Wolfire Games Forums

The Fan Art thread is nice to look at, but I think it'd be nice to have another art thread for a different purpose.

I'm not sure what this will end up being, but I'd like to think of it as a kind of a summer workshop, a place that hopefully keeps the lazy people (like me) doing at least something artistic. An art thread where people can post their drawings for others to comment, even critique. An art thread for discussing different mediums, and for trying something new. A thread for self-improvement, and for learning from others.

There's no minimum skill limit or level to join. Even if you can only draw stick figures, you can post them. In the spirit of the thread, though, you should aim to become good at it, even if it's just stick figures. If you're interested, don't be afraid to join - I only started learning to draw four or so years ago, when I was almost 18. Everybody had to start somewhere! He's one of my heroes!

I'll start this thread with some resources.

If you know of something that you think should be in here, PM me or post in this this thread.

First, if you are very new to drawing and want to pick it up, you might want to try some books. Betty Edwards' book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" taught me many things that are amazing in their simplicity, like that drawing really is just putting onto paper what you see. It's the seeing that's the hard part - seeing where one form ends and what's just shadow, seeing the shape and not the shadow, seeing the color that's really there and not what you expect it to be.

Her book is basically written to not only teach people exercises that help them to learn to draw, but also to help them understand that they CAN learn to draw, that drawing is a SKILL, and can be learned. If you feel like you can't draw at all, but would like to, this book could be interesting. There's also a very, VERY good site inspired by her book:

http://posemaniacs.com/?pagename=thirtysecond

It's a collection of 3D models showing male and female musculature (without skin) in various motion-captured poses. You can set the random pose viewer to get you a new random image every 10 or 90 seconds, or something in-between. It's not drawing from life, but it's still very good for learning anatomy.


I'm currently going through Nikolaides' "Natural Way To Draw" - or at least I'm supposed to, but I haven't actually touched the book in a while. If you want to dedicate yourself to drawing, Nikolaides' book should be great - here's how it starts:

I assume that you are about to embark on a year of art study, and I plan to teach you as nearly as possible just what you would have learned if you had spent a year in one of my classees at the Art Students' League. I do not care who you are, what you can do, or where you have studied if you have studied at all. I am concerned only with showing you some things which I believe will heko you to draw.
...
Begin your first day's work by reading the first section until you come to the direction that you are to draw for three hours. THEN STOP AND DRAW.

And finally, there's Andrew Loomis. His books were published between 1939-'61, and to my knowledge have been out of print since, and they are fantastic. By fantastic, I mean unbelieavable, like a magic book out of a fairy tale. Seeing these books doesn't magically teach you to draw, but studying with these can teach you to draw well.




FineArt.sk has some of his books up as images, so you can browse the books online:
http://www.fineart.sk/index.php?cat=1

You can also downloads an all six of his books here:
http://www.placidchaos.com/AM/index.php ... rew_loomis


These alone won't make you a great artist! If they were enough, I'd already be one! Practice, practice, practice, I've heard it and know it but haven't lived it, and it shows. Even raw talent and natural ability will be fruitless without practice, and if you don't have either - even more practice!

P.S.
Do what I say, not what I do!

And here's some stuff I do when I'm not writing essay-length posts on internet forums. I have no scanner, so the quality isn't as good as it could be.

Usually when I draw, I sketch. I should draw more detailed stuff, but I rarely get to it. As you might see from these, after several years of practice I have a poor grasp of anatomy, a poor understanding of perspective, a poor understanding of shapes and lights shadows, and in many other ways I'm a rather poor at arts. I think that's quite grand, considering that just a few years ago I didn't draw. When I was younger, I didn't doodle on my notebooks, I didn't draw stick figures, I didn't copy manga or comic book characters. I had to work hard until I could go from "I can't to draw" to the "I can DRAW, poorly".



Here's some of the other stuff I've tried my hand at. I've studied 3D graphics in school for two years now, but unfortunately I can't texture yet. That's one of the things I want to focus on this summer.
The paintings were done in an evening class this winter, to learn to use colors for the texturing.
I don't photograph much, and when I do take pictures it's to remember the beautiful things I see and not to create an interesting image. That particular photo was taken on one of the most beautiful days I've seen in years.

Here's the result of about 10 minutes messing with Sculptris. Pretty ugly, but the ear came out cool!





And then here's the product of boredom and Sculptris.

Blorx wrote:

The contrast between the text and background is poor. A lighter color would work better.


Yeah, nice ears, and the top of the head looks good too. The eyebrows also work, but the face could use some more work.
Is it easy to "blank" a face like that in Sculptris? Does it remove the extra unneeded polys, or would they stay there draining resources if you flatten the features?

Yeah, I know it's poor contrast, but due to the awkward gray in the background there, just about everything was either blinding or eyestraining.

Anyways, I'm not entirely sure how Sculptris works just yet, as I haven't messed with it enough. All I know is that a. It resembles real clay in all the ways you would think it would, and b. it's much easier to grasp than more "traditional" modeling suites.

The only problems with resembling real clay are that it does, in fact, induce a lot of polys, and it can be easy to screw stuff up if you move the mouse wrong. Not only that, but since the program is still not quite optimized, stretching or over-editing a specific spot can literally cause a tear in the surface (it's hard to describe until you've seen it happen. If you look closely, you might be able to see where it happened in the mouths of those two models).

Yeah, it's a ton of fun, due to the resemblance of real clay, and I would love to be able to use this as a modeling suite for anything I might do in the future, but it definitely needs optimized. I've noticed that, as you can see in any of those screens, that you reach a high amount of polys really, really fast. Not only that, but if you decide you want to limit the polys, it'll limit it to the amount that you have when you decide to limit it, meaning that if you have a small amount, you're going to have some pretty awkward angles to deal with, and often more rips.

For example, the basic sphere you start with has 2048 triangles. That imp-like thing has 490,218 triangles. Yeah, it's that bad.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing the program evolve and hoping they optimize it soon.

EDIT: Forgot to add that it does take some getting used to, due to the fact that, despite where you grab it and what angle you pull at it with, it doesn't always go exactly the way you want it to until you've manipulated the angle you're working at. The camera can also be a pain on larger models, when you're trying to get into small spaces.

Blorx wrote:Yeah, I know it's poor contrast, but due to the awkward gray in the background there, just about everything was either blinding or eyestraining.

My painting teacher would probably have told you to use one of the colors already appearing in the image. The cyans on the top and bottom menu bars, the light gray in the brighter areas of the reindeer's back and head.



Thanks for the explanations. I know what you meant by ripping, I've seen it in other 3D modeling software as well.
I saw some Blender users discussing Sculptris. They imported the object into Blender, used the Decimate modifier to lower the amount of polys, and then exported it in a format Sculptris understood (perhaps OBJ with all polys as triangles?). IIRC they said that Scultpris will get get something similar soon.

Nice thread, and definitely some great links. I'm totally going to be using that posemaniacs whenever I get 5 minutes to burn and a stack of paper just asking to be used.

I'm terrible at figure drawing, can't draw anything from memory, and have a terrible track record when it comes to actually working with a drawing enough to make it look anything decent. But I'm looking forward to making work to share and hope that there are more people willing to share and talk about their work.

Now I just need to get a copy of photoshop so I don't have to buy a scanner, and to get into using my computer for more than just mindless gaming. I'm still shocked I had never thought of making original art using the layering like the OG concept art time lapse videos.

It probably sounds corny, but these forums in general have been very helpful for me in motivating myself to get working towards what type of artwork I want to create and how to bring that into game design.

So, hopefully I didn't just scare away anyone that had planned to post in the thread, and we can look forward to some fun artwork.

Endoperez wrote:

Blorx wrote:Yeah, I know it's poor contrast, but due to the awkward gray in the background there, just about everything was either blinding or eyestraining.

My painting teacher would probably have told you to use one of the colors already appearing in the image. The cyans on the top and bottom menu bars, the light gray in the brighter areas of the reindeer's back and head.

Heh, yeah, I haven't had any art classes since middle school though, so it's not like I'm really well trained.

Endoperez wrote: Thanks for the explanations. I know what you meant by ripping, I've seen it in other 3D modeling software as well.
I saw some Blender users discussing Sculptris. They imported the object into Blender, used the Decimate modifier to lower the amount of polys, and then exported it in a format Sculptris understood (perhaps OBJ with all polys as triangles?). IIRC they said that Scultpris will get get something similar soon.

Yeah, I'm hoping. Right now, the only way to reduce polys that I've seen is to use the "smooth" tool, but what that really seems to do right now is just flatten everything, unless it's a small area like the deer's antlers, in which case it just reduces the size of it. >.>

Endoperez wrote:Everybody had to start somewhere! He's one of my heroes!

Oh hey, someone else who knows of Fredrik K T Andersson. Cool.

For anyone else who may be interested, his stuff can be found here and here.
(Warning: Not Safe For Prudes. Rampant nipples abound. Seriously, that guy never lets anything get in the way of a shapely set of breasts.)

...

Oh right, I should probably post some actual art huh?
Um... well here's a little troll I drew awhile back. It was intended as a forum avatar, but I never got round to using it.

I'll post some proper drawings later. Maybe.

Cool thread!

Those are some good links you posted Endoperez. Loomis certainly is one of the anatomy masters of the 20st century. I would also like to add George Bridgman to that list, along with Glenn Vilppu (who is actually still alive). I'm not sure on this one but I think Bridgman's books may be part of the public domain, and can therefore be downloaded for free. Just look around a bit and you should find them. Vilppu has a set of DVD's that you can find on his website.

I am currently in the process of doing studies of every single drawing in Bridgman's Constructive Anatomy. It's a great exercise and I'm learning a lot from it - you can see my progress so far right here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showth ... p?t=183694

These are the studies I did today:







So what is everyone else up to?

Cosec wrote:Cool thread!

Those are some good links you posted Endoperez. Loomis certainly is one of the anatomy masters of the 20st century. I would also like to add George Bridgman to that list, along with Glenn Vilppu (who is actually still alive).

Vilppu? I remember finding some articles of his, but I didn't know he was that famous. I still have the articles bookmarked: http://www.awn.com/category/columns/vilppu . I really should try yo go through all of these resources I've collected...

So what is everyone else up to?

I draw pretty rarely at the moment, which is one of the reasons I started this thread. I'm hoping this thread will inspire me to draw more often.

endo, thanks for starting the thread! and listing good books, too. I am going to get some of the ones you listed

@Cosec: one thing i can never do is make myself study anatomy; but looking at your works kind of inspired me to try again, although i am still foreseeing difficulties with the whole process. how do you motivate yourself to do the sketching of the bones and muscles stuff? is there a secret to it?