Doodle Diaries: Progress in 3 pages, a comic

There is a certain way that I want my digital art to look, but I can never get it to look the way I intended.

I keep looking at how other people draw, but for some reason it still looks terrible when I do it. I can't figure out why.

I decided to draw a 3-page comic based on a mini scene I wrote for fun to get the lining and coloring right on my digital drawings.

Page 1: (Finished July 9)

I should probably have finished the background. But I was working on it for literally hours and I had enough. I don't know how I'm going to draw backgrounds in the future.

I just filled the rest of the panels with very large lockers as backgrounds.

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Page 2: (Finished July 10)

Realized there was no getting away from drawing other backgrounds, so I tried. Managed to find a few shortcuts to make the process somewhat less painful, but you can tell I barely put any effort.

The lines and colors are still so flat! I've seen other artists line/color/shade like this but theirs look just fine! What's the issue here?! Am I missing something?! Do my drawings just suck?!

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Page 3: (Finished July 22 - I didn't have the time and motivation inbetween)

Made the lineart off-black instead of black. Tried to put more effort in shading. Played around with the gradation tool and airbrush as well.

It looks slightly better, but it's not there yet, not even close. I need to experiment more.

The background in the last panel is a result of me fiddling with a photo and adding colors, you can probably tell. Fuck backgrounds.

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Some day, I'll manage to churn out something halfway decent... some day.

Doodle Diaries: How I drew this one particular picture

Decided to show a step-by-step just because.

Back when I didn't know anything about digital drawing, I thought it wouldn't be that long a process. Boy was I wrong.

This one started as a pencil drawing. I start by drawing a rough sketch.

Flesh out details from rough sketch and start drawing more defined pencil lines.

Pencil drawing done! I liked it enough that I decided to color it digitally.

Scanned the drawing, began lining over the original drawing. On a separate layer, of course. Layers are important. You can never have too many layers.

Provided closeups of process below.

It's a lot harder to get away with flaws when drawing digitally compared to pencil. Googled torso anatomy and tried to approximate where muscles should be going, fixed anatomy.

Continued lining. I just lined the clothes part blue so I can fix mistakes if I find them, but it doesn't really matter what color you use.

Feet and loudspeaker position still looked weird so I continued fixing.

Made all my lineart black, filled in flat colors on the drawing.

Found a nice manga style sparkly tone from one of Medibang's background sets (Medibang offers a few dozen manga style backgrounds/tones). Added purple gradation effect on the background.

Background put in. Added lighting. Drew harsh lighting to convey the feeling of being under bright stage lights.

The last time I exclusively used airbrush to highlight/shade, it looked like a child's drawing on Deviantart. Somehow it does not look as terrible this time around.

Added shadows. I lowered the opacity levels on the shadow layer for the skin because having it at 100% opacity looked like he rolled around in a mud puddle rather than it looking like shadows.

It might not be super obvious, but I colored my lineart. The loudspeaker now has a dark gray and dark red outline, the skin has a light brown outline, the hair has a light gray outline, etc.

Added finish date and decided to try out the glowy effect I saw on a YouTube tutorial.

Done.

Doodle Diaries: Drawing with a Tablet, Oh Fun

I bought my tablet as a Christmas present for myself and I love it to bits.

Drawing digitally, however, has been a major pain in the butt with a pretty steep learning curve.

I haven't drawn on the tablet as much as I would have liked, but since 2017 is already half over, here are progress pics from the past six months.

2016/12/25
Literally first ever tablet drawing

Drawing with a tablet is VERY different from drawing on paper, or even drawing with a phone. 

This took more time and effort than you think it would. It takes time getting used to the tablet.

2016/12/25

I took a photo of some pencil drawings I did and lined/colored them in.

It looks a lot better than the cat, but still looks sloppy. I still have no idea how to color.

2016/12/26

I started to rough sketch, lineart, and color entirely by tablet. My drawings did not come out the way I wanted them to, everyone had weird faces and proportions.

2016/12/26

Mom: Is that a girl? That looks like a girl.
Me: It's supposed to be a guy...
Robert: Why does he have Trump hands?
Me: *cries*

2016/12/30

Mom: That's a guy right?
Me: IT'S A GIRL.

After spending the last week of 2016 getting a hang of the tablet and fiddling with lining/coloring styles, I decided to churn out some drawings with actual effort as 2017 rolled in.

The sunflowers took forever to draw, and they also came out looking better than the guy.

2017/02/06 

Whoops I guess I never finished this - I wanted to draw a height chart/group picture of my OCs. At least you can see how I rough sketch and then line things.

2017/02/13

Not really a full-fledged drawing, but I did a study on some action poses and tried coloring my lineart to see how it looked like. I didn't like how the colored lines came out.

2017/03/05

Tried a whole bunch of new techniques! They look like they're actually in the dark outdoors! I meant to add more light reflected on the two but I never got around to it.

Youtube is your friend when you want to know how to draw certain effects.

1. YJS FINALLY realizes you can control opacity levels when shading so the shadows don't look harsh.

2. Using phone pictures for drawing may work if you're drawing on a phone, but not when you're drawing on a PC with a larger image file.

3. Perspective drawing is a bitch.

2017/06/04

1. Tried other tools (air brush, gradation, blur etc) for coloring and shading instead of solely relying on pen tool.

2. "Drew" the bench by taking a Google image result of an actual bench and fiddling with various tools and effects. I need to find a faster, more efficient way for this.

My most recent drawing, hot off the press. Coloring still needs work, but it's been looking less and less awful now! Still need to figure out what to do with my lineart for that perfect balance of smooth yet defined lines.

I hope it doesn't take too long to get better at this.