drawing stuff! (Patreon)

 some of the most important features of a good character drawing on a technical level for me are strong form (even if it isn't in perspective, although that does help a ton) and strong gestures. since i paint most of the time, i usually let form issues slide until the grayscale stage where i do a lot of my refinement normally. but since i'm just focusing on drawing here i need to find ways to really sell the form with just lines. i decided that means i probably need to refine the drawing in multiple stages, and so that's what i've been doing.

the most successful sketches from this month started extremely sloppy with a huge brush and no concern for anything but the emotion and concept. after that i refine it once more into something more usable and then once more pulling out the lines from the one before. then i do a final version. all these refinement steps really give me time to pick out what's working and what's not it has really improved my workflow.

the drawing at the top i consider one of the most successful from this month and the drawings at the bottom i consider a failure, at least as far as the process goes. the two at the bottom started too refined and not nearly as expressive as i'd like. a drawing to me can only really get less expressive as it's cleaned up, so it needs to start by pushing the expression and emotion and story as much as possible from the get go. in the future, that's the goal.

all of these characters were meant to be the ice demon, but none of them really fit the theme as much as i'd have liked. the eye character got turned into something completely different, as will the bottom right character. the bottom left is who i decided to use for this character but i feel like if i took another few cracks at it i would have something more memorable.

in this next month i'll be continuing to work on this and figuring out more about where i want my characters to go. i'll have the character for this month up here soon, thanks for yalls support!