Seeking artistic advice

[Merc]

Those aren't bad, but I would point out that your thumbs are generally drawn way too long. They should be 1/2 to maybe 2/3 the size they are now. Some of the thumbs are better in the pen drawing, though a lot of those poses feel a little more unnatural as well.

Also, I think anybody going into these threads expects some large pictures, that is the whole point of an art forum. Go ahead and keep 'em big! =p

[sarsaparilla]

@Arakawa:

Overall, the body sketches are better than the hand sketches, but I'll get back to the body later. Right now the most essential thing is that your sketches reveal a specific fundamental weakness: your sense of whole is not on par with other basic skills. This can be seen most clearly from thumbs that are out of proportion, and in body sketches from entire hands that are out of proportion. What happens is that when you concentrate on a particular detail that is conceptually separate from the rest of the object (thumb for hand, hand for body), you see only that specific detail as such, not as a part of the whole.

This is one of the issues that is often referred to as right/left brain hemisphere thinking, and the best known book about the differences and how to take advantage of them is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Recommended, of course.

There are exercises for learning this skill, both in the mentioned book and described on various drawing related pages around the net. Very roughly, you must learn to 'unfocus' your brain a bit while drawing so that you never lose sight of the whole. You could try croquis (speed sketching), drawing from upside-down reference pictures, or just unfocusing your eyes to keep the reference image and the drawing blurry until you can perceive the whole image simultaneously.

[Arakawa]

Contrary to appearances, I am in fact slaving away at head construction. (That, and I am also fiddling around with minor facial details for amusement's sake. I have managed to convince myself that Japanese people in anime do, in fact, look Japanese.)

Bit sensitive to post anything at the moment, but just a quick question for sarsaparilla based on the specific construction example she gave:

I notice to place the nose you seem to have used a pair of faint construction lines extending from the ears (similar to, but apparently independent of, the jaw line). I can see that these help locate where the nose should be, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the logic behind them is. (i.e. once the lines are placed, drawing the nose is easy. I can't figure out what logic to use to place the lines, though.) I've wound up giving up and just drawing an alternative line following the front teeth (which are fixed in place to the skull and thus easy to picture!) and then placing the nose however I can manage in between the teeth and browline. If I'm not paying attention, this generally results in skulls that are vertically elongated compared to the original (for whatever reason, possibly just the poor gestalt perception you already noted).

So I'm wondering if you could comment on the method you used to place the nose in your drawing.

[Arakawa]

Note: will swallow pride and upload a couple of pages that are relevant to the above.

Head construction: good example of my elongated skull problem with the non-hideous one at the bottom of the page.

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This is just some random stuff, but regarding what I said regarding people in anime looking Japanese -- two eyes on the far right are: above, marked δ is my own; below, marked ε is a more typical (Asian-looking) Ghibli eye of the same size. The penny basically dropped for me after drawing that. (Watch for the next installment of 'Arakawa learns something everyone else knows already...' any day now.)

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[sarsaparilla]

I notice to place the nose you seem to have used a pair of faint construction lines extending from the ears (similar to, but apparently independent of, the jaw line). I can see that these help locate where the nose should be, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the logic behind them is. (i.e. once the lines are placed, drawing the nose is easy. I can't figure out what logic to use to place the lines, though.)

It looks like you are referring to an auxiliary feature that doesn't have anything to do with the nose. Actually, it's the lower part of a circle that I drew first to fix the scale of the head. The upper half of the circle became the cranium; the lower half the is superficial part, and something that is not needed for anything beyond a sense of scale.

Although it's not drawn in my example, the easiest way to determine the position of the nose is to imagine a triangle with the centers of the eyes and the tip of the nose as vertices. Look at the model and observe whether the triangle is equilateral, or if not, what are the relative lengths of the eye-to-eye line and the eye-to-nose lines. If necessary, after fixing the eyes (or just orbs as in my example), draw that triangle (in proper perspective if necessary) to find the location of the tip of the nose.

If I'm not paying attention, this generally results in skulls that are vertically elongated compared to the original

Based on the examples that you provided, I don't find the overall shape of the faces particularly elongated (though the originals may have been rounder). The major issue is that in some sketches the cheeks are drawn way too low, which does indeed give an impression of an elongated face. It might be helpful to have a look at a human skull and study the general shape and location of cheekbones that are the main subsurface feature that determines the cheek profile.

Overall, these sketches hold together much better than the previous ones; there is hardly any scale discrepancy.

Considering eyes, the distinctive feature of the 'asian eye' is the epicanthic fold, and it's very illuminating to study actual human anatomy to understand the structural difference that it represents. However, the most striking differences between the caucasoid and mongoloid face reside in the side profile which is also worth studying from actual images of people of different ethnic origins.

[Muphrid]

It's something about the slope or shape of the jaw, is it not?  That's what I notice with my mother's side of the family; the teeth seem bigger, but I know they can't be bigger, so I can only imagine the space they have to occupy is less or emphasizes them in some way.

[Arakawa]

It looks like you are referring to an auxiliary feature that doesn't have anything to do with the nose. Actually, it's the lower part of a circle that I drew first to fix the scale of the head. The upper half of the circle became the cranium; the lower half the is superficial part, and something that is not needed for anything beyond a sense of scale.

Ah. It seems that by sheer coincidence, in that particular drawing it took two tries to get the bottom half of the circle and the tip of the nose fell in between the two lines... which made me confused, since I thought this meant the lines and nose were related somehow. My bad. No wonder I had no clue what structure I could correlate them to.

In general, starting with a circle gives me a solid sense of the eyes and upper face, and leads me to get confused as to the width of the point where the jaw attaches and then the subsequent angle at which it descends towards the chin -- I seem to make it very narrow, to the extent of actually carving into the sides of the circle. (Based on your reaction to the drawings this seems to be a valid thing to do by choice if designing a character, but when copying from a reference it's obviously an error.) I'll see if explicitly indicating the structure of the cheekbones when constructing the face will help me control this better.

Considering eyes, the distinctive feature of the 'asian eye' is the epicanthic fold, and it's very illuminating to study actual human anatomy to understand the structural difference that it represents. However, the most striking differences between the caucasoid and mongoloid face reside in the side profile which is also worth studying from actual images of people of different ethnic origins.

I've got about as far as observing that the presence of an epicanthic fold has to do with the relative prominence of the brow and eyeball. There's a certain amount of skin around the eye socket; if the brow is prominent, the skin is stretched to wrap around the eyeball and expose the tear duct; if the brow is fairly flat  then the skin folds over the corner of the eye instead. Since the Asians don't have a monopoly on flat brows, epicanthic folds can be encountered in all sorts of populations. (Particularly when you look at children.) -- and beyond just the broad caucasian/mongoloid eye types, there's a wide range of gradations in how tightly the skin wraps around the eye.

[Arakawa]

Dammit! Some of the uploads are disappearing off tinypic already!

Okay... here's a more mundane question for the next time I get around to asking feedback: what kind of image hosting can people recommend for this sort of material?

[Anastasia]

Imgur. They're solid as far as I've used them. http://imgur.com/

[Arakawa]

Alright! Hopefully they'll stay solid when I start using the site.

Thanks for the recommendation.

[Arakawa]

Stick figures that are supposed to exist in space more-or-less convincingly.

Probably my best batch

Spoiler: ShowHide

Misc - drawn from imagination

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Misc - sketched haphazardly during bus commute

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My question to those who can give advice (if anyone is willing) is whether it's worthwhile trying to get the stick figures looking better than they are right now, or to quit dawdling with this exercise and move on to making them look a bit more solid than they are now. (i.e. cylindrical shapes for the limbs instead of sticks, a more well-defined torso, etc.)

[Kt3]

I claim no particular artistic experience.  The following is my uneducated opinion.

My opinion would be to keep experimenting with the stick figures, as it feels to me that the proportions could be polished up.  If you continue fleshing them out, they're just going to look quite a bit awkward and require a massive amount of redrawing to get proportions just right.

But yeah, fix proportions, and get experiment with different ones, like "this is a teenaged girl because of hip width and shoulder width" and "this is an older man with a hunched back" and "this is a young boy in the middle of puberty with all the knobbly knees and slightly longer arms and legs, and not very comfortable in his own skin".