:
Originally posted by Sydney
The most important advice I could give (from experience), is to refrain from treating your drawings preciously. Treat every new drawing as an experiment. You'll find that you gain confidence quickly and can throw lines and tone across the page like magic.
|
Heh, exactly what I do, except with my "best" ones. I look at some of my ones from this time last year and cringe... Most of the time, I post a picture and say "although this, this and this bit on this one is crap, but I might be better next time..."
I don't really have any tips, other than practice, practice, practice. I like to use really soft pencils to draw the structuring, and then go on to harder pencils for the definition, although I don't go any higher than about 2H unless I want it permanent (5H is hell to erase, and it scratches the paper). Shading I tend to do in 4H or 6H (I usually only use even numbers, for some reason). With colouring, I usually colour the whole image very lightly in "base" colours, ones that'll work under the colours I use for details. For instance, I drew a dull green creature a while back, and used a base colour of jade green, which evened out my other colours and prevented them being too bright. Also, if you use a base colour, you get a feel for how hard to press for your shading and so on. For shading (which I'm only really just starting to get confident with right now) I tend to use about 50% french grey, or indigo. Cool greys tend to look a bit fake, as sunlight is usually a warm light, not cold like cool grey would imply. I use really cheap 90gsm paper to draw on, and hate computers, they're evil. Especially scanners. And Paint programs. I might like them better if I had a decent colouring program, but I'm far more confident with just plain old colour pencils, as I'm not too smooth at drawing with a mouse... Graphics tablet, now, that could be a lot different...
Erk, out of time again. See you again soon, folks.