learning proces and post results dayly.

Just one more question about your suggestion, shall I try to draw the four images above aggain and see if I can do better, or always try other Poses? Drawing the same aggain shure has the advantage that I see what improved and what still looks wrong but maybe this jsut leads to mastering "this single perspective", I don't know.

Aggain, thanks for the input laperen!

Posemaniacs
(The nuber is the number of the Posemaniac Model, not the number of my drawings )

Saman

The common problem I see in these images is the pose and perspective(especially in the figure drawings). What you could do is start by drawing the shapes as primitive objects such as spheres, boxes and cylinders. You could then reshape these in order to get the right forms and such. See these images;
http://longposefiguresp08.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

Figure drawings can give one a sense of proportions and anatomy. It also helps with posture.

laperen

yeh i know the number is of the pose maniacs model, i didnt really draw 1000+ drawings, just enough to grasp the concept

and figure drawing's time limit to detail ratio if you dont know yet

20 mins and above: full detail linework with full shading
15 mins: full details linework with shading as much as you can do
10 mins: full detail linework with minimal shading
5 mins:as much detail linework as you can do
2 mins: basic linework, no details, a linework silhouette
under 1 min: action line and as much of the silhouette linework as you can get

well, thats the standard to aim for anyway, you may think its counter intuitive, but draw some of the 2 min and below figure drawings to loosen up first, then move on to the 5 through to 20 mins ones, its sort of like how track and field dash 3 laps(or longer) for warmup before actual practice

regarding you handstroke, its all about control, i too dont know how to explain it to you, right now i assume you pivot at the wrist, its neigh impossible to get straight lines with that, your progression should be:

wrist pivot
elbow pivot
shoulder pivot

you should be able to get a long strokes with the elbow pivot on a small enough paper, but if you ever intend to draw properly on A3 or A2 size paperyou should definitely aim for the shoulder pivot

regarding you question on the 4 poses this is really up to you, i personally hate re-looking at old stuff, but you can always redo for acomparison like a "before after" picture and frame it as a momento of you progress

THE 5

Goraaz:
Yeh the Blockout should bring me a step further, I will studie this some more.

laperen:
I won't aim for shadign now and try to keep ever sketch under 2 minutes. I also treid to draw long, fluent strokes from the ellbow but constantly fall back in this frizzy wrist scribbling. I need to watch myself some morewhile drawing.

According to the chat the essence seems to be this:
"Just darw as much as possible, nomatter what! DO IT!"
I'll stick to that, so here more stuff

laperen

ah keep in mind those timing to detail ratios are for practice, you can do mellow drawings on your own time

then again you are doing this for practice

well just take note of your mistakes and you should be fine

hope to see improvements soon

Two Listen

I think it's a mistake to try and plan your 2D improvement with numbers, time limits, and the type of schedule you could work up on Google Calendar.

I've seen a lot of people approach things in that manner in sketchbooks and the like. I can't think of one off hand who's gone on to improve very drastically.

The essence is not draw as much as possible. It's to draw as intelligently as possible. It doesn't matter how you hold your pencil, you can hold it with your teeth if you like - so long as the mark you make is pretty much the mark you wanted to make, mission accomplished. The rest is just being able to tell what looks right and what doesn't. And focusing on whether or not it's been 10 minutes so you can get on to the shading part of your sketch will not help you with that.

THE 5

I think I will study this pose some more because I realy like it, getting perspective into it and fixing the proportions.

right leg is too short
left pec and shoulder are wierd
right hand is to large, especialy that finger

Also I guess this can be moved to the Digital Skechbooks.

pior

To get character perspective right : Draw the vertical center line going throught the figure > draw the 2x2 grid the character stands on > draw the 2x2 grid sitting right on top of the skull of the character > draw perspective line between the two (5 or so) and always check alignements according to these lines.


Good luck!

THE 5

I imagine this beeing realy hard when the character is not standing perfectly straigt. When he is bent and in some twisted pose you can't jsut work with lines can you? I guess its more of a "visual guidance" once you got the basics and move to more complex poses.
Just wonder why you said 5 Lines between the planes? I just put them wherever they are of use. Like ellbows and knees on same niveau. And if there was a specific number, wouldnt it be 8, for the head/body realation?
Not trying to be nitpicky, maybe 5 is some "magic number" when it comes to proportions, like 8, I just want to make sure.

Also what I wonder is this:

Is there some rule for the Intersection angle of the two vanishing point lines to get a "naturla" perspective? My character looks so huge and the horizon is not at his feet (which would usualy make the viewer look up to him, but... you guys know that). Checking Loomis book as I write this.



EDIT
Tried a picture with one vanishing point

Mithdia

From what I know the character is looking huge now because the horizon is at his waist which means you're still looking up to him. Try putting the horizon somewhere between his chest and eyes ( I am not good at drawing so don't take my word as a fact >.< )

THE 5

Once aggain traced the shape before shading. I realy enjoy this and think I leared some new bits while painting this. Also treid to get some indirect illumination here and there (like at the right biceps and torso).

I think these "studies" give me a good understanding for the form of the bodyparts, which should help to placed them better once it comes to perspective drawing.

innervision961

Very inspiring thread, this one and the one mentioned earlier are great resources, thank you guys!

pior

I just meant 5 as a rough indication, use as many as you want!
As for the vanishing points, you dont have to draw them on the page - just eyeball the perspective lines thanks to the bottom and top "grids".
Regarding the perceived scale of the character : it simply comes from the angle between these two ref grids. The more parallel they are on the 2d page, the more "orthographic" it will look. Meaning, it will look less like a giant building and more like a human scale asset.

As for the horizon line : Put it at the character eye level if you need to insert it in a "FPS" view surrounding ; if not, put it closer to the waist, it will naturally make the character more epic (exactly like on the sculpture you posted : the viewer/photographer eye was at the waist level)

Also, you got tricked by that metal guitar hero picture : the feet placement is off, because you didn't relate it to the second vanishing point - the one at the intersection of the two lines coming from the feet and meeting far away backstage

About that sculpture study : almost close your eyes and you'll see that your shading is overworked. You have some sort of 3 values setup (light, shade, and overly stated highlights), but the original is almost completely 2-toned : Light, shade, and veeeeery faint highlights. The original looks as if lit by a broad, generous light ; yours looks like someone pointed a flashlight at the pecs

I know that for some weird reason, many online tuts mention light + dark + highlights, but this is very misleading. Just focus on the quality of the edge where light and shadow meet. As an exercise, just select two values in Photoshop (a medium grey for the Light parts, and a dark grey for the Shade parts) and force yourself to render a whole study with color picking only these to and whatever is inbetween. You will see tremendous improvements in your shading quality.

THE 5

pior wrote: »

As for the horizon line : Put it at the character eye level if you need to insert it in a "FPS" view surrounding ; if not, put it closer to the waist, it will naturally make the character more epic (exactly like on the sculpture you posted : the viewer/photographer eye was at the waist level)

I knew that the horizon line means the heightlevel of the viewer.
But hell! I never came to the conclusion that puting it at the characters eyes means viewer and character "face" eachother. I realy did not see the obvious here

pior wrote: »

Also, you got tricked by that metal guitar hero picture : the feet placement is off, because you didn't relate it to the second vanishing point - the one at the intersection of the two lines coming from the feet and meeting far away backstage

So for characters it's actualy "always" two or more vanishing points. Other than looking down a street there is probably no scenario where one would do.

pior wrote: »

About that sculpture study : almost close your eyes and you'll see that your shading is overworked. You have some sort of 3 values setup (light, shade, and overly stated highlights), but the original is almost completely 2-toned : Light, shade, and veeeeery faint highlights. The original looks as if lit by a broad, generous light ; yours looks like someone pointed a flashlight at the pecs

Yeh I spent most time on the pecs area and now it realy looks like someone points a flashlight there, hehe.
But I did these hard highlights by purpose, I wanted to make the picture "pop out" some more. In the end I usualy put rim-lights and glossy highlights in my pictures. I realy got addicted to that, hoping it makes the more realistic, or so.
Is that something "bad" in this case? It's sure not a real study then, but don't the highlights support the shape?

pior wrote: »

I know that for some weird reason, many online tuts mention light + dark + highlights, but this is very misleading. Just focus on the quality of the edge where light and shadow meet. As an exercise, just select two values in Photoshop (a medium grey for the Light parts, and a dark grey for the Shade parts) and force yourself to render a whole study with color picking only these to and whatever is inbetween. You will see tremendous improvements in your shading quality.

Cool! I've seen such pictures before and they looked realy nice, kinda "smooth". Will definately try this next, thanks Pior

fightpunch

Always cool to see someone willing to learn

My advice would be to just draw as much as possible at this point, forget about perspective and shading until you feel more comfortable just drawing freely. This will take time but if you keep it up you will become much more confident with your line making and before you know it you will have improved enough so that drawing in perspective is much less daunting. Also relax and have fun while you do it, draw whatever you want as this will keep the whole thing entertaining and make it feel less like work . Always try to keep an eye on anatomy etc when sketching characters/creatures etc though.

innervision961

A question Pior, how do you render using those two values, how do you mix and blend and color pick. Just use a low opacity/flow on your brush and just alt click in the middle some where?

THE 5

Is there actualy a way to zoom with a Bamboo without occupying 2 buttons? Like holding down one button and then zoom with the pen?

Moar! Thanks for motivating me

THE 5

Speaker, shaded the way pior and Sayanora sugested

FrantiC 5

wow, im really impressed my friend
you definitely have to show me the process of shading that way!

great improvement, go on with your studies

THE 5

Daily hand with in-depth shading. The shading was mostly done without ref, my hand wasn't lit that way


and this

Gorman

Hey, it has been a long time since I have seen you around!

Nice to see your recent works, but it feels like you are being held back (I guess that is why you went back to basics!).

Your hand study above is great, an understanding of the way lighting and materials interact is very useful


I am quite inspired to go back to basics too, looks fun and productive!

THE 5

Nothing realy related to my studies, just something for fun.

laperen

wow great progress!

proving once again the main ingredient to learning is interest

Saman

I see that you still have difficulties getting the perspective right. You should be drawing the right perspective for all the parts of a character; the arm, head, legs, feet etc and not just some of them(look at the shoe of your heavy metal guy). Look at some more references and try getting the pose entirely right.
Do some really quick sketches, get all the parts right before getting into detailing. Start with stick-figure shapes(to get the proportions and pose right), then shape up the parts to get the right silloutte size(with cylinders and oval spheres etc) and once it looks good start detailing. Don't start detailing too soon, you have to focus on the posture and proportions before. This is really important.

Edit: I found a tutorial that shows what I mean; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPZJ-uCoZLQ

THE 5

Far awayfrom looking good, but I'll defiantely use blockouts the next days.
Maybe i should just doo these and forget about the detailing for now.


pretty flat... hmm...

1vp simple stuff

analysis + execution

THE 5

I'll focus on these blockouts for now

THE 5

Got distracted by EDF:IA and University stuff but I am still on it!