Starting Character Art
Over the past year or so I've been looking at both environment and character art, trying a bit of both here and there. However I'm think now's a good time to start focusing on one and i'm choosing character art.
With regards with how i'm going to do it here's what I've planned out
1) Learn to Draw, learn to draw in general but focus on drawing people
2) Learn Human Anatomy, practice drawing it and practice sculpting it (in Zbrush)
3) Study clothing, learn how to draw/sculpt different armors and clothes.
4) When i'm comfortable with the above stuff, move on to creating full, textured, character models
5) After i'm comfortable with step 4 move on to things like animals and monsters
Any comments on what I've got planned out? Also if anyone has any links to helpful articles, tutorials, and other forums threads, feel free to post them.
-Thanks in advanced
With regards with how i'm going to do it here's what I've planned out
1) Learn to Draw, learn to draw in general but focus on drawing people
2) Learn Human Anatomy, practice drawing it and practice sculpting it (in Zbrush)
3) Study clothing, learn how to draw/sculpt different armors and clothes.
4) When i'm comfortable with the above stuff, move on to creating full, textured, character models
5) After i'm comfortable with step 4 move on to things like animals and monsters
Any comments on what I've got planned out? Also if anyone has any links to helpful articles, tutorials, and other forums threads, feel free to post them.
-Thanks in advanced
Replies
This will probably answer most of your questions
All it saying is don't do character art because it is hard. Focus on environment or prop art because it easier and less competition. Then, towards the end of the thread people are just complaining they couldn't make it as a character artist and gave up.
i work in a studio where every 3D artist builds characters, and they are all pretty good, but noone is doing it as his dayjob.
theres probably thouthands of guys like that out there, plus all the people that do characters daily as their main job.
i'd say environment art is the safer and smarter choice.
but if characters is realy what you want to do then go ahead. sounds to me like you arn't 100% shure though.
If you are ready to put time and effort, anyone can really make it.
The reality is that most people get discourage by how high the expectactions are, even for an entry position and how much time they would need to spend to reach that level.
Competition is also very hard but if that doesn't scare you, hop you go!
Once you actually start drawing, this may become apparent to you, but one does not "learn to draw characters" per se.
You learn the fundamentals (Form, Line, Perspective, etc, Anatomy if you stretch definitions), and those will allow you to draw anything-- you would choose to apply the fundamentals to drawing characters. But you'd still have clothes and props and such to draw, so don't get too hung up on how to draw humans specifically. It's a really round-about way to look at it-- and leaves out design principals and animals and a million other things. Just from someone who jumped right into only ever drawing characters and has a lot of bad habits thanks to it.
(Some links: Ctrl+Paint and PSG Art Tut. Also, this is a cool reference board.)
Additionally, these are not things you can really put in an objectively correct strict order.
Personally, I learn more following through the entire pipeline of a character from design>final model. I already had a decent understanding of fundamentals, I suppose, but the point is that it's not necessarily something where you can follow through and tick off points as you go through your plan. A few of these steps you have here could well take you years (learning to draw) so if you do them without touching the other steps your progress could well be incredibly slow.
Just my 2cents and something to think about. You may have already thought about them, just figured it might be worth saying something!
I can definitely relate to that. you would think that it would be easy with lots of practice to get where you want, but it's not always the case.
maybe you need a bit of luck also?
[ame]
To quote the guy: "There is basically no correlation between how much work you put into something, and how successful it is."
I really dont think there are many parallels to be drawn between someone who practices character art for thousands of hours trying to break in, and a guy who releases 72 twitter bots, and can't figure out why some of his twitter bots are successfully 'viral', and others aren't.
Personally, I will echo Marie's sentiment - passion, dedication, practice, time, and effort, and the chances of getting in are very good.
Wut?
you could also turn it around and say that all the luck in the world wont make you a character artist if you are shit.
thats still kinda what the dude is saying though.
Perhaps being in a position where someone has the luxury to practice what they love is lucky. We could have been born/raised in many areas where that is not a possibility.
I like the idea that states that the more skilled you are the less luck you need.
Learn how to draw gestures. Knowing the rhythms of the body is invaluable. Practicing over and over how to draw a nose will only teach you how to draw a nose, not how to design a character. Gestures lead to thumbnails, thumbnails lead to ideas. If you spend all your time learning proper technique for drawing a character you might as well become a concept artist. You just need quick and dirty thumbnails to get an idea out of your head. Now days you can just do quick and dirty sculpts to get ideas out and bypass 2D altogether.
Practice understanding the mechanics of anatomy. There is a lot to it and it's a lot harder to understand this than learning how to sculpt. Drawing or sculpting it won't make any sense until you actually understand what you're drawing or sculpting. If you need to know a particular shape, use reference, but understanding what each muscle is doing during a pose is #1. Otherwise, you're going to be sculpting a muscle flexed when it should be relaxed and so on. Most anatomical education geared towards artists talk about shape and form, but you need to understand function. You're designing machines, they're organic machines, but machines nonetheless, and machines have parts that have specific functions.
So don't just sculpt a leg. Sculpt a leg in action. Figure out which muscles are flexed when raising your heel off the ground and so on. You might think it's just your gastrocnemius (calf muscle) but there is a lot more going on.
The rest of this seems to be a good order, but always find a cheat to save time, like Marvelous Designer for clothing. You can always use a cheat to get accurate outcomes and then mimic those outcomes manually to better understand them.
+1, well put.
(I'll be keeping an eye out for your art thread... :poly124:)
You should pick at least two artists of your choice to inspire and motivate you in to achieving your stated tasks.
For me its Scott Robertson and Joe Mad.