Pixel Art Style -> Drawing Style

[Helm]

The neck is too fat and doesn't connect to the head on the left one.

I won't 'critique the critique' of Loominous, we've been through this before, I'll just stick to saying that comic art is not fine art and the idiosyncratic approach of each artist is a wonderful thing that shouldn't be sacrificed for realistic-interpretation type of clarity.

But you get all sorts of different critique here, I'm sure you'll find out what you want to do, Bernie.

[skw]

As always, I recommend Andrew Loomis' books, which used to be available for free online, but has been removed as of late. Due to their popularity, it's not hard obtaining them anyway.

http://www.fineart.sk/index.php?cat=1

[txarly]

Here is a link of a comic making tutorial, from drawing to computer colorize.
Very interesting style.

http://www.boltcity.com/workshop/copper_tutorial/

[Nikolas]

I just have to say WOW.
To all of you:
Bernie, Helm, Loominous, Txarly, Skurwy.

This must be the best thread in the critiques lounge, ever...

WOW

[Pet Terry]

This must be the best thread in the critiques lounge, ever...

Threads like this were everyday life when Pessi was around.

But this is an interesting thread, lots of helpful advice here. The first images you posted had very Bernie-ish feel to them which the latest one seems to lack. Perhaps it's just because I'm used to seeing fantasy type art from you, and then you suddenly draw normal people!

But it's neat art nevertheless.

[Mordalles]

loominous, that's great!

[Bernie]

Petteri: Don't worry, I can always do that style whenever I want. The new ones are just me trying to learn other things. With learning basic anatomy, drawing whole persons won't be sort of like a puzzle to me because I'll actually know where to put things. Shading and feathering can also be applied to my old style, but I'd do it in a more basic way than I'm doing now.

Helm: I hope so! For now I've got a lot of stuff to try out and learn. I'll post the results in a few days or weeks, depends on how well it's gonna work out. Thanks for all the help!

loominous: I actually prefer not to build the actual character's face on the polygons themselves. However, putting them over an existing face and working from there seems to work very well for me. Thanks.

Skurwy & txarly: Thanks for the links!

[loominous]

I actually prefer not to build the actual character's face on the polygons themselves. However, putting them over an existing face and working from there seems to work very well for me. Thanks.

I think that I may have been misleading when I introduced the polygon mesh like construction.

The point of the demonstration was to illustrate a way to determine how to shade a face, not how to construct the head. I'd suspect that very few people actually draw out mesh-like grids like that except for studying purposes. It's simply something you project onto the face in your mind. When it comes to shading, I just picture the object from the lightsource, and note what parts are hit, and how.

That said, drawing models like that is an excellent way of getting to know and sort of "feel" mass, that is, a way to begin to sculpt on paper, seeing and working in the z dimension whenever you draw, even without any construction models or meshes, rather than drawing lines in a 2D space.

Something I forgot to mention in my other post is that if you are to add grid like surfaces as illustrated, it would be added after you've constructed the basic shape of the head. The pic below illustrates a common approach how to do this.

A construction like that would be redundant if you are to draw a frontview, since the lack of perspective problems makes it easy enough, but once you start doing trickier angles, it's pretty much the only alternative to using references, and is how animators work, since they need to maintain the volume and shape of a character's body in whatever way it moves.

The constructions are just like perspective grids, that is, something you lay down lightly and quickly beneath, and use as guidelines.

Here's an excerpt from Loomis' Drawing Heads and Hands:



So while you can of course continue simply adding the "grid" once you've drawn the face/body, you'd be missing out on the major point of the construction approach, and would be sort of similar to drawing a building in freehand, then adding a grid onto it, which would probably result in a wonky building with a grid, instead of starting out with the perspective lines, establish the major shape, and go from there.

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Here's how you can construct some easier more cartoony characters (crappy style, but illustrative) (from Loomis' 'Fun with a Pencil')

You can see this technique in pretty much any book on animation, and the idea is the same as the top illustration.

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Btw, the same techniques are used for bodies, here's one construction model from 'Figuredrawing for all it's worth' (a great book on anatomy and constructing bodies).

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The techniques may seem cumbersome, but really aren't. Getting tricky angles right on the first try will take a while (I havn't reached that point), but for easier angles/poses, it's mostly it's a matter of spending 30 secs.

Hope you find it useful, and good luck.

Edit: Fixed links

[Bernie]

I reached a similar part in Burne Hogarth's book, his approach slightly differs but is still the same basic idea. This is definitely useful and something I'll tinker around with. It goes hand in hand with that anatomy book, too. Thanks!

I've got a lot to try out and learn now. It may take a while until I post some results, and they'll most likely go into a new thread, so... thanks and until then, CL!