Topics

1

Tips and Tutorials / Facial Features - Head Proportions

« on: December 01, 2018, 09:36:59 PM »

This tutorial is the start of a series where I'll reiterate the curriculum of my Figure Drawing classes except I'll be applying the techniques to use with Anime and stylized work.

Part 1 Basic Proportions

Draw a 2 x 3 box (this box is not an exact measurement)



Split the box in half



Split the box in half again



Take the bottom two rectangles and split them in half. These two lines could be used to determine the neck.



Take the bottom 4 rectangles and split them in half again.



Place the head inside the box. The head should meet the verticle edges of the box just slightly above the halfway point.



Split the bottom half in half again horizontally. This will show us where to place the nose drawn in blue.



Draw the nose within 2 rectangles. These two rectanges make up the width of the eyes drawn in blue. Place the bottom of the eyes under the halfway point. There should be an eye's width of distance between the two eyes and half an eye's distance between the eyes and the perimeter of the box.



Split the very bottom section in half again. This will show us where to draw the mouth.



Split the area under the nose in half again. We'll use this teal line to define where to place the lips. The lips should split along this line. The bottom lip should meet the blue line and the top lip should not reach the nose.



Draw the eyebrows above the eyes following the trail of the nose. We can use the eyebrows as a general guide of how to place the hairline.



Place the hairline following the shape of the eyebrows. The hairline should be more rectangular while the head stays circular.



Use the hairline to see where the roots of the hair should be placed.

Part 2 Manipulate Eye Size and Style

Here I've drawn two additional lines representing the bottom of the eye. How far down you place these affects both how young your character will look and how abstract your style will become.



Here I've drawn the eye in the larger box. Already the character looks much younger.



Here the character looks more like a child. You could also change the nose to make it less prominent and the cheeks to be more prominent. Also children's heads will sometimes be more square than rectangular.

Finalized versions

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

2

Tips and Tutorials / Color

« on: August 22, 2018, 03:21:49 PM »

Part 1: Mixing Colors

So you've probably heard of these acronyms

Traditional Media: RYB (Red, Yellow, Blue)
Digital Media: RGB (Red, Green, Blue)
Printmaking: CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black)

If you're wondering, CMYK was made because printing is done using subtractive media + black. Printers achieve white using the white of the paper and desaturate colors by applying less ink.

When mixing colors in paint or ink the colors will get darker. When mixing with light, the colors turn brighter. When I took a painting class we used only 4 colors: Red, Yellow, Blue and White and we were able to make any color on the spectrum. However with this method colors like Cyan and Magenta may appear less saturated.

You can mix to create every color obviously, but for instance lets look at how skin color is mixed. You may here people say that "green" is mixed into skin and this is true, but it's a little ingenuine to the process. Skin is primarily made of a mixture between red and yellow. Fully saturated it should appear Orange.

In order to get that peach color we know and love you must add white. In my personal artwork I like to work with highly saturated colors. But skin is not fully saturated in reality. It is very grey and "neutralized". Neutralization is what happens when you mix complementary colors to create what is called a "chromatic grey". Green is the complement of Red and we know that skin is made of Red and Yellow. Green won't be visible when you mix it, but it will neutralize the Red and Yellow because it is made of Blue and Yellow. In my painting class we added blue to it instead of green. The effect is the same, but more drastic so you have to mix carefully.

Blue will neutralize Red and Yellow.
Red+Blue+Yellow = Black
Black + White = Grey

If we wanted to make brown skin we would add black. And again you would add blue to neutralize it slightly.

Part 2: Dynamic Reflections

If you turn on a blue light you expect to see blue on your face right? What if you turn on a white light in a room full of blue walls. You would see blue on the other side of your face. That's because the surfaces reflect their color around them and your skin will reflect it back. Your skin is more reflective than most types of clothes. If you dye your hair a bright color you would see the color being reflected onto your skin.

If you drew a person in a blue room and they had red-tinted skin they would feel out of place, they would look "photoshoped"

This may hurt your eyes to look at (and it's a bit of an extreme example). But I want you to see how her lime green dress reflects the color green onto her arms.

Spoiler

This is a screenshot from the Fate series. You can see how the animators have shown the yellow glow from the sword appear on her body, but also the blue from her clothes and the environment is mixed into the color of her armor. Notice how the yellow causes her arm to appear green.

3

General Discussion / How to actually give constructive criticism

« on: June 22, 2018, 08:27:17 AM »

A lot of people have different stances on criticism. Most people don't like the idea of saying something nice about a piece at all when criticizing it, but that's not necessarily best.

Typically we use the term "constructive criticism" when we're telling people not to insult each other on these forums, or go off topic and just consider everything else constructive. But not all criticism is constructive, it can be as destructive as insults.

What I've found is the most constructive way to give criticism, based on the input of professional artists, is to say at least 1 good thing, and at least 1 bad thing. Even if a piece is so bad all you like about it is the fact that the artist was ambitious enough to try or it's so good that your only problem with it is the fact that there isn't any more of it. These are both valid points that any person looking to improve would need to set their pride aside and consider. It might seem crazy at first that you need to come up with something good or something bad even when the piece feels perfect or just feels terrible, but there's a reason.

The goal of constructive criticism is to help the artist or creator's next work be better than the last. In order to improve you have to:

A. Continue doing the things that are successful.
B. Stop doing the things that are not successful.

If you have no idea what's successful about your work, because the critic only focuses on the bad, you have no foundation to fix your next piece on. You might as well assume everything is bad and try something completely different. You'll end up abandoning strengths that were actually helping you in your work because you thought they were weaknesses.

If no one ever brings up what's wrong with your work, you'll never try to fix it. You'll continue letting the same problems keep you down and stagnate when you should be improving. You'll become more prideful of your work because the first person to say something bad about it will seem like a complete culture shock, and everyone who ever said something good about it is now a type of evidence preventing you from accepting its flaws.

This is where criticism can become destructive. This goes for any type of creative work, not just illustration.

4

General Discussion / Humble Artists

« on: February 10, 2018, 03:41:26 PM »

I kinda noticed some of the best artists here have very humble names for their threads, and beginners have explosive names.

e.g.

"Wanna see some of my little doodles?"

Spoiler

"Behold the Amazing Gallery of the Greatest Artist!"

Spoiler

I'm not trying to call people out because I did this too when I was getting started. And I do this stuff now Why do we do this? We're so proud when we're just getting started, and then so humble once we're actually doing something great.

Is this because we got beat down so much along the way? Are we sick of the drawing by the time we're finished with it because it took so long? I feel like it's a combination, probably some lean more towards one than the other. I remember my professor in Drawing 1 called my final project a "great under-drawing" as if I spent 18 hours laying down the guidelines for a drawing.

Pablo Picasso said "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

There's something beautiful about this statement. My child self painted all the time, but would I have ever touched paint again if Painting I & II wasn't a prerequisite for my major? The fear of drawing a bad drawing is something we don't have as children, or even as beginners.

Sometimes I find the work of beginners more fun to look at. Because you can see the ambition and emotions in spite of certain skills not being there.

5

Video / PC Games / Blade Reglia [Indie Project]

« on: February 06, 2018, 04:43:25 PM »

This is the main thread for the game my partners and I have been working on.

About the game
Blade Regalia is an Anime-styled multiplayer online fighting game. Similar to games like Overwatch, DotA, Paladins and Gigantic but more melee focused. It has almost 200 playable characters with wildly different abilities and mechanics planned, and the game is built around team-vs-team objective-based gameplay.

More artwork and screenshots

Want to learn more? Join us on discord.
https://discord.gg/x5anSnH

6

Tips and Tutorials / The Mistake New Manga Artists Make

« on: May 20, 2017, 02:19:32 AM »

I am a visual art student majoring in Drawing and Painting and I wanted to share some things I've learned I was wrong about when I was aspiring to become a manga artist.

1. Traditional art and manga art require different skills
When I began my studies I believed many of the things I was doing were irrelevant to my end goals. But as I've learned more about art I've become more perceptive and it's clear that many great manga artists were visual arts students or were perhaps as observant and obsessive as the artists of the renaissance. For instance, how many aspiring manga artists know what "reflected light" is? The level of realism that simple illusion adds to the image is extraordinary. Many great manga artists are familiar with this construct most people don't know exists. Many great manga artists are well aware of all these fundamentals pioneered by ancient Greek and renaissance artists.

2. Practice drawing manga by looking at manga
This is a trap. Manga artists take reality and generalize it just enough to fit their needs. When you draw what you see, you will naturally generalize it in some way. So when you draw from manga, you generalize a generalization ending up with something much less attractive than the artwork you saw. This greatly hinders the natural development of your skills in portraying perspective, anatomy, balance, and general art skills.

3. Practice means drawing the same thing over and over again.
Using repetition as practice is only necessary for when you have to start drawing from imagination and drawing rapidly. Practice should be in your studies. You should always be studying reality and practice should be you drawing the same thing over and over again until it starts to look the way you want it to. This is more than making a page full of hands, this is drawing a hand, studying hands, then drawing then hand again with the sole purpose of making that hand look better than the last.

4. Specific body parts are my weakness
Many artists struggle with hands or backgrounds. This happens when you don't use observation and study based practice to illustrate. If you can draw a face, you can draw hands, if you can't draw hands, you probably can't draw a face very well. Generally we find generalized tactics to give the impression of the body but these tactics don't go so well with everything else or we just weren't taught a tactic specifically for a tree so we don't draw trees. You have to be able to look at a form and turn it into lines, you have to be able to imagine a silhouette. If you can do that, you can draw anything.

7

Develop Your Story / Sentieria

« on: June 18, 2016, 03:47:30 AM »

Sentieria 2016. Finally ready to revive this one.

This story is a bit more lighthearted than what I usually write.

Introduction to the story and setting.
The spirit is the force of creation, the soul in man, the force that keeps time moving, the energy in all things. All things were created by the greatest spirit in existence, Goddess. Now the Sentierians have learned how to control the spirits within themselves to mold the natural world. But the world of Sentieria has recently become plagued with an accursed mist. The mist slowly rots away all life in the areas in engulfs and replaces the inhabitants with vicious monsters. In order to maintain their peaceful lives at home, fighters travel all over the world attempting to strike the mist at it source before it can reach home.

The mist began to appear in the far east and is slowly but surely spreading to consume the entire motherland. Esashi Arishima transfers to Temple Knights Spirit Academy as a third year student in order to escape the thick mist in her home country. The academy was formed to train adventurers to combat the accursed mist. However, it isn't her ethnicity in which students quickly become infatuated, but the secrets behind her escape.

8

Develop Your Story / FNO

« on: April 03, 2015, 01:17:29 PM »

The Fall of Nations Online

About FNO

The Fall of Nations Online is a virtual reality MMORPG where players build up small communities into ruling nations. As the nations grow in size and power they also become more volatile. Guilds of players lord over smaller guilds in the land and their guild members makeup the ruling class.

Tara, like all other players finds herself trapped inside the in game world as her avatar, however for some unknown reason she has lost all of her memories of her past within the game and back home. Aided by a very eccentric friend, Tara journeys around the in-game world searching for friends and answers and involuntarily becoming the catalyst that destroys every nation she comes across.

Chapter 1: The Fall of Tara

Track Progress

List of revisions of chapter 1. Characters, objects or events revealed in one revision may not exist in the story represented by the next.
Version 1
Version 1.1
Version 2
Version 3
Version 4
Version 5
Version 6 (Current)

Prologue/Introductory scene revisions
Version 1 (For chapter 1 version 4)
Version 2 (For chapter 1 version 5)
Version 3 (Current, Not posted)

Characters revealed in the revisions
Tara: The protagonist of FNO, Tara has suddenly been struck with hysterical amnesia in the midst of playing a VMMORPG. Tara is uncovering a past of destruction and deceit by her hands with retribution just around the corner.
Takahashi: (Removed) See version 1.
Elizabeth: (Removed) See version 1.
Lynn: (Removed) See version 1.
Viviana: (Removed) See version 2
Damian: (Removed) See version 2 or Prologue Version 2
Sabrina: (Removed) See Prologue Version 2
Lucius: Mysterious and benevolent, Lucius is the guild leader of 403 Forbidden, a guild that gets its name from the error code that appears when someone attempts to log out of the game. Lucius tends to act like a guardian angel for Tara, and he can be very optimistic and cheerful towards threatening situations.
Tiffany: A member of 403 Forbidden.
Keegan Chess: Game Master and original creator of FNO.
Reina: A close friend to Tara. Reina is meant to appear as benignly insane and blissfully ignorant though at times she can seem well informed. Reina is impulsively affectionate and always drawn to Tara. Reina's character is true to the role of the class she plays within the game, the Lunatic.
Osval: The guild leader of Bless. Bless is a guild of some extraordinarily powerful players who seem to all be working towards becoming as powerful as possible.
Olsin: A member of Bless. Olsin tends to appear more evil than he truly is. His deceitful ways and cruel methods don't help his case however there are times when Olsin can be very selfless. To him every player of FNO is little more than his puppet.
Melanie: A member of Bless.
Danielle: A member of Bless. Danielle was forced into Servitude to the entire guild of Bless due to a deceitful exchange between her and Tara. Danielle however seems to have difficulty expressing herself or she is afraid to show her feelings, but one thing she cannot hide is her love for teaching.
Kesashi: The leader of Fallen Kings, a guild of 5 powerful players who control nearly half of the entire world of FNO. The Fallen King's empire has some influence spread to every corner of FNO.
Jordan: Playing under the name Lord_King, Jordan is a member of Fallen Kings.
Nypheria: A member of Fallen Kings.
Taikichi: A member of Fallen Kings.
Kairon: A member of Fallen kings.

9

Discussions / Sentieria

« on: July 17, 2014, 06:12:51 AM »

Please direct all comments on Sentieria stories here.

Dark Lineage is currently the first and only story of Project Sentieria.

Introduction to Dark Lineage
Dark Lineage is a dramatic story about an orphaned girl who comes across a discarded sword. The sword releases a dark power in her. After she learns to control it, she learns why her family was killed, and she decides to murder those responsible.

10

Manga Creations / Dark Lineage

« on: July 17, 2014, 04:26:36 AM »

Please direct all comments to the current discussion page

Dark Lineage

I will be posting both the manga script, and the pure story plot here being as the manga script may be very difficult to grasp in the way i've developed it.

Preview:

Script

Dark Lineage

Chapter 1

Page 1
Panel 1 – Inferior, Top, Right, extended to left border
Speaking (centered, top) (Character undefined): By my calculations, you’ve made a grave mistake my Lord.
Description: Unsheathed Katana stuck in the dirt standing straight. Focus on the katana with a bright gleam on the blade. The Katana is in an inactive battlefield. Afternoon Daylight.

Panel 2 – Superior, Top, Left, Undefined
Character-Action: Young Esashi, pointing towards battlefield. Focus on Face, lower body not in view. Blissful happiness, speaking.

The words Superior and Inferior will refer the panel placement on a 3 dimensional grid. Inferior panels may have speech bubbles, bodies or actions placed on top of them.

Undefined panels will refer to panels that do not have a square border, often being like a character's body png'ed on top of another panel.

Narrative

“By my calculations you’ve made a grave mistake my Lord,” a man says.
Two orphans approach an old battlefield hoping to loot the area. The oldest tasks her sister with helping carry equipment and quickly follow her around.

11

Develop Your Story / Sentieria

« on: January 04, 2014, 05:47:10 AM »

Sentieria: Dark Lineage. Full Revival coming soon

12

Develop Your Story / Sentieria Legends

« on: August 05, 2013, 06:52:13 PM »

Genre: Romance, Comedy, Action, Fantasy, Drama. Some intense horror is used, but the story is mainly a drama.

Age group: PG 13 Moderate Gore, Some content may not be appropriate for children under the age of 13.

Setting: Medieval Fantasy World known as Sentieria

Synopsis: A young, orphaned girl named Esashi Arashi is enlisted into a military school where they are training a new kind of soldier the world refers to as "legends".

13

Manga Art Gallery / Kesashi's Gallery

« on: July 22, 2013, 02:43:57 AM »

I've been here for a long time and most of the old links are broken. I think some people would still like to see how I've progressed so I'll repost the images. If a link breaks again (facebook links tend to expire) just tell me.

2010

The oldest image I can find on my hard drives.

Darlynne

2011

Esashi

Josue

Kesashi

Esashi (a sprite made for animation)

Ikaki (sketch)

Ikaki (Vector)

RPG Warrior

Love

RPG Class

Edgy Sketch

Edgy Vector

Robot Parts

2012

Much of my vector art was traced on top of a proffesional artist's piece at this time.

Traced

Traced

Traced

Traced

Traced

Traced

Taikichi

Comic Book Sketch (When you see it)

Comic Book Sketch 2

Comic Book Vector

Fiesta Online Fan Art

Moline Sketch

Moline Vector

Shundai

It's for the church

Demica

2013 (When I Joined MR)

A Map

Nameless

My first colored pencil portrait

King

Ella Mental

The Lords

Improvement Checkpoint

Tera

Julian

The Teacher

Face in profile

First Drawing at MR

Comic Book in Colored Pencil

Comic Book in Colored Pencil 2

Comic Book in Colored Pencil 3

Fight Scene

Esashi as a girl

Spoiler

2014

Not actually sisters

Colored Pencil Comic Book

Colored Pencil Comic Book 2

Colored Pencil Comic Book 3

Colored Pencil Comic Book 4

Daniela

Figure Drawing

Fight Scene

Esashi embracing her heritage

New costume for Esashi

Colored Pencil Portrait of Esashi

Chibi Esashi

Gemstones

Esashi

Jesus

2015

Reina

Colored Pencil Art

The Virgin Mary

Edgy Heart

Spoiler

Spoiler

A Self Portrait

Both Characters are a portrait of me.

Spoiler

2016

Gemstones

Esashi Again

Tara

Tara

Colored Pencil Portrait (Taikichi)

Colored Pencil Portrait (Tara)

Caroline

Comic Book

2017

New Media

New Art Style

Portrait of a friend drawn from life

Jeremy

Spoiler

The Vision

The Game

2018

Spoiler

14

Welcome Center / Salutations ~

« on: July 22, 2013, 02:07:09 AM »

Taylon Salter, pleased to meet you. I'm a 15 year old manga artist, I've been drawing anime since I was nine. I've just been looking for a nice place to critique my work rather than comparing it to professional art and enhancing my skill that way. I learned how to draw from my brother who taught himself from watching dragon ball Z and other old animes. I adopted my own style(based on traditional anime) and story for my artwork. I'll put more artwork in a gallery thread so you can get a better understanding of my art style.

I've also experimented with realism, but the main issue in that is I only want to use a pencil, and color pencils, and, occasionally, Anime Studio.

In short:

Name: Taylon E. Salter
Location: United States of America
Age: 15
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: Pure blood African American(but i do have a lighter skin tone).
School: Harmony School of Innovation(College preparatory charter school)
Constellation: Aries(only know that because of beyblade)
Recommendations: My art teacher says I'm good because I've been drawing for a long time, but I don't have my fundamentals down.
Best Subject: English
Favorite Subject: math
Occupation: Grammar Nazi in training.
Favorite Animes: I don't like any animes enough to pick favorites, but my favorite genres are fantasy and action.

Artwork preview

Spoiler

Spoiler

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