Just finished this commission, finally. Took me a bazillion years.



Face detail (I know, I did better on the girl, because guys are hard for me to draw)



And this is my fav band evuuuur. Did this for a tshirt design competition. Finalist haven't been picked yet, so we'll see.



Comment, my lovely people.

*jawdrop*

Artist are very much in possession of a wonder and beautiful skill. They are pretty epic Melonie.
I have a girlfriend now and just this week she drew a rose for her mother using a marker. It was freaking gorgeous, the shading details were way beyond anything I could ever do. I think you and her would be good illustrators for graphic novels.

Beautiful Mel absolutely beautiful

The girl looks like she has no legs.

The wrinkles on her dress look very well done though, and once again you make amazing eyes.

You pwned it sweetheart! Best guns EVAR! If that 30 seconds to mars drawing doesnt win, the competition is a fraud.

quote:

The girl looks like she has no legs.

But other than that, these are awesome. What did you use to draw these, pencils and paper or computer?

they are both great but my fav. is the mars one too!!!! you are very talented!!!!

quote:

Originally posted by LaurenIsSoMosh:
The girl looks like she has no legs.

She's standing on her knees you tard, and her legs are behind her. I thought it looked right anyways, but maybe not.

@Kenny. I did these drawings with a Wacom tablet and Photoshop CS3.

@pinkcar. Thanks so much!

Thanks to everyone, I you all (especially John, though)!

Cool, You are truely Talented. I love looking at your drawings.

Mel, if she is on her knees, she has awfully long legs and her thighs are like 3 feet long, especially the way she is sitting. Maybe it's the way I precieve the perspective of her pose. Still, a pretty good drawing. Better than what I can do.

Yeah, anime characters tend to have loooooooong legs, so I stuck with that. I think I should have made them a little shorter though, but it's what my client wanted anyway.

Ah, I figured you used a tablet. I've never seen a scanner that works THAT well.

quote:

Originally posted by JohnsHomegirl:
She's standing on her knees you tard, and her legs are behind her.

I know, I know, but it still looks like she has none.

WOW! How on earth do you manage that! I have the same graphics tablet as you(as far as I know) and Adobe CS2 and I am absolutely unable to produce anything like that.*shakes head in amazement* Good job!!!

Wacom Intuos 3?

Anywyas, takes practice my good friend, and lots of it. TBH, I feel like a noob, because I'm so used to browsing deviantart everyday, where there are so many masters of the trade, I have sooooo long to go before I'll be satisfied with my work, and heck, I may not ever be satisfied completely with what I can do.

Seriously though, I find the best way to learn is to sit back and look at other people's methods, try them out for yourself, and make your own style from it, pretty much branching from different styles. I've drawn all my life, and while the saying "practice makes perfect" is very true, I find that if I do just that, practice, without researching other artworks, I improve muuuuch slower.

You'd be amazed if you saw the difference between my drawings last year and what I do now. It's crazy. But like I said, I'm on deviantart every single day, and I'm always looking at other art and tutorials, and apparently I subconsciously take note from each of the pieces I'm inspired by, because I've developed my own style that is a combination of many different styles.

Anyway, I'd also recommend drawing your roughdraft on paper before fine tuning it. You just can't match the feel of a pencil and paper, even with a tablet, and while I can do much better with fine tuning and coloring with a tablet, the initial roughdraft phase is much easier for me to do by hand. Mind you, some people are amazing sketch artists and don't really see the roughdraft phase as that difficult, but I'll be brutally honest, it's debatably the most difficult process for me. And even though I did this Umair and Liren drawing all on the computer, without a traditional roughdraft, I still prefer to do a sketched roughdraft first.

Here's a good example of what I am currently working on (which is heavily WIP, and needs lots of tweaking and finishing up).

I started off on paper, and it looks pretty crummy, but the beauty of roughdrafts are that they are just that: rough. Works for me.



Sketching a face with little room to work with is so difficult, which is why it doens't look right in this sketch. There's also some more noticable flaws, such as her left calf being longer than her right. All things which I can fix on the computer, so it's important not to drain yourself with details during the sketch phase. It's nice to add them, but if you over exert yourself with them, you'll feel like you wasted your time once you don't even use those details when the digital work comes ino play.

So anyway, after scanning the drawing, I'll get photoshop booted up, and the key thing to remember here is that you need to work at a very, very high resolution for the best quality results. For this drawing, I used 6000 by 4000 pixels with 400 DPI. 350 DPI works fine too though, but I always use 400. I'm not sure if you were already aware of that, but working with a lower resolution and lower DPI will hinder your drawing dramatically, the difference in quality and smoothness is downright amazing.

Moving on, after I get my canvas size ready, I copy the sketch and stretch it to fit the proper resolution, since it scans at much smaller. I make a new layer above it, and set the sketch layer to 40% opacity. Also, I know this is personal preference but I still find it worth mentioning, I don't like for my background layer to be white. When I'm doing linework, it nearly blinds me if it's white, so I like to make the background layer fit the color scheme that the actual background will have. In this case, I used gray.

After getting that established, I start with my new layer aboth my sketch layer. This is where I trace my lines, and line color really varies, some artists don't like using pure black, but I do, so I use the blackest of black possible (with the exception of my umair and liren drawing, I made an exception). Something that I learned that really improves lineart is to not work with your brush at 100% opacity, because it will prevent your lines from having weight. I liek to set the opacity at 85%, zoom in and start tracing from there. I use a lot of small strokes with my lines. Long strokes are great, and come off cleaner, but I can't make them steady enough, so I go with short strokes.

But usually I start off with fairly clean lines, but not perfect, still a little sketchy. Sometimes I clean up the lines with the eraser, but other times I make a new layer and trace over it all over agian, only with the new sketch lines. Depends on what I feel works best at the time.

Having the higher resultion really improved my drawing from it's original sketch layer, because Iwas able to add more detail with her face and wrinkles in her clothes.

I started this yesterday and have been working all day today (on break now), so I haven't done a lot, but it's what I have so far anyways. Maybe I will have some more time tomorrow to work on it:



Right now I'm cleaning the lines up and making sure everything is proportioned how I want it to be. Notice that I said "how I want it" instead of "how it's supposed to be". Because obviously the proportions are not realistically done, her kneecaps are inhumanly narrow, and her arms are too long, but it's the look that I was going for, and I'm actually pleased with how it's coming out so far.

So as yo ucan see, it's all one huge process. It's not merely drawing something up, it's a step by step process that takes a lot of time and effort, but I love it to pieces. I can't wait until I'm finished with this one, I'm really enjoying it so far.

Like I said, the best thing to do is analyze other people's works carefully, try to figure out how they achieved their piece, and try some new stuff of your own. It's discouraging to ocmpare yourself to other people, so try not to do that so much, but more so be inspired by those who are better. I remember about a year or so ago looking at deviantart and wishing I was as good as some of those artists, and I felt so discouraged to ever attain that level, but now I look back at some of those artists, and I've actually gotten better than them.

So that's also important to remember. Some people are talented, but never learn to do better, and stay at the same level, while other people continually grow. So far I've been improving with nearly every drawing a complete, and I hope this trend continues, because I'm most certainly not content with where I'm at now.

That's cool! I guess that's my problem I am too impatient. The longest I have spent on something was about 30 hours split over 6 days and this is how it turned out.

That is a complete rebrush of a car from scratch. As you can see it kinda sucks but I am better at doing that kinda of stuff using controlled drawing and such but that was my 1st real rebrush like that.