Fennec's Art Dump
 

As promised, some Oddworld fanart I've done recently. Critique/feedback is welcome.
A headshot I attempted of Stranger as practice on a new tablet. Couldn't quite figure out how his face worked, though. He's got a funky skull shape.

Some traditional pencil-and-paper sketches will be coming tomorrow, when I have access to a scanner again. Is the usual practice here to update this original post with the new art, or to add it in a new post?

That's fucking badass man. And you can create new posts when it comes to art and shit.

Nice.

Will you draw your own version of "A Fan Art"?

Thanks!

Well, I could definitely try. Do you mean redraw that in my own style, or try to make my own parody art? I'm not sure how good I am at visual humor.

Do as you please.

That's pretty damn cool. Looking forward to whatever else you decide to post!

Oh god yes please redraw A Fan Art!

You can't remake something that's perfect.

You can make funny sketches/comics about it, though!

Annnd here we go.

http://orig00.deviantart.net/5956/f/...re-d9q2wz6.png
Forgot about this one before. Is drawing a female Steef (or rather, what one might look like since there's no actual official art of them) dumb? It probably is. But I liked how it came out for the most part. It was just meant as a simple concept doodle, so it's not as detailed as the Stranger bust.

More Stranger, this time for expression practice.

And the gal Steef again, more expression practice. Also I apparently have no idea how horns work when it comes to perspective.

http://orig03.deviantart.net/a980/f/...re-d9tii83.png
I was doing some hand practice, and a bit of Oddworld ended up on the page.

And finally, some Mudokons--a slave, a tomahawker, and Alf.

That's all for now, though I've got a couple more drawings planned in the future (possibly including some fanart of A Fan Art).

Heh. Gluk tears seems very Alf-like.

Funny that Stranger is smiling in one of your sketches. It's certainly not something he does very often.

Yeah, I dunno what I was doing with the first one--maybe one of the rare occasions when he's chill? The second grin would probably only show up right before he's about to kick someone's ass.

He does grin when he's cut loose remember. Any way these are brill, well done.

Pretty amazing stuff.

I want that mug!

These are fantastic by the way! :D

FennecFyre, you might get recruited for AEHD.

cool artwork, man. i love the Stranger expressions and the mudokons.

Not bad but please stop chickenscratching.

Also in your lineart (digital coloured) try changing the colour of the lines to a darker colour of the colour you're using for that section.

Good looking stuff, it's great to see some new fan art around the forums!

Wow your stuff looks great. I can barely draw stick figures.

I wish :P Not gonna lie though, getting to work on an Oddworld game one day would be awesome beyond words.

What do you mean by that? Making the lines a bit cleaner? Fair 'nuff, they did turn out a bit messy.

And I have tried colored lines before, but it never looks quite right, at least on flat/unshaded colors. Could just be me.

And thanks to everyone else as well!

Chicken scratching is where your lines look hairy because you're drawing lots of small lines instead of smooth strokes, particularly prevalent on the hands you posted. As for the coloured lineart, without seeing how you did it I can't suggest anything. It looks like you drew a sketch then erased parts/cleaned it up to create your lines. I used to do that and it's pretty bad practice since a.) you can't get varying line width which is important to help portray depth and b.) you don't get practice in drawing smooth, steady strokes.

Are you using photoshop for your digital stuff?

Oh, okay, I see what you mean. I have noticed that I tend to "feel out" a drawing with short marks, rather than long flowing lines. It works for fur/hair, but that's about it.

And yeah, I am using PS. My usual process for digital lines is to create several layers of sketches to work out pose/proportions, then do final lines on another set of layers.

It doesn't really work for fur/hair though. It's amateur practice and it suggests a lack of confidence. In the end it makes whatever you're drawing look stiff. Like I said, you aren't bad but this is a bad habit you really need to nip in the bud as early as possible.

Rather than getting caught up in detail from the get go try drawing a sketch lightly in as few strokes as possible then refining it. It'll really help your speed too.

Like a gesture drawing, you mean? Where it's more about the motion/form than the details. I'm so used to drawing with short lines, but I can definitely give it a try.

Do you draw any? If you've got any examples of what you're talking about I'd love to see them.

Yeah sure but I'm out right now, I'll PM you when I get back since it doesn't feel right to spam my drawings in someone else's thread.

Also sort of, I'll clarify in my PM

That's fine, and thanks!

Impressive. Do you do any other types of artwork (exemplī grātiā: paintings, sculptures, etcetera?)

Post scriptum: I love infusing latin into my speech.

Mostly just digital/traditional art, sorry. I do photomanipulations sometimes, though I've got nothing Oddworld-themed there. In my senior year of high school, I also did an independent study project where I modeled/textured/animated a dragon, and I'd like to do more 3D modeling stuff in the future--it was really fun.

And I might be working on a SW fancomic/graphic novel but that's still very much in the plotting stage

Oh boy oh boy oh boy I'm gonna go on a critique train because your work has so much potential but it falls short in so many areas ALRIGHT LETS DO THIS

I appreciate Vy's modesty but I'm going to be posting this publicly because I'd like this advice to be out in the open for those who may find it useful for their own work. Hopefully it at least evokes some thought.

As Vy said, chicken scratching is definitely poor practice. Not necessarily because it looks bad, though imo it definitely does in this use of it, but because it holds you back from what you could accomplish. Chicken scratching in small marks like what you're doing not only makes your lines seem brittle and makes you seem like you have no confidence in your strokes, but it also is very, very time consuming in practice. Something that takes you several hours to draw could be cut down to mere minutes. No matter how you look at it, chicken scratching is a hinderance to you as an artist.

I scribbled up a few examples of what I mean. You can still call it chicken scratch, but it's chicken scratch that accentuates the style, and is easily cleaned up. I even took step by step pictures for you to see how much you can accomplish with so few lines comparitively.

https://40.media.tumblr.com/780c1f24...er10o1_400.pnghttps://40.media.tumblr.com/5e7ce7a0...er10o2_400.pnghttps://40.media.tumblr.com/59086a8e...er10o3_400.pnghttps://40.media.tumblr.com/e3334538...er10o4_400.png

This in total, took 3 minutes to draw. Clean up was easy because the lines were confident and few in numbers, and when drawing there were only a few things I needed to adjust that, had I used your method of sketching to do, would have taken me ages to fix. I even did a rough redraw that looks like an entirely different clakker than the one above that in itself was a learning experience for me, because in doing this I realized why exactly I stopped using this method in the first place.

https://40.media.tumblr.com/d49f8403...er10o5_500.png

Not the best picture, but here's what I'd like to go over:
-This took me an additional 8 minutes and one rage induced eraser throwing compared to my previous example
-I'm not even going to attempt to go back and clean up the awful line work because it would take even longer to do that
-This is garbage and lifeless and theres no confidence anywhere in this drawing it was like I was uncertain of where I wanted to go with this even though I had a very clear idea of what I was drawing
-The fact that it looks so different was unintentional. I found myself focusing more on the details than the base of the sketch. In turn, you have something that looks awkward and like its not supposed to look like that.You cant tell the Clakkers neck is arched forward, its just floating rolls of fat cascading down a vertical neck. No amount of shading would have fixed this.
-Theres a lot of unnecessary lines that occured in the process that are overall offputting.

Chicken scratching definitely has it's uses, but not how you're using it. I think overall your work would be a lot stronger without it.

Only if you want to portray split ends. Most hair on most animals clump together. It's why you see a lot of floppy triangle representing hair in illustration in general. I actually drew up an example of how effective smooth lines can be for portraying hair and hair direction as well, and "shaded" in the bits entirely using contours (weighted lines).

https://40.media.tumblr.com/42c724d9...er10o6_400.png

Here's a few more examples of what couldn't be accomplished in a reasonable time frame without going insane from frustration with chicken scratching:
x / x / x

The first and last of which were done entirely in single strokes.


Now, moving on from your technique, but still relevant to it, is your anatomy of the characters. If you used a reference for the mudokons, it's not immediately apparent. Their lower jaw basically becomes their neck, it's part of their weird charm but it's not in any of your illustrations of them. In fact, they're pretty difficult to look at. The arms are creepily long, the jaw cuts into the neck in an unnatural way, I feel like the feet should be bigger, and the body is MASSIVE compared to the head on the left one specifically. It makes me want to see your full body steefs. Next time you go to draw them, maybe try blocking them out with literal blocks first to get the proportions right, then "carve away" at the simplified sketch until you're satisfied with the sketch. Draw them from more angles and honestly you don't even need to be a pro at perspective yet to get it to look good. Perspective is a whole other animal I'm still getting used to hahaha

Draw various types of paws and hands and claws from animals that actually exist and understand how they all intertwine because once you fully understand that you can draw any hand or paw or claw or wing on any animal whether it exists or not. It's really cool.

Do gesture and figure drawings, you don't even need a model from life just watch sports on youtube or something and draw the most hilarious poses you can freezeframe. Just stick figures or circles or something, you don't actually have to draw the people in their full sweaty glory. It'll help you more easily come up with poses for your drawings.

And this one more specifically pertains to the first image you posted, but study form! When you understand form you can make everything pop off the screen without even trying.

I think from what I've seen, more beastly animals like steefs are definitely your strong point, and doing all the expressions with them is the perfect way to help you convey emotion through your work and I'm excited to see more of it. Keep it up.


Also that female steef drawing is very familiar I think we may have run into each other before

Okay, I was gonna PM but I guess since SlogBait thinks it's more useful out in the open I might as well. Pretty much following up from what he was saying.

When I said to draw a light sketch in as few lines as possible, I meant something like this

http://puu.sh/ns26x.jpg

(The beard part is darker because I was starting to render it before I remembered to take a picture). As you can see it's just very light outlines, mainly single strokes just to build up the form. I only took the pencil off the paper a few times. The total time for this sketch was about 3 minutes.

And here it is after I rendered it
http://puu.sh/ns8Yo.jpg http://puu.sh/ns23S.jpg

I tried to show my shading process here with the head being the most rendered then decreasing down the body.

I also used to chickenscratch really badly, here's a year ago vs a wip from now. (sorry for anime shit).

http://puu.sh/ns1Uf.jpg

You can see the difference. Also the old picture took about an hour+ whereas the newer one took about 10 minutes. Proportions are way easier to get too since you're looking at the canvas space as a whole rather than focusing on carving out a small area.

When colouring this can be useful too since you don't have to do a million lineart layers, here you can also see what I was saying about changing the colour of the lines to match the picture.

http://puu.sh/ns1TM.jpg

vs

http://puu.sh/ns9uQ.jpg

which was their original colour.

A good practice for not chickenscratching and using space effectively is posemaniacs 30 second pose drawings btw since you don't have time to draw a million lines. Also I very very much recommend sketching stuff in pen as practise, really helps with your control and getting stuff right first time which boosts speed.

Okay I think that's about all from me.

Do not use posemaniacs, using 3D models as a reference isn’t as useful as real photos. Here’s a summary of what makes a good reference photo: http://www.freshdesigner.com/good-fi...ference-guide/

Here’s a few sites that let you do timed drawings from photo reference (beware, the links below contain NSFW nude photos!):

http://artists.pixelovely.com/practi...igure-drawing/
http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en/

And some more photo references that you can use at your leisure:

http://characterdesigns.com
http://www.freshdesigner.com/figure-drawing-reference/

Also a nice little summary and some tips for line dynamics: http://nsio.deviantart.com/art/Nsio-...mics-411098876

e: This video helped me out a bunch, it goes over how you can control your pencil to get different lines:

Lots of really good critique here so I'm going to reply to each post in order:

@Slog Bait-

Give me your skills.

I did, actually ;_; I used the Mudokon concept art and renders on TOGG. Though I can see why you'd say that. Usually, the first time I draw a creature/species, they come out a little wonky and it takes a while to study them and understand how their anatomy works (you don't even wanna know how long that first digital drawing of Stranger took me. Now I can slap down a steef pretty quick). Looking back, I can see where I got proportions or form wrong--likely because, as you said, I was focusing too much on details instead of overall form. I've caught myself doing this before--I'll spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking little details, then be like "aw fuck I messed up that part's shape and now I gotta do it over again".

I'll have a couple doodles of them coming later :fuzsmile:

You're absolutely right there. 90% of the things I've ever drawn were animals/beastlike creatures, and I've only started to acquire any kind skill with humans/humanoids in the past couple years. Something I gotta work on.

Really? I'm not the first person to have drawn a she-steef, though I've only shown that drawing to a couple people in the past. Freakova is that you?

@Vyrien-

Give me your skills too.

I can definitely see what you're talking about with the two sketch comparisons, the one one the right is much smoother and crisper. For the steef sketch, did you put down shapes/guides beforehand, or just go straight to lines?

I see what you mean about the line colors too, I'll experiment with that the next time I'm in front of my tablet.

@Manco-

I'll be sure to use those resources. That video's intro and the bits on hairy lines were embarrassingly relatable, but he had a lot of good tips.


Thanks all for the tough love, you all had really good advice.

I agree that for life drawing you should absolutely use photo or live references, however, for the 30 second gesture drawings posemaniacs is fine since it's more about training your efficiency with lines. Also they have a great variety of poses so it's useful if you are uninspired for a pose. Which I often am because I fucking suck at posing.

For the steef sketch I drew a kind of oval for his head shape first and a line of action down from that for his body.

Ah, okay.

I'm going home for spring break tomorrow, so while I will have my tablet, I won't have access to an internet connection that's actually strong enough to upload anything. I'll have some new art ready to post by next Monday, hopefully.

(If I shouldn't be double-posting like this let me know)

I did some more things. First, some fan art of A Fan Art:
http://orig06.deviantart.net/76f4/f/...re-d9v4bs9.png
I still can't draw a goddamn Mudokon.

And second, an idea that was a lot funnier in my head. Potoos are birds with big yellow eyes and a funny voice. Abe is a bird(ish creature) with big yellow eyes and a funny voice. Therefore, logically, Abe is a potoo:
http://orig04.deviantart.net/16bc/f/...re-d9v4c73.png

Good job!

I'm sick of your trolling, Vlam.

I'm not.

He did posrep me, but you can never be sure with Vlam.

That was more me being a dick, but nevermind.