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.
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.
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.
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It works for fur/hair, but that's about it.
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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).
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:
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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
Fennec's Art Dump
