About an hour. (My new scanner is making it all speckled an' ♥♥♥♥. Sigh.)

EDIT: blurred it a bit to fix the speckles.

That looks nice, but yeah, a shame about the speckles. What mode are you scanning in (if applicable)? The scanner I have can be set to colour, grayscale and black & white. Pencil drawings are best picked up in grayscale mode I find.

I do grayscale too, but I also up the contrast and lower the brightness a bit.

Just scan at 1200DPI, max contrast the whole thing like 3-4 times and scale down by 2/3.

maximdude is that a baby puking rainbows

because i don't know whether to laugh or run away in horror

Also, at the risk of being chastised and lamented...



Tearing the guy next to you in half is Demonese for "i do not come in peace, start dying". Also, clouds are evil things, they shouldn't be so hard to draw. :c

Run away laughing in horror.

For a second I thought that might be a game of some kind and I started throwing money at my monitor, then I realized it's probably just art

@ MLC: good portrait. Your facial features are getting better. A few things though, the eyes are my main criticism, the iris is enormous in the eye and no offense but the eye is almost "anime sized". The lower eyelid eyelash shadow seems too thick, like mascara. A natural eye has so few lashes on the lower lid that they really cant be seen.
Here's an eye in greyscale and then the same eye reduced to 10 shades, notice the deep shadow of the top eyelid yet no hint of lower lid.

All the shadows are nice and seem anatomically correct (the face does however look very gaunt due to the deep shadows under the cheekbones), the nose might benefit from a darker shadow below it to make it pop more. The left ear is a tad low compared to the right. Anyway yea, just need to study some eyes a little more, think of them with light and shade in mind rather than what an eye symbolically looks like, keep it up.

Aye, I remember reaching a new level of enlightenment when I started at looking sow eyes can be constructed by paying attention to shades and stuff.
Or something like that.
Since then I started trying to develop a way for me to draw faces simply and it started swaying towards looking like manga which is what I was trying to avoid.
But anyway, I wanted to try making lots of variations from a base model. So here's some officer kind of get up.

Matty, looks like a pretty solid character, however I do see some things that could be improved, starting with the face, I made some quick edits to the overall construction:

Main changes are: Shape of the cranium, brought the mouth up a tad (mouth is about 2/3rds up between chin and nose, closer to the nose), changed the jaw shape as yours seemed very square, brought cheek bone up and softened the shape, ear was to small.
As for the overall body of the man, at first I thought the arms were simply too long but I think that actually his arms are proportionally correct but his lower body, just about past his waist, begins to shrink in proportion. His right leg is posed in a way that looks painful because one foot is facing forward and the other is facing in almost the opposite direction. The clothing is well designed and seems fitting though.

Very sound advice indeed and much appreciated.
Humans seem have an annoying tendency to be complex, your comparison makes me want to concentrate on pinning down faces. A lot.

But gaunts have no faces! The bloody flying bastards came and snatched me dog! I killed 'em later, and to me surprise: the demon had nothing on his head but a pair o' ears!

Faces are very interesting, Matty. I've committed about a 50 pages of my sketchbook to pinning them down myself.

Madmax, you're completely right, but in my defense I wasn't really concerned with realism.
I started with a little sketch and decided to shade it, without changing any of the lines really. I'm just sketching this off the top of my head as well, no references.


About another hour on top of the last spent muddling around with my mechanical pencil.

Thanks Maxim, it appears that ridiculous dpi levels and a bit of smoothing helped enormously. It probably didn't help that the actual drawing is about two inches wide.

Was working on my facial topology in a sculpt, then decided what the hell and did a paintover. 13 colour skin ramp + grey + 2 blues.

cheek and chin topo are still crappy. bridge of nose too

http://filesmelt.com/dl/Robowalk.gif
Because I ♥♥♥♥ up the antenna and it looks weird on a dark background.