The Forum's Art Museum

[moredhel]

Before i completely forget to show it here is the thing, that made me think about inspiration and creating.

I think I start learning something about watercolor.

[Tarnagh]

What a lovely tree! There are some around here that will look a bit like that soon.



Thank you, Jitter, for letting me know about PostImage! Also, Geoguesser sounds fun!

[Mirasol]

Oh, a really pretty tree, moredhel! Everything looks so lush with watercolors! The alternate version of the snake your kid colored looks very cool too! Truly interesting to see different interpretations of the same thing.

[Raaffiie]

I know that was directed at Tarnagh, but I wanted to add another vote for Geoguessr - I love it! Finland looks a lot like my part of Newfoundland, too.

Thirding this, it's so fun to play during lunch breaks! I'm always holding my breath for something Finnish or Japanese to show up so i can try and read the signs 

Also moredhel, that's really pretty! Those watercolours suit the mood of the real thing really well.

[Annuil]

Songbird, that's very interesting! I looove looking at the sketchbooks too, but I'm so bad at keeping my own interesting. I use a lot of space, so there isn't that much stuff on one page usually. I like to keep my works individual, though sometimes that's not necessary because they don't really have that much of a value.
I feel your pain about the fundamental stuff! I have spent seven years in an art school, mastering these fundamental skills and at the time they were much needed. I suffered through them and I gained a steady hand that allows me to do things I used to dream about doing, however, nowadays, I am taking another course, which was supposed to be a portfolio preparation course, but all that we do is we sit there for three hours listening about drawing vases... I thought I will never ever be facing this again! This torture of boredom! And the teacher has a heavy Russian accent that drives me nuts by the end of the class (thankfully, I do know Russian, so it's not as bad for me to understand that english).
However, I found one thing about fundamental skills... they are very important. They give the artist the freedom to do whatever they want. That's why they are called fundamentals. It's nice to practice them once in a while. 
But yeah, your experience doesn't seem fun...

moredhel, that looks very nice! I love how light and transparent your watercolor is! You did a great job with it. (Watercolor is my favorite media ).

Edit: Here is something I can share! I posted it in the Comfort Corner thread already, but here it is: my stretching comic. So, I took a break from my schoolwork to do a little bit of stretching on the floor, and then I came up with the idea of creating this: (it’s a scene from my stories that took place after a certain battle, that’s why part of the guy’s face is covered with... say, scars):
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AsSnHPIBASO_xwpQ0gXyRNpdLy8k
I also did some watercolour illustrations for my story, so here’s one:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsSnHPIBASO_x0kKv-GFDzzOH8gt
Sorry, it ended up being an art-dump post  :'D

[moredhel]

My son wants me to thank you four your comments. I want to thank too for all nice comments.

Annuil art dump posts are a fine thing. I like them.

[Songbird]

Annuil Not only I don't see the issue with dumping art on the art thread but I welcome them! You got a neat style. I admire all traditional media and line things so don't mind me sitting here going all "aaaah" over the watercolors.

which was supposed to be a portfolio preparation course, but all that we do is we sit there for three hours listening about drawing vases...

That got a chuckle out of me! I feel for you and sincerely hope there's substance to this course. :'D

Tarnagh Just saw the art installation you posted. Thanks for sharing, it's so cool! I'm not a US person thus had no idea Maine had such beautiful forests. It's part of my visual library now, bwahahaha.


I've got two requests if you guys don't mind.

Hands

I'd love to hear your methods to draw the bane of every artist, hands!

There's an excess of methods floating on the internet, it's hard to pick something that clicks. My current weird method is to start from an imprint of the hand: pads of palms, fingertips, knuckles & joints then connect. Fluid results and relatively comfy but the lower accuracy creates a mess when it comes to specific gestures. When they're tiny things seen from afar I start from silhouette instead and mostly suggest them, looks okay but looks okay.

Sequential art

I got an idea. It's too late to fight it now, it buried itself too deep into my mind. I'm going to turn the prologue of something into a short comic. D:

This would be my first one. I have zero experience with sequential art. To study it I'm just going over the comics I like trying to take note of paneling, stylistic choices and pacing, but I basically have no idea what I'm doing. Pointers for structured ways to study it would be deeply appreciated!

[Annuil]

Thank you, moredhel and Songbird!

That got a chuckle out of me! I feel for you and sincerely hope there's substance to this course. :'D

Haha, yeah, it does remind me of all the stuff I learned from my previous years of studying art, so... it's not too bad.

I've got two requests if you guys don't mind.

Hands

I'd love to hear your methods to draw the bane of every artist, hands!

There's an excess of methods floating on the internet, it's hard to pick something that clicks. My current weird method is to start from an imprint of the hand: pads of palms, fingertips, knuckles & joints then connect. Fluid results and relatively comfy but the lower accuracy creates a mess when it comes to specific gestures. When they're tiny things seen from afar I start from silhouette instead and mostly suggest them, looks okay but looks okay.

Huh, let's see... for me every drawing starts from a light line that shows me the approximate position of the object I'm drawing, then I do the inside line/"the bones". I often start from the basis of the object, like draw everything on the outside and on the inside, that is especially true for the things like vases. A person I would start from very simplified bone structure, just to make sure that ribs and hips are in place and the backbone is going in the right direction and curving in the right places.
Same for hands.
1. Basic bone structure
2. Then basic shapes of the parts of the hand (to figure out the shapes of the palm)
3. Then get rid of some bone structure and start adding details and outlining the shapes more clearly
4. Then sometimes I would draw some sort of a line that would show the shape of the hand better, it helps if you need to draw a sleeve
5. And finally erase all the inner lines and draw a sleeve.
Edit: here’s a link to step-by-step drawing I made while writing this, making is a little more visualised:
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AsSnHPIBASO_x3RrNDwfe-NMmBxz

I didn't go into shading, because... because that is way harder than just drawing the outline of the hand and there are so many little aspects that its hard to put it in words. Honestly, I don't always know them with my mind, my hand just figures where to put the correct shading instinctively. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't :'D

Sequential art

I got an idea. It's too late to fight it now, it buried itself too deep into my mind. I'm going to turn the prologue of something into a short comic. D:

This would be my first one. I have zero experience with sequential art. To study it I'm just going over the comics I like trying to take note of paneling, stylistic choices and pacing, but I basically have no idea what I'm doing. Pointers for structured ways to study it would be deeply appreciated!

With comics I'm not sure if I can give you a good advice... I've never done a full comic myself, the only thing I did was I started a little comic based on one of my stories, haven't finished it yet. Your idea with looking at people's work seems rather helpful. Good luck with that and I would love to see the outcome! 

Edit: also, here are the first two pages of that little comic. I need to make the cover and probably start from the view of the place, because now I feel like it’s a little confusing... and it’s also in Russian, sorry... I’ll translate it one day...
https://1drv.ms/f/s!AsSnHPIBASO_yABwEhqA4T5dYOjT
Enjoy the familiar style of doing hair 
See? I have a tone to work on, so not  a good teacher for now :'D)

[moredhel]

I've got two requests if you guys don't mind.

Hands

I'd love to hear your methods to draw the bane of every artist, hands!

There's an excess of methods floating on the internet, it's hard to pick something that clicks. My current weird method is to start from an imprint of the hand: pads of palms, fingertips, knuckles & joints then connect. Fluid results and relatively comfy but the lower accuracy creates a mess when it comes to specific gestures. When they're tiny things seen from afar I start from silhouette instead and mostly suggest them, looks okay but looks okay.

I do not have a specific method for drawing hands. It is alwas horrible to draw one.

[Sevseres]

For hands I find it helpful to break it into sub shapes. There's the palm and then the fingers. The fingers don't have that much mystery to them if you figure out the palm I think. And I see palm as having three sub-shapes:
1. Plumpy round part that connects to the thumb.
2. The triangle-ish middle section that mostly stays flat.
3. And then the band that the four fingers connect to, which bends into all sorts of shapes but still keeps its width, and it's sort of seperated from the middle section by the palm lines/the finger knuckles.

Another thing that I find helpful is more about the tone but, if you add the hand a lot of edges (for example by putting more emphasis on finger knuckles) everything looks a lot more tense, and the gesture hints a more stressful situation. Vice versa, smoothing out the edges makes the atmosphere become more relaxed.

I say all this but honestly when I struggle with hands everything works much better once I give up, take a reference picture of my hand and use it as guidance. I guess I can say that... there's never a shame on needing a hand. 

Honestly, I think you're much better than I am at art Songbird, but that's sort of what I do. :'D And I know nothing about sequential art, so I can't really help you with that.

[Mirasol]

Annuil, nothing wrong with Art-dumps indeed, and all your pictures and comics look really nice!

Songbird, I wish I could help you with hands, but I usually deal with that problem by not dealing with it... :'D By that I mean conviniently hiding them behind long sleeves, pockets, objects or speech bubbles. If hands need to be drawn after all I like using every comic artists favorite trick of drawing people wearing gloves so they don´t need to be detailed. (Sometimes I even just use a completely "Adventure Time"-esque style where hands are even more simplified.) I tell myself I can get away with it because I don´t even try to be realistic... ^^" But other than that, I draw hands by:

1. rough shape where they are supposed to be
2. either: winging it from that point on with questionable results/ drawing a trapezoid-like shape guiding where the palm is and then adding fingers with significantly better results.

For complicated gestures I usually use my own hands for reference

For sequential art though I think I can be of a bit more help: (but note that I´m completely self-taught and have no idea whether what I do is concidered "right")

First off, to look at the way comics you like do paneling and so on is definitly very helpful and mostly how I taught myself too.
To get to the method I use for paneling/ page composition (The comics I do are usually traditionally drawn, but I think my method can be applied to digital art just as well.): Before I start a comic, I set myself "rules" as for how the composition will generally work for all of it so it stays consistent and is easy to follow. An example:

- this comic will be read left to right, top to bottom of the page
- pages will be drawn upright
- speech bubbles are to be read top of the panel to bottom of the panel

Deviations of said rules due to maybe needing more space for dialog in one panel are ok but shouldn´t be the norm so it doesn´t get confusing. I have to mark that with arrows or something.
Then I think about what pages will look like in general. This is mainly a question of "how small can I/ do I want to draw" and "How small can I go without the dialog being too small to read". For example I have found Din A 4-pages to be nicely devidable into on average 6 panels/ three rows. (like that every panel is a square) That doesn´t mean it´s the ideal size for everything, I´ve also already drawn comics in different formats, but that´s one I found where you have a nice amount of space for backgrounds and dialog (I say as if I wasn´t usually avoiding drawing backgrounds altogether...).
Anyways, a "format" like this is just a guideline, like that all panels would be the same shape and size which is boring. It´s just to keep the composition somewhat structured. Depending on what is needed for a scene I can then devide the three rows into smaller parts, or make two rowss into one if a large scenic panel is needed.
The way I devide panels depends on the scene. Usually thick straigt lines, vertical or horizontal. But during things like dream- or montage-sequences, as well as dramatic scenes I switch to other things. Examples:

- dream sequence: cloud-like or squiggled outline
- montage: scenic panel with photos lying around showing different points (of course there´s plenty of other options here)
- drama(TM): panels are devided with lots of angular lines

My pacing is usually terrible, so don´t listen to me on that aspect.

I realize none of these are really ways to study people´s ways of doing that, but I guess if I were to "translate" it into that: try finding the underlying structure they use for their pages on questions like rows of panels and way of reading, and then try finding a structure that works for you or the story you want to tell.

[Songbird]

Mirasol Oooh, the way you described panel work reminded me of magazine/book and site wireframes! In hindsight they're kinda the same. :'D I think I can draw on prior knowledge from these areas to cook up a similar approach for paneling. Thanks for the write up and hands method. It's been of great help!


Sevseres You described what I roughly do but in better words.

Regarding art levels I find it useful to look at it like a skill tree because a big part of doing art is about acquiring experience at doing something. I got a head start in this game; I've been farming XP for longer and invested all my points in a branch, unlocking a flashy skill. That doesn't mean I'm better at the game, or that the game is even about this single pretty attack, nor that I can't benefit from taking a different branch to unlocking the same skills and more. You've got a different life experience and (presumably) way to approach art. This exchange of knowledge and creative insights are valuable.

I guess I can say that... there's never a shame on needing a hand. 

*dies*


moredhel And they can get foreshortened in so many ways. Oh, the horror!


Annuil Wow thanks for taking the time to do that step-by-step!

My hands tend to be more accurately positioned when I ghost the general silhouette like you do, but I usually make a big mess when drawing the bones because I still need some fundamental markers from palms and joints to get the volume right, ending up with way too many lines in a too small region if mixing the two methods. Honestly I probably only need more practice to know when to omit what when doing this.

With comics I'm not sure if I can give you a good advice... I've never done a full comic myself, the only thing I did was I started a little comic based on one of my stories, haven't finished it yet. Your idea with looking at people's work seems rather helpful. Good luck with that and I would love to see the outcome! 

Edit: also, here are the first two pages of that little comic. I need to make the cover and probably start from the view of the place, because now I feel like it’s a little confusing... and it’s also in Russian, sorry... I’ll translate it one day...

This looks very cute! From the art alone I can tell it's a "first meeting" style of snippet and I suspect there's a difference of status going on too, meaning they're a bit of foils to each other.


Hah, I still got so much to do for that comic that outcome will take quite some time to materialize. But... I actually have something related to show? I've tried Clip Studio Paint (it's a mixed bag!), and reworked a character look and  am trying to figure a style which is faster and comfortable to draw that still feels like me in one go. I'm stupid and I'm sure I'll ultimately go for something that's insanely time-consuming to produce but it can't be helped. No matter how much I love to look at clean stylized art trying to do something that's too far from mine feels absolutely off.

Spoiler: Aimless doodle doodle doodle • show

Hands? What hands?

[moredhel]

I am still exploring the world of watercolor and I made my most controversial piece of art.



The title is "before bananas look like this they taste horrible".

[JoB]

The title is "before bananas look like this they taste horrible".

Dissing Baumgärtel, are we?

[wavewright62]

I am loving this discussion.
How do I draw hands?  Like Annuil, I mostly deal with the outline. I also model the pose myself a lot.  But, as with most cartooning, distortion and downright dodgy anatomy is my friend, to I get my expressive point across, more so for comedy.