I really like the flare effect on his magic eye; it's nicely done.

I think the cloak would probably cast shadows on his skin? It looks like you might have a bit on the collar, but adult!Captain's left-hand side (over his sword) could probably do with some darker shading, to capture just how shadowed it is.

I like the fact that you've managed to keep his hair the same at the front, while still differentiating it at the back.

Oh... but I'm adding this to the list of Drawcember Men Don't Have Nipples images. ^^ (I, obviously, have neatly avoided this issue by only drawing women - and women with their tops on, at that! That means I get to poke at it each time it comes up. ^^)

hS

What mad alternate universe is this?

(As you will see when I get my #4 up in a few minutes, this is rampant hypocrisy.)

I think the differentiation of the beds is a nice marker of personality, but... where's all their stuff? Having nothing makes it look like you forgot it exists, whereas having only a few things - a lamp, a mug, essentials of that kind - looks like a deliberate choice. You could also use that to distinguish the two bed-sides a little more - you just know that the one on the left has glasses of water from the last three nights left on the table in various states of fullness.

hS

Other than that, it looks pretty good as far as lines and angles go. I can tell you didn't use a straightedge the whole time, but it's only really obvious on the left-hand table and the books.

With all that wall space, though, it's very apparent that there's nothing on any of them. I guess there wouldn't be if it's a barrack, but there would if it's a dorm. Posters, weapon displays, mirrors, lights, sheets, whatever else people hang on their walls... anything to show the personalities of the people who live there. And your characters clearly have personality to display. {= )

(I'm dreading this prompt. So many details go into a well lived-in room, and it all has to line up with the vanishing point, and scale properly, and ugh.)

When this thread drops off the front page, we can start a new one.

~Neshomeh

Is that the English bowmen "come and get 'em" gesture she's making, or something else?

I think her chest came out really well. It looks three-dimensional and well proportioned to her torso, and the top looks like something that would actually stay on. ^_^

Her shoulders could use a bit more development, especially if she's meant to be a strong character. The raised arm in particular, with the small, round joint, looks a bit doll-like.

~Neshomeh, trying to spread the concrit around.

He's, um... _{he's missing something...} ^_~

Once again, I have to complement the facial expression here. Yue looks super excited to be in this fight; I'd imagine it's a training bout, possibly from before he turned against the Shinonomes. And the way his eyes stand out from the rest of his face really draws attention to them.

I think there's something subtly off about his proportions, though: it looks like his head is to scale with his arms, but his body and legs are a bit too large for them. Might be worth taking a look at.

I really have to comment on those trousers, though - the rumpling is very nicely done. Not overdone, but clearly and cleanly evoking exactly what you wanted. Nice.

hS

I'm gonna start by saying that I love the detail on the heads - all three of them, counting that beautiful harp [/Dafydd]. Skepnadth looks completely relaxed, just gazing at Derik, while Derik looks both focussed and faintly amused. And harp!dragon is just super proud to be here, guys - it's her big break, so she's giving it all she's got! [/Dafydd... again]

I don't think Derik's shoulder flags up as wrong (though I note that he, too, is missing something ^_~), but I can't follow the line of Skepnadth's neck for love nor Marks. I think he's got a 90-degree bend in it? There's definitely something weird going on with him spine.

(I'm also being thrown off by the lack of him body. It ought to be curving waaaaay up as it heads to the right, but as it is that sweeping curve looks like a back leg, making him the most truncated dragon ever.)

(Also, confession: at this point I realised I had consistently referred to Skepnadth as 'she'. :O I apologise profusely, and have no idea why that happened.)

I like this picture. I hope you get it finished, because I think it'll be really good. And I really do like that harp. [/Dafydd... nah, it's just me, really]

hS

Here it is all colorified:



It may have come out a little over-saturated? I used saturated colors on the costume on purpose, because it's a superhero costume, bu then I tweaked the value and color levels a bit in the GIMP to whiten up the background. I dunno. But I'm very pleased with it in person. ^_^

~Neshomeh

Because who needs three sketches when you can obsess over one! {= D



While this is definitely more readable, I feel like the first one had more energy somehow? Eh, oh well. I like being able to show off her musculature in this costume, anyway. Gall is buff.

~Neshomeh

I think the key is not lining things up directly in front of each other - you lose the depth. If Gall had her arm slightly bent, or her arm at a slight up/down angle (which people generally do - holding your arm straight out horizontally feels very unnatural, though I guess less so when you're swinging a heavy object), you'd be able to see part of it and avoid the 'maceborg' look. (The way the shading on the side of the mace joins with the armour to look like scar tissue doesn't help... ;))

Apart from that, I was immediately drawn to the hair and the (visible) hand. I know the hair is only roughly sketched in - you can see the shape of her skull under it - but if you ignore that construction line, I think it looks very good. It speaks to her character, and actually looks curly. (Is that a braid behind her ear? It kind of looks like one; I might need to crib that sometime.)

As to her hand, it's good! I think the shading might be slightly off - it looks like she's got a substantial pad on the non-thumb side, which I don't think is right? - but that's nitpicky; just looking at it, it'd good.

I feel like there's something going on with her armour, which I think comes from treating it like cloth. You've got it near enough in the plane of the page at the shoulders, but skewed round with her hips further down; a solid plate (metal or leather) wouldn't do that. It would... I guess it would ride up on the back shoulder? Not sure.

In contrast, the skirt works very well, and (though they're only loosely sketched) her legs also worked out. They look leg-shaped, and capture the dynamism of her movement.

hS

It looks correct except that you chose a pose that doesn't give an interesting silhouette. At first glance, her mace head seems to be coming straight out of her shoulder.

Henry's hair is so scruffy, I just want to ruffle it. ^_^

I'm actually having difficulty offering concrit here, because you've already done it all yourself! I think Castor is a pretty good stab at androgynous, but would probably peg them as female if pushed (or young teenage male, I guess). And I absolutely agree with you about curly hair.

One thing I will note is Henry's pose (he's the only one with arms, so...). There's a definite air of 'hiiiiii, there's nothing wrong here, don't, um, don't look in the kitchen' about him, both in his face and in the positioning of his arms. I don't know if you were aiming that way, but if so - it worked.

hS

The pose looks well done, and the crossbow is actually pretty decent, if a bit plain. Remember, all you really have to do is suggest to the viewer and not include every single detail, and you have certainly suggested the orientation of the crossbow decently. However, on closer inspection it looks like her crossbow is aimed straight back and out of angle with her arm.

A bit of a concern is her hair, you drew a border then added streaks to it to simulate hair. This turns the hair into a block. Hair, especially the tips, don't really have a defined edge in realistic art, so a suggestion here is to just border the sides of the mass of hair, but leave the tips open. Then use a really fine pencil and make strokes.

I don't know what to tell you about the scanner, unfortunately. It should just, y'know, do its job. Check your settings, I guess? Make sure you're scanning a photo/image, not a document or something? And closing the lid is important, I think?

As for coloring plus shading, that's gonna be a no. Adding color over graphite is just going to give you greyed-out colors, especially on lighter tones like skin.

When you get into colors, shadows often tend to actually be slightly blue or purple (though it depends on the color of the light source and blah blah, not really important right now). You can also tone down or deepen any color you're using by adding something from the other side of the color wheel. For instance, I used Tuscan red for the darkest shadows on Gall's leggings (dark green brightened with grass green, white highlights). I used the same combination to create the near-black portions of her cuirass and gauntlets, plus indigo where I wanted it darkest. On her skin, the darker shades are henna and a slightly greenish sandbar brown. Again, I used indigo for the very deepest shadows. Only a very little black to bring out the outlines that were muted.

Using opposite colors like this is a thing I've only just started doing (this was an early experiment in using blue shadows to make the light seem more yellow), but I have to say it works!

... And I realize it's all more or less Greek to you. But you did ask.

For reference, I'm using Prismacolor pencils; the names may or may not translate to other brands.

~Neshomeh

How do you have time to draw a room this awesome? You're making me want to go back and pretty up my room during the 3 day catch up period. I really don't see anything that really needs improving. It's really good.

Such a pretty space... and the view out the windows! I loooove iiiit.

Ahem. *wipes drool off chin* So. Concrit. The only thing I find off is the window seat. It seems way too deep, and I'm afraid I had no idea that was a fire-lizard until you told me. She is very tiny—not out of scale, probably, just tiny.

Aside from that, though, this is a very hard act to follow. I might skip this prompt and save myself the embarrassment. >.>

~Neshomeh wants to draw Henry at various stages of maturity.

Also serving as a redo of the original image, to see how good I am at taking advice. ^_^



Anda is a powerful psychic - I think the term, cribbed from or inspired by Anne McCaffrey, was Prime. She's a telekine and telepath, shown here using her wrist-mounted flechette-drones. I dunno what they do, but they look cool.

I think this is a big improvement over the last one (and not just because I took Nesh's advice about the blending, though that helped!). There's some problem points in the shading - mostly the shape of the highlights - but the hands are much better (I hope!), and I think the shading on her face has improved too. But I'm always looking for more advice/concrit, so go nuts. :)

hS

Definitely an improvement. There's a dark dot on her stomach that keeps distracting me by looking like a very misplaced belly-button, but I don't think that was intentional?

Next step: invest in a blending stump or two. These are basically tightly rolled sticks of paper that let you smear the graphite into smooth gradients. In the meantime, though, a bit of tissue on the end of your finger works, too. {= )

I think Remnant covered the hands well enough, so I'll mention that the jaw looks a bit misaligned. It might be the way the neck connects with a straight line to the hinge just at the junction of the ear on the left. It shouldn't quite do that; there's a muscle that runs from the pit of the collarbones up behind the ear (the sternocleidomastoid) that should carry that neck line back a little. You kinda have that shaded in at the throat, but it looks like it goes straight up to her chin rather than back.

~Neshomeh

The hands actually look decent enough. However, on closer inspection, it does look like the fingers are directly connected to the wrist. Also the fingers look like there are no bones. A good way to fix this is to draw the structure of the hand before actually drawing the hand. This applies for the body as well if you draw it free hand. Everything can be broken down into component shapes, so you first construct the hands from their components, which are the palm, the fingers, and the thumb. The fingers and thumb can be further broken down into a series of cylinders, and the palm can be represented as a trapezoid or pentagon. To construct the hand simply place the components in the correct orientation and position, foreshorten if necessary. Then outline. I just realized I sound like Lego instructions.

The body looks well shaded and the shadows are correctly oriented for the most part. Everything else seems fine, though the lineart can use some cleaning up. The facial expression looks pretty good.

(As you can see, I'm not really good at concrit.)

Yeah, I have trouble with noses when they're tipped up. I also have trouble with shading in general, which... hey, you seem to know about this sort of thing, can you help?

My problem is that I can't get properly 'light' shading to work. You can see I've tried to get the shadows running down the front of Connie's cheeks here, but every time I try, they end up looking like old-person wrinkles. Same for the shadow under her lower lip (though in this case I think it kind of works, because of how weird her mouth is being).

I actually have a set of pencils of different hardness, and my assumption has been that softer pencils are intended for shading, but they seem to lay down darker lines the softer they are. Should I be using one of them for the main lines, and the harder pencils for shading? (Or, I guess, should I be using soft pencils for shading and then inking the hard lines to darken them?)

I'm not even going to get started on colour, though I probably will be redoing and colouring this one unless Prompt #3 turns out really well.

hS