Hello there! :D I recently stumbled upon your blog, and I have a question:
Any art tips? I've been recently trying to study various artists and their way of drawing their own respective types of characters. (Such as humans, dragons, etc. And as of now, Transformers!)
You're art is so captivating!
(You may answer this however you like, I'm just curious how you motivate yourself to create such wonderful things.)
Thank you for your time :)
I'm not that good to give any tips, specially since I usually rawdow my way into things lmao. I think I can still give some advise.
Before starting drawing Transformers (or mecha, for that matter) I can say I was a pretty decent artist, I guess. I knew all the fundaments and stuff and I worked (still do) profissionally as an animator.
So when I started drawings TF my first drawings were BAD (I ain't showing it). So after trying to rawdog through it I took some advise I saw on Twitter - I don't remember who posted it but if they ever read this post they will know: you need to concentrate ON SHAPES!
Like it seem kinda obvious if you are an TF artist (since these guys are just a bunch a blocks) but it kinda made me realise how to be a good artist you need to develop a "4D" vision for things - it goes a bit beyond understand how shadows and light work, you need to see a square and visualise in your mind "right now I only see one side of this block, but if I spin it a bit to the right, I'll see 3 sides. I need to figure out how to do that", if you know what I mean.
So you know that boring ass exercise where you need to draw a ton of cubes on a grid? Unfortunatelly it works.
Also you don't need to do "clean" drawings unless you really want it or your job requires so (like, if you want to work as a clean up animator learning to use vector will save you). My hand is not very firm and I have difficultty doing lineart, even traditionally. So most of my drawings are kinda sketchy nowadays. I used to feel bad about it but I actually enjoy it now.
Also for animation, here's my very personal advise: EVERYTHING IS BALL! Head? BALL! Walk? BALL! Jump? BALL! Lipsync? BALL!!! Cubes and metals? REALLY HEAVY BALLS!!! You master the ball kicking and (the 12 principles of animation) and anything is possible.
Your biggest setback will be how much time you are willing to put on it. Drawing robots still takes time. Animating takes a lot of time. Animating robots takes a TON of time. But its fun. I don't have as much time to do exercises anymore, so unfortunately I'm still rawdogging stuff, but I always try to learn something trying new things and using reality as reference! So if you can and have time also do some life drawing sections, its great.
Anyway thanks for my listening to my yapping
