critique wanted One of my OCs

[CinnamonSwirl 90]

So I'm new to drawing and using digital paint. I dont have a tablet or computer so I use my phone.  Any tips or anything please. I use Medibang but I dont know how to really use it. I want to be better. ...

This is one of my OCs named cinnamon swirl. I'm not 100% on her hair style or big eyes. She isnt a filly....shes a free spirit and does funny stuff...shes eating a cloud lol

also not related. I accidentally posted topic somewhere else and wanted to delete it. How do I delete a topic? I cant find an option. Thank you 

Edited September 8, 2019 by CinnamonSwirl

[Emerald Heart 24,559]

Soooooooooooo cute!

Loving this!

[Splashee 28,537]

2 hours ago, CinnamonSwirl said:

So I'm new to drawing and using digital paint. I dont have a tablet or computer so I use my phone.  Any tips or anything please. I use Medibang but I dont know how to really use it. I want to be better. ...

This is one of my OCs named cinnamon swirl. I'm not 100% on her hair style or big eyes. She isnt a filly....shes a free spirit and does funny stuff...shes eating a cloud lol

also not related. I accidentally posted topic somewhere else and wanted to delete it. How do I delete a topic? I cant find an option. Thank you 

In order to delete a topic, you need to contact a moderator on the forum. You can click on any of the online staff members, and in their profile send a private massage asking to delete your topic (and of course give them a link to your topic so they can find it).

Your drawing is really good! It's a cute design! I don't really see a need for it to be improved in any way. That means I don't think you have to "become better".

 

If you post an example of what you want to draw, or become better at drawing, we might be able to steer you in the right direction. It is all relative to what you see is "better". You are the artist. You have a vision. We can't see that vision for you. Also, we might not even have the same vision, meaning we might tell you to draw things you don't like. It's kinda complicated. So far you are doing a very good job on your own! And I love you drawings!

[CinnamonSwirl 90]

1 hour ago, Splashee said:

In order to delete a topic, you need to contact a moderator on the forum. You can click on any of the online staff members, and in their profile send a private massage asking to delete your topic (and of course give them a link to your topic so they can find it).

Your drawing is really good! It's a cute design! I don't really see a need for it to be improved in any way. That means I don't think you have to "become better".

 

If you post an example of what you want to draw, or become better at drawing, we might be able to steer you in the right direction. It is all relative to what you see is "better". You are the artist. You have a vision. We can't see that vision for you. Also, we might not even have the same vision, meaning we might tell you to draw things you don't like. It's kinda complicated. So far you are doing a very good job on your own! And I love you drawings!

I appreciate it. Maybe it's because I'm comparing my drawings to others. O found this on pinterest and which mine looked...life like and so detailed like this. I'm not familiar with the app I'm using and it's all new to me.

[Meson Bolt 2,647]

@CinnamonSwirl

I can't say much in the way of tips for drawing (I'm horrible at it lol) but I think your OC is very cute.

[Thuja 3,658]

I think this looks really cute, I really like the design you gave her it's very unique especially the hair.  Was the head size intentional?  Or is that just the way you prefer drawing ponies??  I think the size of her head could be a bit smaller but it's no big deal.  I think the eyes could use some more detail, the white highlights in her pupils looks a bit off considering most of the rest of the piece is soft while the highlights are these sharp dots that stand out.  One way you can fix that is to draw a bunch of different eyes for your warm up sketch, maybe that way you can decide if her eyes are right for the vision you had for her.

Do you have a stylus for your phone or are you using your fingers?  If you're using your fingers, you're doing a great job!!  I wish I could help you with understanding your program but I use CSP which is totally different from Medibang.  If you're on facebook, you can probably join one of the digital artist groups on there and you'll find loads of people who use Medibang on their phones, they could probably help you with that.

[Splashee 28,537]

@CinnamonSwirl There are two things I noticed in that drawing above, things that you might want to try to aim for. The first thing is realistic shading. The second thing is 3D.

Start with realistic shading. You don't even have to do colors. Black and white is a good start to train.

Realistic shading (completely achievable with your cell phone app):
Somewhere, light is produced. Maybe from a light bulb, or from the sun. If you imagine the light being composed of rays (like lines flying in different directions AND the starting point of the line is the light source itself), these rays will origin from the light source and travel towards "something". That "something" is probably going to be nothing of importance. We don't care about light rays, but we care about what they collide with. In fact, we really don't care about that either. We only care about if the light ray has collided with our eyes. The light might have gone straight from the light source, let's say the sun, and hit our point-of-view, let's say our eye. What we see is the information encoded in that light ray, which is mostly white, as the sun is very very bright and we recognize it's color to be "warm white". We also register pain in our eyes because the light ray's strength is damaging to our sensitive eyes.
So one single light ray can do much to us, as we recognize its color and its strength, but also it's angle from its last collision (remember that one, it is your shading).
As soon as the light ray has collided with our eyes, it changes direction and continues somewhere else, maybe into someone else's eyes, but it has lost some of its color information and strength while doing so, eventually fading into nothing (undetected by anyone's eyes).

Now imagine a nice strong light ray from the sun, hitting a perfect sphere, which has a material that absorbs some of the ray's light, so that the only information left is a red color with a decent strength. If that ray then collides with your eyes, guess what you will see? Yes, you will see the information "decent strength red" from the direction the ray's latest collision.

Now bombard that perfect sphere with millions of millions of light rays from the sun, and many of those rays will in fact collide with your eyes, and most of them will have the "decent strength red" information encoded in them. They are so many that they together will make up the image of a red sphere. But the rays' information is all different because the latest collision was not shared by them. Their origin was possibly the same but for some reason they didn't hit the same point on the sphere. They all hit the perfect sphere, but different points on that sphere, making their collision different, resulting in a different angle when they bounced off the sphere. Many of those rays will still end up in your eyes, but with different angles. The eyes detect that information as shading. Shading can be even more complex as rays from other light sources may hit the sphere, or the same ray might be reflected multiple times onto the sphere, before ending up in your eyes, resulting in a mix of colors or slightly less strength of the same color.

If you start in black and white, all you have to do is use different shades of grey to encode the objects with. How much light is absorbed by the object before hitting your eyes is shown by the whiteness and blackness of your drawing.

So light rays are lines that originate from a light source, bounces off objects, and finally end up in the viewer's point-of-view. Well, the viewer's point-of-view is your drawing. And your drawing is a 2D drawing. But you want to draw realistic 3D objects.

ThreeDeee (3D):
By now you are probably not reading anymore. But if you are, maybe you should stop. I mean, you have probably heard about 3D before, as it is a huge buzz word.

If I try to minimize the information as much as possible, and just explain the important details, it will not harm anyone, right?

We all see the world around us in three dimensions. It has pith, yaw, roll, yadda. Space as we see it is three dimensions. But in order for us to draw it in two dimensions, as a drawing, we need to transform 3D into 2D. The known world does this for us in the nature, as we can see by our own shadow as a 2D representation of ourselves. It does so by the process of transformation. A point in 3D space can be encoded as 3 separate units (that's the 3 in 3D). You need to remove at least one of those units to make it 2D. As with all information removal, things are lost and can never be found again. The most common information to remove is depth. That makes the drawing very flat. Your shadow might look flat, but it has depth to it. So depth is not removed. There is a way to encode depth into a 2D drawing, but it requires you to bend the rules of the known world a little. The secret is called the Reciprocal of Homogeneous W, or RHW for short. A position in 3D space includes 3 units, usually called X, Y and Z. But that is not enough information as the world is more complex than that. We need to add in another unit, which we call W. Welcome to the world of homogeneous space! This is the space where my OC Splashee lives in!

... I have reached the maximum character count allowed by a post of this complexity. I'll have to continue another day! *runs*

 

[CinnamonSwirl 90]

6 hours ago, Thuja said:

I think this looks really cute, I really like the design you gave her it's very unique especially the hair.  Was the head size intentional?  Or is that just the way you prefer drawing ponies??  I think the size of her head could be a bit smaller but it's no big deal.  I think the eyes could use some more detail, the white highlights in her pupils looks a bit off considering most of the rest of the piece is soft while the highlights are these sharp dots that stand out.  One way you can fix that is to draw a bunch of different eyes for your warm up sketch, maybe that way you can decide if her eyes are right for the vision you had for her.

Do you have a stylus for your phone or are you using your fingers?  If you're using your fingers, you're doing a great job!!  I wish I could help you with understanding your program but I use CSP which is totally different from Medibang.  If you're on facebook, you can probably join one of the digital artist groups on there and you'll find loads of people who use Medibang on their phones, they could probably help you with that.

I'm open to any app. i just wish i had a drawing tablet so i can draw.  the head being that big isn't intentional. i draw smile then somehow the head always end up swollen LOL. I'm lost on how to draw the eyes.  I drew the eyes in the app. they were cross eyed but i decided to make them look a different direction.

6 hours ago, Splashee said:

@CinnamonSwirl There are two things I noticed in that drawing above, things that you might want to try to aim for. The first thing is realistic shading. The second thing is 3D.

Start with realistic shading. You don't even have to do colors. Black and white is a good start to train.

Realistic shading (completely achievable with your cell phone app):
Somewhere, light is produced. Maybe from a light bulb, or from the sun. If you imagine the light being composed of rays (like lines flying in different directions AND the starting point of the line is the light source itself), these rays will origin from the light source and travel towards "something". That "something" is probably going to be nothing of importance. We don't care about light rays, but we care about what they collide with. In fact, we really don't care about that either. We only care about if the light ray has collided with our eyes. The light might have gone straight from the light source, let's say the sun, and hit our point-of-view, let's say our eye. What we see is the information encoded in that light ray, which is mostly white, as the sun is very very bright and we recognize it's color to be "warm white". We also register pain in our eyes because the light ray's strength is damaging to our sensitive eyes.
So one single light ray can do much to us, as we recognize its color and its strength, but also it's angle from its last collision (remember that one, it is your shading).
As soon as the light ray has collided with our eyes, it changes direction and continues somewhere else, maybe into someone else's eyes, but it has lost some of its color information and strength while doing so, eventually fading into nothing (undetected by anyone's eyes).

Now imagine a nice strong light ray from the sun, hitting a perfect sphere, which has a material that absorbs some of the ray's light, so that the only information left is a red color with a decent strength. If that ray then collides with your eyes, guess what you will see? Yes, you will see the information "decent strength red" from the direction the ray's latest collision.

Now bombard that perfect sphere with millions of millions of light rays from the sun, and many of those rays will in fact collide with your eyes, and most of them will have the "decent strength red" information encoded in them. They are so many that they together will make up the image of a red sphere. But the rays' information is all different because the latest collision was not shared by them. Their origin was possibly the same but for some reason they didn't hit the same point on the sphere. They all hit the perfect sphere, but different points on that sphere, making their collision different, resulting in a different angle when they bounced off the sphere. Many of those rays will still end up in your eyes, but with different angles. The eyes detect that information as shading. Shading can be even more complex as rays from other light sources may hit the sphere, or the same ray might be reflected multiple times onto the sphere, before ending up in your eyes, resulting in a mix of colors or slightly less strength of the same color.

If you start in black and white, all you have to do is use different shades of grey to encode the objects with. How much light is absorbed by the object before hitting your eyes is shown by the whiteness and blackness of your drawing.

So light rays are lines that originate from a light source, bounces off objects, and finally end up in the viewer's point-of-view. Well, the viewer's point-of-view is your drawing. And your drawing is a 2D drawing. But you want to draw realistic 3D objects.

ThreeDeee (3D):
By now you are probably not reading anymore. But if you are, maybe you should stop. I mean, you have probably heard about 3D before, as it is a huge buzz word.

If I try to minimize the information as much as possible, and just explain the important details, it will not harm anyone, right?

We all see the world around us in three dimensions. It has pith, yaw, roll, yadda. Space as we see it is three dimensions. But in order for us to draw it in two dimensions, as a drawing, we need to transform 3D into 2D. The known world does this for us in the nature, as we can see by our own shadow as a 2D representation of ourselves. It does so by the process of transformation. A point in 3D space can be encoded as 3 separate units (that's the 3 in 3D). You need to remove at least one of those units to make it 2D. As with all information removal, things are lost and can never be found again. The most common information to remove is depth. That makes the drawing very flat. Your shadow might look flat, but it has depth to it. So depth is not removed. There is a way to encode depth into a 2D drawing, but it requires you to bend the rules of the known world a little. The secret is called the Reciprocal of Homogeneous W, or RHW for short. A position in 3D space includes 3 units, usually called X, Y and Z. But that is not enough information as the world is more complex than that. We need to add in another unit, which we call W. Welcome to the world of homogeneous space! This is the space where my OC Splashee lives in!

... I have reached the maximum character count allowed by a post of this complexity. I'll have to continue another day! *runs*

 

I didnt stop reading LOL i appreciate it.  I"m use to drawing just 2d.  I'm very fusterated with my drawing and wish it would pop! My next drawing i will try to incorporate the light.  I  appreciate it!

[Splashee 28,537]

@CinnamonSwirl There are many drawing tutorials out there for applying shading with much simpler illustrations to learn from than my technical post. Some might be better than others. Don't settle for one description. Watch and read many of them, and take whatever you find useful for your own art.

[Thuja 3,658]

@CinnamonSwirl The best advice I can give is to play around with your program, try drawing random stuff.  CSP is a program you have to pay for and I think the app is a subscription so it might be best to stick with Medibang for now.  I'm pretty sure that Medibang comes with a resize tool so you can change the size of the head if you want but I'm not really sure about that, you'll have to look it up.  Could always check for tutorials?

For the eyes, just try to keep the theme you have for the rest of the piece.  If you paint softly in the rest of your piece, paint the highlights in the eyes softly too.  Eyes and hands seem to be the hardest things to draw, I have a hard time painting eyes too but you're doing great!!!  Also there's nothing wrong with using references, just get some screenshots of ponies so you better understand their anatomy.

Edited September 9, 2019 by Thuja
Forgot to add stuff...

[CinnamonSwirl 90]

I'm in the process of redrawing her.  I love her smaller design better and working on shading.  I'll post before the end of this week. I'm excited.

[Hardway Bet 96]

I might desaturate the streaks in her mane. They have kind of a ketchup and mustard look to them right now, which seems to me like it clashes with your overall theme.

[CinnamonSwirl 90]

10 hours ago, Hardway Bet said:

I might desaturate the streaks in her mane. They have kind of a ketchup and mustard look to them right now, which seems to me like it clashes with your overall theme.

what theme? i intended the mane colors to be that bright.  idont want them gloomy looking.

[Hardway Bet 96]

Ah-ha. I assumed from the name you were going for a cinnamon bun type look.

[Splashee 28,537]

@CinnamonSwirl @Hardway Bet

I think it (the theme) looks great. It never even crossed my mind about ketchup and mustard colors, and i am usually thinking ketchup and mustard all the time.