How do you get your art/character interactions to be so expressive and organic? I've loved your art and ocs for years and keep coming back once in a while to skim through your Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls art to get inspired, so I wondered if you did specific art studies to get to where your art is right now?
Thank you for the compliment! I've got three answers (or exercises) for you and you can take them as you like 'em underneath the cut.
They are in order from Most Annoying to Most Pleasing.
The Noble Still Life
My parents threw me into art classes at around 6 years old. I don't mean to imply that that somehow makes me a better artist out of the gate--it truly doesn't--but it does mean that I've been doing still life studies for a sad but significant portion of my life. And as much as I hate drawing stupid fruit arranged with other stupid shit on stupid pieces of fabric, still life studies were really helpful across the board and especially with developing a sense of how shit works. ... Even if I go on to blissfully ignore what I've learned and draw fabric folds however the hell I want and put shadows wherever I damn well please.
The Ye Olde Master Study
As part of secondary school, we were also trotted out to local museums and parks and whatnot and told to just... have at it. So a lot of my sketchbooks from that time are filled with studies of library-lion-this and portrait-of-supposedly-important-man-that. Then, back in class, we were asked to imitate the old masters. Old Masters studies are really fucking fun and some of my favourite commissions have started out with phrases like "Can you recreate this Benjamin Constant painting but with my character as Empress Theodora?" or "How about a different Constant painting of Theodora?" I also do master-ish studies with my own digital paintings, like this one of Samson and this one of Bree. I think it's a fun exercise because it pushes me out of my comfort zone even if the end result doesn't look all that sophisticated or much like the original.
The Desperate Scribbles of the Human Form~
I should put gesture drawings and anatomy studies before master studies because in theory you need to know how to draw bodies before you start trying to paint in imitation of Caravaggio. (Now that I think about it, a deep knowledge of fruit is also essential to Caravaggio... but I digress.) In my art class, gesture drawings were more about flow and movement than it was about your unnerving ability to draw an elbow. Our teachers broke us using the Boiling Frog Technique, which was to say that they lulled us into a false sense of security by allowing us to sketch the person modelling for 10 minutes. Then 5 minutes. Then 3 minutes. Then 2 minutes. Then 1 minute. Then 30 seconds because they were sadists. It is unfortunately an effective way of teaching 1) how bodies move and 2) how to capture the essence of a pose rather than the strict reality of it.
But I really like anatomy studies and I really, really like drawing hands. And more hands. And even more hands. And then some more hands just in case. And then, just to shock and surprise everyone, a torso. A good chunk of my sketchbook is just me drawing faces and hands and eyeballs and hands and faces and sometimes feet when I can't remember how ankles work.
Other Weird Tips That Don't Quite Count As Studies:
If you don't wanna sketch in a museum or go to a park or stare at a stranger's ankles to figure out how ankles work, then go pull up fantasy stock photos on DeviantArt or take a photo of yourself and then get to sketching. That's what I do!
Watch a shitton of animated films. There's a fluidity & theatricality to how characters move in animated films that I love. Sometimes it seems like every inch of the character is expressing the emotion they're feeling. I find it personally inspirational even if I feel like gnawing off my own hand every time I attempt to draw my own frame-by-frame animation.
Study film. I studied film very, very briefly and a wee snippet of that was studying storyboards (as in: in library, with book) and doing some storyboard art projects (as in: at desk, with sketchbook). I treat every comic I do as if I was storyboarding the animated scene from the disjointed animated film in my brain and then polish it up to make it more readable/enjoyable.
Hope that helps!