That’s awesome! Thanks for the feedback guys, this is the reason why I love these boards. And Sam, I’m glad you say that about the space ship because the bottom two were from a couple months ago and the space ship was done yesterday and I’ve been working on my perspective, so it’s definitely been getting better.
And apowers, I’ll give being really loose a go, I have a real difficult time with it right now, but I want to see if that helps and also thanks for the advice about the backgrounds!
Phone sketch from today, focusing on perspective, it was loose until the page looked nice then I got tight and the bottom right corner, the last sketch is a little off.
Ditch the markers for a few weeks and focus on line quality and weight. Get your perspective dialed in better and be more deliberate with your mark making. Straight lines should be straight and curves should be curved. You’re swinging your arm on your elbow and everything has the same slightly bent line character.
But line quality is the main issue. Single line weight images filled in with flat color end up looking like animation cells, cartoony as you said.
I agree about focusing on the lines for now … but don’t necessarily only use ballpoint or other pens.Some people do great with ballpoints but I have trouble because you have to go over the lines a lot before you can get any real lineweights. It’s also very hard to make curves / ellipses bolder without getting super hairy. A lot of people recommend doing linework exercises with standard Sharpie – it makes you commit to each line (and can be very fast). Markers can be great for linework alone.
If you see Jeff Smith’s (Concept Sketches - Linework - Single concept per page by Jeff Smith at Coroflot.com) stuff like the image below, you can imagine how quick it can be … IMO quicker but cleaner than you could do with a ballpoint in the same amount of time. You can also get the same effect with felt-tips pens or even cheap-o Crayola Supertips (though they might bleed if you shade later).
A lot of it might be how you’re treating edges, corners, groupings and material faces - take a look at real objects mimic’ing the feel you’re going for and duplicate some of what you see on a few sketches, you’ll find that a light hand in those areas will help sell the idea and take out some of that cartoon’y look you wondered about.
good, good, keep going. Try making lines that denote the perimeter a little thicker and darker. Any line you can “tuck your hand behind”. Also, try making your cross hatches a little closer together/more of them and let them go slightly beyond the perimeter of the shadows line (note Jeff;s sketch above with that. Let your lines go past where they intersect with other lines. Lastly, try incorporating some thick to thin lines. The thick to thins really draw the eye into the sketch.
It’s great to be ambitious in your subject matter as you’ll do better work drawing something you are excited about as opposed to something you find mundane or tedious. But having said that, don’t knock the value of just sketching very simple shapes - Cubes, Cylinders, Spheres, etc.
Taking a little time at the beginning of your sketch session to bust out a few simple objects can help get you in sketch mode by letting you focus on the style of the drawing rather than the subject matter.
Theres no shame in going back to basics once in a while.
In the order that your latest sketches are posted, it looks to me like you are taking steps in the right direction. The bottom page looks a bit looser and I can spot some areas where the line weight difference is starting to add that “sketchy” POP that we all love so much.
You might like to try drawing cubes to warm up and then filling in the sides with ellipses like in the example below (actually just found the site but it has a lot of good info if you keep looking, is it from another C77 poster?). I noticed after doing only pages of ellipses that it was harder to draw an ellipse in the context of the rest of a sketch, but this helps that.
Robby-roy’s post is pretty important to learn because ellipses and cubes are building blocks for objects.
For instance, if you set a wheelbase for a car with ellipses, then you can use the box to find other proportions. If you use the cube then you can draw the ellipse etc.
Thanks for the post Robby-Roy, good stuff! I remember doing that exercise in first year but I was never really good at it so I think I gave up. Gotta get back on the horse!
Some more exercises I’ve been doing: