SourCherryJack 2021-04-13 20:01:02

Okay, since you didn't link me a specific upload, I'm just gonna do a general review of your work here on the comment.
So first off backgrounds, draw them yourself. There are ways to make photographs and certain types of art styles work together well, usually they're limited color palettes and heavily filtered and the figures are already close to human shaped, or there's some other purposed that justifies using the photo.
In your case the metroid background pixel art in the zero suit drawing, the beach photographs in a few pieces, and the dense forest in Link drawing, all look a bit too busy, and are distracting to he actual figures themselves.
Another thing, that might be more of a me thing, but try ditching the heavy white outlines around a lot of your characters; this goes for the drop shadows as well. It makes them look like paper cutouts or further separates them from the drawing.
You're clearly going for a cartoony style, and you're doing a pretty good job with it -definitely coming a long- so it's pretty hard to give any decent feedback that might help you accomplish what you're trying to do stylistically speaking.
You can work on more dynamic poses, right now all of your art, are all, for the most part, static characters standing straight up and looking at the screen head on or at a slight angle. Do some figure drawing, get your characters in more dynamic, or at the very least, more varied poses. Work on learning how body parts fit together, right now your figures look like they're ready to be puppet animated in aftereffects. You've got a very basic simplified template for how you do faces and there is not a lot of variety in it a lot of your chins come to a very sharp point, work on getting more varied head shapes. A good exercise for this is to draw various shapes and turn them into heads. long tubes, squat boxes, think of shows like Hey Arnold, they got wild heads, you don't gotta be that out there, but the variety helps and adds to the personality of all the characters.

Your colors could also use a bit of work, you're working with a lot of very pure saturated colors for the most part, maybe try exploring less saturated choices. Also in that try shading more creatively, right now it looks like you're using darker and lighter versions of the same hues to shade highlight, try adding violet or darker colors instead to shade and washing out the colors more to highlight.
Looking at your earliest posts in the portal, they're all in the same style you're currently working in, just less refined, so I don't know if you're really looking to alter it in a huge way, or are comfortable with being where you're at with it, but I think you may have taken this style as far as it can go, and it may be time to switch that up.

If you want to bring your art up to the next level though here's the standard sort of spiel you're gonna get.
Draw from life as much as possible, work on anatomy by drawing actual humans, line-of-action.com is a great resource for this.
Learn perspective. sit down, grab a ruler and some paper, plot a horizon line and some vanishing points and work on one, two, and three point perspectives, then shade your exercises with consistent light sources. this will help you to grasp form, and how shapes warp with perspective for foreshortening limbs. Work in black and white a lot and work on understanding value to help bring your compositions to life, speaking of, look into the rules of COMPOSITION. Golden ratio, rule of thirds, strong diagonal etc. Look up the "Gestalt Principles" and do drawings that explore them. Adding to your art vocabulary and understanding of concepts intellectually will help you translate that into your studies and improve your art faster. These are all things that will help you to bring your art to the next level.
The youtube channel PROKO is one that gets a lot of love, I haven't explored it much, but he comes highly recommended, as does Draw A Box, I've never used that one personally, but it looks promising.
The important thing to remember is there are no shortcuts, but there are more effective ways of learning.
Know what you want to go for, if you want to learn to draw proportional realistic humans, study for that, if you want to draw slapstick looney toon characters, you should also learn to draw proportional humans since a lot of them are based on that anyway, but also learn to exaggerated it more. Looking at where your art was two years ago, I'd say you're on the right track overall though.

SourCherryJack 2021-04-22 11:41:38

Hey man, I follow you on instagram so I see your work quite a bit, thanks for dropping by the streams!
I enjoy your work and it definitely has a lot of room for improvement and you seem to be working at it a lot and by the looks of it you're working on scenes and not just characters so that's very good. In time, as long as you continue to challenge yourself you will continue to improve.
Moving on, so you're at a very early stage of your art journey. You look to be working with bic pens and other miscellaneous office supplies, these aren't helping your art. They keep it all looking very "doodley." Look into upgrading your equipment and use those supplies for final drawings. There are a lot of good choices and always use coupons as much as possible. Micron pens, pentel pocket brush, an inkwell (I use speedball super black india ink) and croquil pens and/or brushes are all great choices for inking (I can go more in depth on those if you want, message me.) These will all help to give your art a more 'finished' look and feel, by pushing those blacks and giving you more control over the placement of the ink, it will also make it easier to do fills and spot blacks, so your work won't look as scratchy (or if you want the scratchy look it'll look more intentional and less a result of the bics).

In the very immediate you can improve your documentation. Make sure you're in a well lit area, outside in indirect sunlight is a great place if your home doesn't have good lighting, and hold the camera as parallel to the paper as possible, take multiple photos and choose the best one for uploading. Adjust the contrast and brightness to get it as close to the real life drawing as possible and then crop it to show the drawing in the best possible format. Presentation of your art is extremely important to the final product and can ruin otherwise really good art if not done well.

Something to work toward in your future art portal submissions is have an intent. Right now there are a lot of cropped doodle/scribble pages, and these are great for ideas and getting a flow going, but not so much for presentation as final art. Take your favorite scribbles on the page and try to put them into a more fully realized composition. take more time on the art and draw bigger, fill the page with the one piece. They may not look as good to you when expanded on, but that is normal and something you'll have to push through, the sketches always look better than the final to the person drawing.
I am very familiar with the sort of dark art subject matter you're working with. using more black, and really pushing shadows will only help you achieve these looks, I can give you the standard spiel on learn anatomy and work on fundamentals - and you should - but right now I think upgrading your supplies and exploring better tools and developing techniques with them might be more what you're looking for.

That being said, do gesture drawings, they help a lot with character drawing, especially spooky stuff because you can really get the emotion and action out of the characters through the poses. also work on one, two and three point perspectives, they'll help you create distance and scale in your work which will really help you develop horror scenes, and further push character interactions.
Any questions, or anything you want me to expand on, message me, and I'll see what I can do, hope all this helps in someway.

SourCherryJack 2022-05-23 15:16:58

Hi, I am getting around to this now, sorry for the delay.
No worries, the Art Portal thing just meant link me a specific submission to your gallery, not that you needed to be scouted, I'll edit that to be more clear.
MOVING ON
So right off the bat, based on your gallery of a bunch of figure drawings, the first advice anybody is more than likely going to give you is "work on your anatomy" and you absolutely should do that, but let's get into that for a bit. Drawing from life and using references is the first and best place to do that. If you are able to find and attend a live figure drawing class, I strongly recommend that. There is no better way to learn anatomy than to sit in a room with a pad drawing a person right in front of you. If you are unable to (understandably so), line-of-action.com, is a great resource for simulating life drawing. You can set timers on a very large library of varied photographs of people and animals. To warm up a recommend doing quick illustrations and try to get the broad strokes, 'gesture drawing' will help you figure out the weight and mechanics of the human body in the broader sense and will help you develop your grasp of proportions. After a few sixty second, or five minute gesture drawings, bump up the times to ten, fifteen, thirty minutes, an hour, etc. and spend the full times working on rendering and getting more accurate to the reference.
This also extends to portrait practice, as well as hands, feet and any other specific body part. If your goal is to get really good at drawing people; you're going to have to spend a lot of time working on each part, and a hand is essentially another body attached to each arm, so they take a lot of work to understand well.
Posemaniacs.com is also a good resource for poses and learning muscle groups and in general a bunch of good basic, and not so basic poses.

I've thrown a lot at you on anatomy alone, but studies are important to grow as an artist, I recommend working fast and in pencil (or even a bic pen can be fine) during most studies, the idea is to not be precious with your work, so keeping it simple is often the best choice. If you'd really want to dive in though, its more efficient to get a large (18" x 26" is a good size) newsprint pad and some charcoal sticks. If you go for a life-drawing class this'll likely be what you're working with, and that's for a reason.

Beyond anatomy, I recommend doing 1-point, 2-point and 3-point perspective box drawing exercises. where you draw the horizon lines and vanishing points then fill the page with boxes in line with them, use a ruler to get all of the boxes to align to the vanishing point(s), and after doing a lot of that, move on to different shapes. This will help you get more comfortable with warping figures, and making sure they align well with the ground they're standing on and any objects in the environment you've drawn. It will also help you in developing and drawing any backgrounds.

I realize I've just thrown a lot of advice on anatomy tutorials, so getting on to your art itself.
I've gone through your gallery and right away almost all of the figures are cut off at the mid thigh or just past the knee. One or two is a normal framing situation, but I get the feeling you're just choosing to not bother with the feet. Start drawing the feet. Even if you hate the way they look -- ESPECIALLY if you hate the way they look. You're early in your art journey, it's better to keep trying, keep studying and get a janky looking foot, and make some progress, than not try and make no progress.
If I'm reading that incorrectly and it's just a legitimate and consistent framing issue, then you need to work on framing your characters so they're fitting on the page fully. To a lesser extent same goes for hands, there's a few cases where they're in pockets, going off the page, behind backs etc. Hands are very expressive, learning to use them effectively can lend a lot of emotion and impact to your character designs. These are not things that will be fixed over time, you've got a lot of drawing and studying ahead of you, but getting the extremities down will bring your character art to the next level.
As for coloring, you're working with fairly basic palettes, but they work well enough at this point, being a bit more creative with your blending can color mixing can help. Try using reds, violets and/or blues to put shadows instead of darker shades of the same hue. What I would really recommend for some of these pieces, particularly the pen and ink ones is to not be afraid of using heavier outlines and fills in some areas. Right now your pen is exclusively used for one lineweight and only lines. Try getting some more out of it; use it to shade in larger areas and use thicker linework to denote parts of the body are closer to the audience than others. Inks for comic books and manga are great examples of how to effectively use black ink, and really push what you can do with lineweight and fills alone.
Beyond that, there are a good amount of more complicated poses in your gallery, that is definitely good, and I fully encourage more challenging poses in the future, even if it doesn't turn out 100% how you envision it, you're getting closer to that by going for it.

This was very targeted at anatomy, but the fundamentals of art expand way beyond drawing people, if you need further help, or critiques, feel free to make a thread asking for help in the art forum.
Hope this helped in some capacity, have a good day.

SourCherryJack 2022-05-29 10:28:02

I am finally getting around to this request, sorry about the delay.

So I have given you feedback in the art forum before and a lot of it is probably going to sound a bit familiar to what I have to say here, just a heads-up.
Before I get deeper into this let me just say that the two pieces you linked are very similar. They are both extremely stylized, and simple compositions overall, which makes more in depth critiques a bit difficult to give; and very easy for the artist to wave off any critique as "I was going for that" so please bear that in mind.
You have some very pleasant color choices, and show a willingness to use color variation to shade rather than just adding black, or desaturating. This is very good when applied to bright cartoony illustrations, and keeps them having a lot of depth and visual interest.
If anything I would say don't be afraid to get a little bit darker in certain areas, some of the lines on the teeth of the smiley face could benefit from getting a bit darker, closer to the mouth line edges.
The guy with the big nose looks to have a few conflicting light sources going on, he looks good, but, digging into the spot light on the top right, and the edge lighting from the top left, create an awkward depth issue where the nostril, top lip, and bottom lip are all also getting direct light. The droopy top light should probably be getting that indirect green lighting, like the inner neck, and the bottom lip should only be getting ambient light, or to simulate moisture be getting smaller instances of more intensely reflected light.
Again, he looks fine, but going forward figuring out your lighting will help to enhance your less cartoony work, and cartoony exaggerated proportions are good for learning broad strokes overall.

Your use of textures isn't a bad thing. A lot of digital artists are too afraid of being seen as cheaters for using them, or just don't know, or any number of other reasons. I do think they may be overdone at times on the smiley face especially. The red texture works well on the cheeks, and the subtlety in the lighter areas work pretty well. But try toning them down in the darker and midtones a bit, as well as the background. Some visual noise is great, but when there's too much and it begins to make patterns appear, it starts to look a little jarring, or distracting; I get this effect especially with the blue background in the Smiley. A bit less with the green of the Nose Guy, but that's probably attributable to the lighter green hiding the textures more.

Other than toning back the use of these kinds of textures or textured brushes, I would say try just using a simple black pen brush, or a traditional pen and paper. Learn to make texture with just line work, or dots. Doing it yourself like that can force you to be more selective and judicious with your choices of how to convey texture. Hatching, stippling, cross-hatching, strategic use of fills, are all techniques that learning to use effectively with a basic line, can help you a lot in understanding how to communicate different surfaces effectively. Much more than having infinite access to brushes that will do it for you out of the box (not to say that it is bad to use them, it's great to save time, but building a foundation of understanding is going to help you get more out of them in the future).
I've gone through your gallery, and your work overall, much like these, is very pleasant, but also much like these feature almost exclusively the same composition, and approach to backgrounds, which is to say amorphous texture and color. Now, there is nothing wrong with enjoying what you're doing and having a thing, but since you've asked for feedback, I'm going to say it would be good to break out of that box you've built for yourself. Especially if it's uncomfortable and you don't like the early results of trying different types of art.
My advice for a starting point is grab a bic pen, a piece of printer paper and find a good black and white photo of a any person. Make sure there's some really good contrast, and good detail. Draw the person, and that's it. Keep doing portraits, if you get sick of people, move to animals, or even jut objects around your house. You are very comfortable, and proficient at drawing cartoons and from your own head, you have good colors, and your textures are getting there. You've got a lot of bells and whistles, but I get the feeling you need to build a stronger foundation. Stripping away the bells and whistles and working in black and white, with only lines, is about stripped down and focused as it gets.

Hope this was of some help, good luck!