So I failed to do any drawing yesterday so I decided to try to do to sets of drawing today, both upside down so here's the first set, hopefully I'll post more tonight.

So I drew once realized that I failed horribly at measuring and decided to do it again and measure a ton.



eww... but this one with lots of measuring turned out well!  It almost looks like the ones where I did the measuring by tracing.


So there they are, they are rightside up here but all the drawing was done upside down from an upside down reference photo.

I'm not really sure what the upside down thing was supposed to do (draw what I'm seeing I know but it's hard for me to know what that actually  means other then the drawing will be more accurate), so it's hard for me to know if these drawings were a success or not.

Either way drawing upside down was kind of a pain but I'll be doing another set tonight and then more tomorrow probably.  I also want to go back and try constructing a figure like I was doing before so I think I'll try that either tonight or tomorrow.

ahh true I guess I just figured that was your conclusion my mistake

Yes but I think his main point was that just because something increases the risk of cancer doesn't mean you should avoid it all together.  For instance these are some other activities which expose you to elevated levels of ionizing radiation (ie. not flashlights and cellphones) which increase the risk of cancer...

flying in an airplane
living in a brick house with low levels of air circulation
getting an xray

You should try Russian kvass

Oh my gosh that sounds delicious.  Time to find a russian market near me.

I like the taste of the non alcohol part of beer but dislike the taste of the actual alcohol in the beer if that makes sense.

That's not to say I like the taste of non alcoholic beer as they try to make it mimic the flavor of beer with alcohol in it.

Yeah you're still not drawing what you actually see. Try flipping the image upside down so you stop thinking about it as a person (for now).

Also, keep measuring... DON'T GET LAZY.

Yeah I should have measured a lot more before doing that first one


Gimmy your post was very interesting, I remember you suggesting to draw upside down earlier and it kinda got lost in the shuffle sorry, today is the day for me to try that out I think

Thanks you guys for your help, without it I probably would have lost motivation near the beginning

Don't try anatomy yet, just keep practicing how you do for a while. The reason is that you should learn anatomy from a construction/theory way. Tracing won't help at all, mostly because most anatomy book don't focus on "fat" which have a big impact too, especially in real female form. So you learn anatomy to train the eye the same wway you would use basic shape and skeleton and complement with observation to add life (fat and movement).

Ahh yeah that makes sense.

The next step is to learn volume and ocedar character.

volume sounds fun but seems difficult, I guess I'll just have to practice like verything else.

Here's another set of images, this time I picked something with a lot of perspective because it seemed like good practice and boy was it hard.  The first one is amazingly bad then the tracing is ok obviously, then I had to do one where i looked back and forth like every line to see how off I was, then I did the final one over that one.



After this I realized that I had made it pretty much still a box when it should have been a quad that was way smaller at the top...




Anyway this one was difficult, I feel like my brain lies to me when I'm drawing this, like it know's it's in perspective and somehow decodes it so that it ends up just looking like distorted straight on.

Nice! Better lines, as well.

Thanks, since I did the latest 2 without as much tracing (they didn't have a traced frame or a traced version before them unlike the other ones) it's kinda disappointing as they don't feel as good.  So it's nice to know that the part I was concentrating on (better lines) was noticeable.

So i decided to try the next part of the book today which was anatomy and I tried to trace the muscles onto the arms and legs in this photo but it's so hard!  Maybe I need to find some super ripped dude so they are easier to see?



Then I went back to spending more time on each picture and so did one drawing, then a tracing, then a frame trace, then drew a final on top of that traced frame, then I was done as far as my usual timer is concerned (1 album) but I wanted to do some shading so I did






I fear I might have made the head a tad to small in all of those (in the first one the tilt is way off obviously to :\ ).  Darn hair is so complicated to see through and figure out what part is scalp and which part is just hair.

Also my cheap bamboo tablet seems to be breaking (possibly due to some bunnies nibbling the wire a bit) which made me think about drawing not on a computer.  I've tried some painting a bit but it seems so hard to use a brush properly.  The only drawing I've done during the posting of these me trying to get better things has been with pencil or ballpoint and they are so fricken skinny it's annoying.  I guess sharpie works ok but I don't like the smell and the tips seem not the best for some reason although I can't really put my finger on it.  What cheap supplies should I get for this type of drawing on paper?

I can imagine being interested in buying something to create art assets
ie) I put in an arm/leg/torso/head etc and then can easily create lots of animations from that
which seems to be what your talking about.

Hard to say how much I would pay for it though, but I will say I like (and bought) tweenlight, so maybe take a look at his pricing scheme...
http://www.greensock.com/tweenlite/

If it's something like an engine i wouldn't buy it as there are so many great engines out there all ready (torque, unity, etc.)

So I would say my advice would be to do something very specific but useful (like a 2d skeletal animation tool), and charge tweenlightish prices, but that's coming from me as someone who might buy such a tool not as someone who has produced that type of thing in the past.

Oh man I love that runaways art I'm going to have to read that.

I've always liked the art in wasteland a lot, both the colors and the inking...

Wow I like a lot of these

Jackson Pollock's stuff I always think looks cool (and that's at least one of the points of art) regardless of how hard/easy it was to make (I've never really tried making something like this so I don't know if it's actually as easy as it look).  In most of the comments on him that point always seems to come up and it always seems weird to me.  When I make a game in 1 week vs. 1 year but people like the 1 week game more no one claims it's a bad game because it was easy to make...

Howard Hodgkin's stuff on the other hand is not interesting for me to look at at all.

I also am fine with the 2 webcartoonists I mean they're art isn't great but it doesn't seem nearly as bad/serious as Rob Leifeld's stuff.

I may be missing a right bracket in there, but it's in there for my code. I get no errors for that, but my enemies just don't shoot.

That looks like it should shoot but you didn't say when your calling enemyFire().  If it never gets called then it won't do anything.

Also I don't know what your game looks like but why is this there...
 e.target.x +=  15;
         if (e.target.x <= 10)
         {
            e.target.removeEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, moveEnemyBullet);
            removeChild(MovieClip(e.target));
         }

if your adding 15 to the bullet's x every frame then how is its x ever going to be less then 10 unless it starts out less then 10.

same routine as yesterday did a bunch of frame stuff and then did this one without any tracing.

It's pretty close

I've seen something like this implemented fairly easily that worked pretty well (although it was on the ds and so the screen was small so I don't know how it would work on larger screens), it went something like this...

Split the screen up into a grid (play around with what resolution to see what works best).

Draw some symbol this is symbol A you save what squares of the grid are colored in
Draw a different symbol this is symbol B you save what squares of the grid are colored in
When you save the symbols you elemenate all the white space around them (cropping is easy) then you scale them to be the same size (lots of simple scaling algorithms out there)

Then in your game when someone draws a symbol you crop it and scale it to the right size just like you did with symbols A and B.  Then you just check if this grid has more in common with the grid from symbol A or the grid from symbol B and pick whichever one it's closer to.

As long as you make your symbols different enough this works surprisingly well... for example if A is a square and B is an X

oh ok, we had honors classes but it would just be like Math 19a is normal calculous quarter 1 Math 20a is honors calculous quarter 1 and it's a bit harder, but anyone could take either classes.  We had some classes that sound like those (we had a bunch of film classes and a class on comics etc.) too but none of those were considered honors.  It's always interesting all the differences between places

I'm a Media Informatics major, as well as a Fine Arts minor and an Honors minor.

What is an honors minor?  It sounds like your minoring in honor, so you get to take a bunch of samurai/knight classes where they teach you about honor.  Somehow I don't think that's what it is.


Also, I agree that the woman's chest is weird even with the coat over it.  The art looks amazing though!

So my apartment has been super cold the last couple days and that combined with the screen on my laptop being broken so me having to use an awkward external monitor setup has sapped a lot of my will.

That said I decided to do some exciting practice today.  I looked at JWK5's flour sack drawing tutorial stuff and had a lot of fun with pixel lovely and drawing lots of flour sack people.  Then using the floor sack instead of my usual frame I did my usual multiple copies of one drawing only I didn't do a traced version this time.  Here's the final result and while it's much looser/faster then the other ones I think I got pretty close to the real figure!

I have never experienced any of that.  My Macbook pro is 6 years old and it's still my only computer, and I have never run into things it couldn't run.  I have OSX 10.5 still and not upgrading hasn't seemed to be a problem for anything either.

That said it's probably because I mainly use it as I would *NIX .

I don't understand how I score points...

just that they seldom find a place on my 'best games of all time' lists. e.g. i like short platformers that can be beaten in 20 minutes and were made in a few months, like au sable or small worlds, but in a list of my favorite platformers i'd never put them on the same level as full-size platformers like la mulana, smb3, cave story, super metroid, etc.

Yeah that makes sense, I guess I just misunderstood your post it seemed like you were saying that you didn't enjoy any of them.  I tend to like short films (5-15 minute ones) better then feature length films and I think the same is true with me and games, not novels though strangely...