Hello! :D Do you have any advice on drawing creatures at different angles? I struggle a lot with coming up with a pose and trying to draw it at another angle, and in your work your anatomy, shading/lighting, proportions and foreshortening are always just so perfect ;w; In particular Tau’s reference sheet, those greyscale headshots of him are so incredible that they look like 3D models :’) Thank you for your time!
When i know that i’m looking at a figure or an environment that i will draw a lot more and very regularly in the future, i make a 3D model.
But most of the time i don’t use the model. It’s best to use it in specific situations, like when you are trying to get the hang of the design (the end goal of that is being able to draw it from memory alone with ease). Or when you make a reference sheet, because the accuracy should be top notch there. Just sculpting a model of it alone helps, because the knowledge you gain from sculpting the design will carry over to 2D, whether you like it or not, you really have no say in it, fortunately. :p
draw, fail, delete, draw, fail, delete, draw, fail, delete, until success
In contrast with that, i don’t have a model for most of my designs, including these two. Most of the time what i like to do i’d call “brute-forcing” accuracy. That is… drawing it and deleting it over and over and over again, without help, until it looks right. I like to think of it as making my brain’s 3D software stronger.
observe & learn & memorize & draw relevant real life things
Drawing from life/photo is to train your brain software too. You basically suggest to it, for example “this shading is correct in these lighting conditions on this material, code it into System32”. By this, while drawing from memory/imagination, you relegated the task of accurate shading to your subconscious and you can spend your active concentration on better things.
(this example image is more like a joke, but if i ever draw Pegasus in a catbread pose again, i will have a better idea of what to do and what not to do - and i will certainly not be drawing him like this next time i use this pose)
construct and transform the figure using basic shapes
You can also use that tecnique everyone keeps recommending for everything that is basically “break the figure down into simple shapes like cylinders, orbs, cones, squares, etc and transform those shapes”. E.g.: don’t think of it as a bird’s wing, think of it as a sheet of paper. If the base shape looks ok after you draw it from a different angle, it will also look ok after you put the details back on it. Probably. Art is an art, not a science. The reason everybody keeps recommending this technique is because it’s really effective, when done right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical) - and train your brain to make use of this thing too.
(like this but with more effort)
get intimately familiar with your design
Practice/repetition/familiarity can’t (or maybe shouldn’t) be skipped, needless to say. If you already drew pigeon wings 4999 different ways, the 5000th will not be as hard to draw as if you have only drawn pigeon wings 50 times before.
Also pays off to get familiar with your creature’s range of motions, behaviors, relative sizes of bodyparts, etc. Every new pose and angle for every different design you draw is more or less like uncharted land.
if it looks wrong, it isn’t necessarily wrong
Maybe this is a very niche scenario, i don’t know, but sometimes when one design looks terrible/wrong from another angle it’s because that is how it looks from another angle. It tends to happen when i couldn’t predict that the design will not look good from any other angle, or when my brain gets stuck on a belief (e.g. when i was like 8, i thought that bones can’t have a bent shape because they are rigid so if they bent they would break. I drew very… very straight limbs for a while). This is another reason for me to make a 3D model. It’s good for troubleshooting.
“I struggle a lot with coming up with a pose and trying to draw it at another angle” is how i feel too. More often than not. If you want to be varied and draw many kinds of Things, new things all the time, struggle will be riding shotgun in your car forever. Name your struggle. I’ll name mine Bob. Bob might be a douche canoe, but he is my douche canoe. Life is never dull when Bob’s around. I hope these tips will make your Bob more fun too.
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