Spring RTS Engine

mr sharpoblunto wrote:

Guessmyname wrote:You lose a lot in the colouring process

I disagree, You gain alot in the coluring process, in fact I think colouring goes a long way toward covering mediocre drawing skills (i.e in my case :-))

a pic I made
heres another
and, another

Okayyyy, when you're not good at colouring, you lose a lot of detail

Holy mother of peeweeslaughter.

Mr sharpo, You win drawing/painting.

The sky in the second pic is awesomeness.

Caydr wrote:Have you tried using higher resolution when drawing those, GMN? At about 300, you shouldn't get the pixelization around the color borders.

I scan them in at 300 dp, but that's a pencil drawing. The color border issue is due to me not putting a high enough threshold on the colour fill tool

Ohhh...you draw it on paper THEN put it in the computer...

I keep doing it the other way around...

Guessmyname wrote: I scan them in at 300 dp, but that's a pencil drawing. The color border issue is due to me not putting a high enough threshold on the colour fill tool

You want to make the scanned lines a transparent layer with only the lines being visible (dunno how you do this in tha gimp) but I'm sure theres lots of good tuts on how to do it. In paint shop pro you create a layer mask from source luminance, or in photoshop you could set the layer blending to multiply. Once you've done that darken your lines with the levels/brightness & contrast tools and create a colour layer behind the lines layer.

Now you're free to paint all the colour in without disturbing the lines on the layer above and you shouldn't have the problem of jaggy artifacts around the outlines

Some more, which I haven't inked or anything, just fresh scans (though the last had to be scaled down, as it took up an entire page of my notebook whilst each of the other characters took up about 20% of a page)


Random bloke with a sword


Inquisitorial Officers (The foot in the top left corner belongs to the 'Swordsbloke' above - they were drawn on the same page)


Another Inquisitorial Officer. I've messed her hands up something awful

There are others, but they're in a large artbook which doesn't lend itself well to scanning...

Good drawing is a function of understanding how light falls on objects from it's source. Your drawings mostly look amateurish because you completely ignore lighting and only draw form. Understanding form for an artist is only a precursor to understanding how light casts itself over that form.

Guess: for inking in gimp, especially for the simple formed characters you're working with here, it's best to use the pathing tool. Speeds things up and makes it easier to do lots of complicated curves, that is of course unless you have a gimp compatible wacom that is large enough to make lining easy.

I want a wacom tablet...

How much do good wacom tablets cost, by the way?

EDIT: Also, Tara from Insurgency Devision!



Take special note of the gun she's holding. That's a very special gun.

Depends. The brand name one's aren't cheap, around 300 dollars usually, though they come with a fairly functional version of photo shop. The small graphics tablets are pretty much useless, but they can be as little as 50 bucks. You can get large tablets that don't come with all the fun software the brand name tablets come with for about 150 dollars. The top of the market are the built in LCD touch screen tablets that basically are just like drawing right onto your computer screen. While for art they own ludicrous ass, they also cost 500-700 dollars, if not more (also it's really hard to kill bugs that are flying around on them).

You don't want to use a non-Wacom tablet. Believe me, I tried. The Intuos series is the most popular one. I think the smallest Intuos will work just fine but there's probably a reason EVERY artist in the game industry uses these things (or a Cintiq but those are few).

The LCD thingies aren't touchscreens, they use the same EM tech the normal tablets use. Touchscreens don't have levels of pressure sensitivity, they only know on and off.

Mr. Sharpoblunto: The server seems to be dead.

Practising drawing heads and snazzy gun effects

Your faces have pretty bad proportions, the eyes are way too high on the skull for example.

GMN, you seem to have a reasonable grasp on the proportions of the bodies of your characters, though as KDR said, the proportions of the faces are way off, and ultimately its the face of a character that conveys the personality of that character, so its the most important bit to get right.

When I first started I found (and I still do actually) that I tend to draw long faced characters, resist this temptation! In actuality the head should be only slightly higher than it is wide with the eyes positioned vertically in the center, the nose sligtly below that and the mouth positioned twice as far from the bottom of the chin as it is from the bottom of the nose (KDR's avatar is a good example for facial proportion) if you put the mouth too low it makes them look very long faced which is what I see in most of your sketches.

Bear in mind that the size of the eyes indicates the age of your character, the larger the eyes, the younger and more "cute" the character will look (In anime or cartoons in general females usually have larger eyes than males for this reason). Also I noticed that some of your characters are missing eyebrows, this tends to make characters look a bit psycho and besides eyebrows are a real easy way to convey emotion so you should always put them in.

One final thing, by putting the pupils of your characters eyes in the middle of thier eyes surrounded by white, it makes them look like they have a wide eyed stare which is a bit unnerving, nearly always in real life part of your pupils are concealed behind your eyelids or by the edge of your eyes, drawing eyes with larger, partly concealed pupils tends to make characters look more calm and natural (unless you want a wide eyed stare to convey the rage or something!)

I guess the fact I have an Intuos 3 Wacom A4 helps....

Ill postr a pic later I did befor I got my tablet...

aGorm

aGorm wrote:I guess the fact I have an Intuos 3 Wacom A4 helps....

Ill postr a pic later I did befor I got my tablet...

aGorm

A tabled doesn't make you insta a great artist.
But it does help free you from the limitations of your mouse.

And ps, I've got the same tablet, it rocks!

The tablet really doesn't make you any more functional an artist than a scanner and gimp does. It just makes you more efficient since you can cut out about a hundred middle steps.

Thats why I siad that ill post a pic i did befor the tablet...

Although I have found its far easier to get good results with a tablet.

aGorm

I have almost picked up modelling, I could consider myself good and I still suck at drawing on the computer..

Alex Calde (Not Calden, as is listed on the image)

You're consistant weak point, I've noticed, is the hands. Hands are hard for me too...usually the fingers either look too blocky or are to fat...