Non-Hacking-Related Art Thread

Creative
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I searched around the forums, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a general art thread that isn’t mostly dedicated to one person, so I made this. This is a thread to post whatever visual artwork you may have drawn that isn’t directly related to hacking. (And critique others’ posted work, if that’s your thing?) It doesn’t even have to be FE-related, though I’d expect many or most posts here to be FE fanart for obvious reasons.

I’ll start:

The main characters of the anime Shinsekai Yori (From the New World), dressed as Fire Emblem characters. I would ask you to identify each outfit but, considering this community, you could probably tell who is wearing what FE character’s outfit at one glance.

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I kind of resent the fact that as a primarily hacking-based community we’re pretty lacking in the creativity department at the moment (members such as @dancer_A and @Overlordpichu notwithstanding). Let’s get to recruiting more artists, people!

(Side note, @zahlman keeps thinking that Shun is a Pork Mage lel)

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Pork Mage? This isn’t the RM2K3 game OFF, nor is it a money-maker in Kingdom of Loathing. And I don’t think pork was Ike’s favourite food either. I hear it was some kind of meat, but I haven’t actually played the Radiance games.
But Shun is actually kind of similiar of similar to Pelleas, yes, in one major aspect I can’t really talk about because spoilers. (I’ve spoiled way too much of the FE games I haven’t played…)

(Serious: Have you actually watched the anime? If so, @Crazycolorz5 will be very happy.)

Anyway, here’s a full custom mug (I used other mugs and fanart of her as references, but there was no splicing at all) I tried to make of Saki in one of her canonical outfits (not cosplaying Sanaki) a week before that:

I have a long, long way to go, and I’m not just talking about the incompletness of the hackbox. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Not bad at all. If we can post mugs here, then I will do that some time.

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SSY FE hack? pls?

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Another pic for you guys:

The main cast of Puella Magi Madoka Magica in the outfits of FE characters. (Something less obscure this time so maybe some of you have watched this anime.) I’d say I did better on this one than on the SSY one, but Kyouko (I still don’t know if there’s a U there; the subs I watched didn’t but I heard someone put a U there to make it a long O; whatever) was a pain to draw since a) I like her the least and b) Jill’s armor is so complicated.
Also I spent thirty minutes trying to take an adequate picture of my drawing; I don’t have a scanner and all I have is my Android phone. #genericannoyingapology

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They’re cute looking. I wonder how they would looked colored.

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This is from maybe six weeks ago (before anything else here was drawn), but here’s Nino as her older, Elibian Nights self:

Yes, that’s my hand. No, you aren’t seeing any more of my body.
Now if you excuse me, I should be going to my Linear Algebra midterm right now. Really.

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This was supposed to be for Valentine’s Day but I was lazy so the drawing went into today as well.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ku2k2rsq1gflcfd/IMG_20150215_192712848[1].png?dl=0
I think I messed this one up pretty badly for too many reasons to list. I mean, I don’t even know what two-thirds of those reasons are; I just know they’re there. (For starters, their arms are both messed up and their clothing looks textureless. I didn’t even bother with the fire. At least Mamoru isn’t wearing Asvel’s pantsless outfit anymore…)

Also, is anyone else going to post their art here? :confused:

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well, feu is much more a hacking/programming-focused forum than an art-focused one, so I don’t know how much luck you’ll have…

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This one’s more FE related than the last (then again, the last one wasn’t FE related at all so it would be easy.)

Isabel’s a Pupil (think Ewan, though a bit older and a different personality… very different?) in my Fire Emblem world (which isn’t a part of any canon Fire Emblem setting.) Yep, a cute mage girl. :slight_smile: We all know the Est has to be really cute (wait, does FE9!Tormod count as an Est? If so he’d be the only not-cute one… okay to be honest I think he’s just plain ugly in his PoR artwork but actually kind of cute in his RD artwork, which is weird), so yeah. What’s interesting is that she’d have a Staff rank in addition to a Wind rank, so she’s healer/10 at the very least even if she joined late, and that would help her gain EXP without risking her in combat. (She’s not a very special unit otherwise. If there were a game in the setting she could have Nino-level plot importance, maybe.)

Hmm… I’d actually like some critique here and maybe some of the previous pieces as well (it’s more or less my art thread since no one else seems to make non-hacking related art here for reasons @dancer_A detailed above), but I don’t know if anyone is actually in a position to think about my work, or cares.

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Yeah sure Ill give you a bit of crit (I’m an artist member aswell but I lurk here mostly) and I’ll post something I was working on earlier

I feel like the biggets piece of advice I can give you is the generic easy one: just draw more! It’s a road you’re going down and you’re doing a good job I think~ There’s improvement from piece to piece. Another thing I can say is that you probably want to draw from life some more, the bodies you draw are a bit doughy, they feel almost like claymation characters to me.

Also do you have any tools to color with? I’m a huge fan of color myself

I think your style is cute though, the way you draw faces reminds me of Akihiko Yoshida. If you’re not familar with his work I think you’d benefit from looking at it, he’s really great and could be a source of inspiration.

If you want any specific feedback just let me knwo

http://puu.sh/g64wQ/05a7bd135e.jpg

then here’s a thing i drew yesterday because i dyed my hair purple, prolly not done yet, trying to keep my style consistent mainly

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Hm…
I’d admit that what I’ve posted here is basically all my drawing ability. I tried using my sister’s pencil crayons a while back (Almost two years ago? Holy crud…) for some of my drawings and… well, I couldn’t shade very well with them and overall it kind of all looked like it was done by an elementary schooler (I’m 18 and in university now, FYI.) Then again, I think those were pencil crayons, and I don’t know what more experienced artists use to colour their paper drawings (other than paint, which is a different medium.) Also, I really only draw people and their weapons (my characters, or characters from my favourite works of fiction), hence why the fire in the Maria x Mamoru pic was so hastily doodled. I just didn’t really care. :stuck_out_tongue: I’m mainly only interested in drawing people though, or maybe landscapes (but I haven’t done landscapes in a long time.)

I don’t know how to colour anything digitally, either. I’ve tried a few times, but there’s a lot of things that I don’t get and I can’t quite get how to do them. (I only managed to draw the Saki mug you see above because I took the colours and shades of the actual GBA FE mugs. I used references (official and fan art) for her, but otherwise she’s full custom.) I don’t know how to pick shades so that one would accurately be a darker version of the other. I can’t paint things without having those ugly white areas between the colours and the outline. (I don’t have any digital painting to show since I won’t let myself make anything I’d see as bad.) Also I don’t have any of those high-end painting programs… I just don’t really have any experience, I guess, and I don’t know where to start.

Also I think I take waaay too long to draw things, since i do so much erasing and I’m inexperienced so I take a lone time to get the right lines done. Like, I think my most recent image took me at least ten hours total for both poses, maybe more. The Saki mug at the top took me at least eight hours - I hear that mugs do take a while, though. I really should be studying (I’m a math major, actually - I don’t like math that much but I don’t think majoring in art or writing would be a good idea since people don’t really go to uni for those subjects and expect to get a good job but I can’t really stand anything else so it’s just math or CS for me… also despite CS being one of the things I can sort of do I’ve never really thought of trying to learn FE hacking), and I’d like to get better, but I just spend all my time drawing… I mean, not that there’s a need to do things fast, but that my slow speed is indicative of inexperience and whatnot.

Eh, I have a lot to learn. But learning’s part of the fun :slight_smile:

Also, do you recognize any of the works other than FE that have come up in this thread? If so, great :slight_smile: And if you somehow recognize SSY, @Crazycolorz5 will be very happy.

(I had a less anime-ish face style until about two months ago where i just suddenly decided to switch to anime style faces because I felt like it. I kind of want to develop both an anime and a less-anime style though, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.)

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Traditional coloring mediums would be colored pencil, pastel, marker, gouache, watercolor, arcylic, oil, and prob some things I’m forgetting. Colored pencil and marker is probably the easiest to start with.

It’s fairly customary to sample colors for mugs to keep it consistent, so you didn’t do anything wrong there. Anyway, there are some free programs for digital color available depending on your computer platform. I think Krita is free and also Gimp. What would fix the problem with the lines is to use layers to put the lines on the top layer and make the color underneath the lines.

Then uh, if you just want to draw people (i’m the same tbh) you would really benefit from drawing from life or photos. And you said that you draw really slow, work on that! One thing that can help is drawing from something like this http://artists.pixelovely.com/ and going into Class Mode. The point is to look at the body as a whole and try to get it down on paper as quickly as possible instead of worrying about every detail.’

Mugs do take a while but it gets faster at least.

anyway if you just keep at it you’ll definitely improve, especially if you become conscious of your weak points and strive to improve. like if you see that you’re bad something (speed for example) spend an hour or two every day drawing some bodies out really really quick and try to time yourself. don’t let yourself spend more than one minute on something, go to the next one, you’ll speed up that way

also I recognize Madoka and the FE stuff but thats it Im a bit slow and picky when it comes to anime

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Hm… I’m most wondering what you think of the mug of Saki, and the drawing of the pupil girl Isabel from my FE setting (that’s my most recent piece and the one right before your first post.) Since she’s (Isabel, anyway; Saki is the main character of Shinsekai Yori which is my and @Crazycolorz5’s favourite anime) my custom character, what do you think of her design? (I mean things like her outfit, body features, and class idea.)

I could post some of my slightly older drawings here but I don’t really want to clog this place up… I don’t actually think I’ve improved that much in such a short span of time since all I’ve done is drawing without looking at any tutorials I could understand, but I don’t know. Can I send my slightly older pictures (and a few from before I entered university) to you privately through the site’s private message system? Among them are drawings of other characters from my setting (I also doodle my characters in my notebook in class… I probably shouldn’t since that means I can’t pay attention…) Though I guess it wouldn’t hurt to post one or two things in public, so here’s a picture of Amelia in the art of a Magic: The Gathering card I drew maybe four months ago:

This card, if you were wondering.

… I use parentheses so much… :confused: I guess it’s indicative of my thought process. So many of my thoughts are amendments to my other thoughts.

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Hallelujah, he’s a natural born functional programmer.

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Yeah sure send me stuff if ye want. Feedback is fun when people are willing to listen

So Saki mug: Definitely good for a first attempt. I usually encourage people to splice because it’s how I got better at the FE style, figuring out how pieces fit together taught me a lot about how the shading works–people have been successful without it though. I think in terms of ways to improve it…lesse

You shaded the hair somewhat correctly but the shape of the hair is somewhat limp and inconsistent. It’s a bit hard to describe but the lines have to be more curvy and smooth, so tbh I’d just recommend splicing then doing some of your own work on topof it. If you don’t want to splice then I’m not really sure what feedback to give, you’ll just have to practice more and see ;w; As for the face, the shading is mostly correct but the nose shouldn’t be shaded yellow. The shape of the face itself is a bit strange, the left eye from our point of view is sort of bulging out whereas usually there’s a bump for the cheek, then the face sinks in where the orbital is, then the forehead comes back out.

The body is kind of stiff, it’s just plainly facing the viewer. Neck is pretty long too. And also a style thing, the outfit has too much of the darkest color in it, I’d suggest using more of the color found in the chin to smooth out those lines. Really helps to view the thumbnail version of the sprite in paint when you work on it.

For Isabel’s outfit (lol not really the authority on this but i’ll give thoughts) it looks like short-sleeve crop-top Nino to me. I think it could use some more trim and details, and maybe another layer on top, like a cool jacket, cape or collar, or even a hat of some sort. I’m a huge fan of FE:A designs myself, I like it flashy~ The body features are a bit nondescript to me, looks like a young girl with a ponytail to me. Class idea idk lol probably a better question for someone that participates in FE game design

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Some stuff I’ve drawn since April or so, in chronological order…

https://www.dropbox.com/s/07wac89ipjzteqz/another%20portrait.png?dl=0 A swordfighter. I’m not quite sure when I did this - April, probably?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pz37d776hif7dal/abcdefghijkl.png?dl=0 Got a graphics tablet in June, so I decided to draw some stuff. This took waaaay too long for something that isn’t very good. : / (No, I don’t consider it finished, but I’m probably not going back to this one.)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jv06gfweu2ec9in/self.png?dl=0 A self-portrait FE8 style portrait… thing. I haven’t tried any spritework since for whatever reason.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6egoqoorq7nc0c/IMG_20150816_211138115.jpg?dl=0 Drew this to pass the time while in Asia this summer. (I later realized that the katakana should read キーナ instead of シーナ, since this (my) character’s name is Cinna (she’s a girl; I decided that her parents gave her a boy’s name for whatever reason) but even then I’m not sure about that. Oh well.)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2ahikpdb1rm2rm/IMG_20150816_211421809.jpg?dl=0 Also drawn on trip to Asia.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/31plm78ico29gzq/IMG_20150923_031002457.jpg?dl=0 From a few weeks ago - doodled this in my comp sci notebook. I can’t pay attention in class in general. Kanata from Sora no Woto (Sound of the Sky) cosplaying Nils (she’s a girl; it’s a crossplay, but Nils’s outfit is pretty androgynous anyhow), and Naru from Hanayamata cosplaying Ninian.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u7v4d02c1yygyvo/lmnop.png?dl=0 Some sort of knight/cavalier. In my mind, he specializes in magic swords. (Not complete; not sure if I’ll finish it.)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhlib0g9c02aavb/mamoru-itou-portrait.png?dl=0 Mamoru Itou from Shinsekai Yori (From the New World) again. The drawing… hasn’t turned out as cute as I would have liked it to be. Oh well. I actually drew this so I could use it as an avatar (no, not an Avatar in the My Unit sense), but it’s probably not good enough. <- I just finished this one. Except I might touch it up a bit more.

I’m not sure if I’ve actually improved all that much. I can hardly bring myself to look at tutorials, and my art just kind of seems to lack… something… I also spend way too much time on each piece because I make so many corrections…

arch don’t ban me for necroing my own thread
also i’m a licensed necromancer apparently

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Your art uh… Well, it needs a bit of work.

I’ll focus on the mug that you’ve made, since that’s the easiest one to talk about. There are a few things that are up with it.

First of all, the proportions are completely off. The eyes are REALLY far apart. You only need to compare this to someone like Kleine to figure that. The head is also really big and the shoulders are small.

I’m looking at the general shape of the head and you seem lack a general grasp on depth and shape of heads. Heads are 3D images with different contours. The face recedes at a brow ridge, and protrudes at the cheekbones, etc. This isn’t quite something that’s reflected in your mug.

There’s um, a lot to say about it, to be honest. My honest recommendation would be to stick a vanilla FE mug next to your sprite and try to spot the differences and use it as a strong (VERY strong) reference.

You desperately need some sort of reference for drawing, too. Somehow your characters are the same width from chest down to their legs - this is not how human bodies are, and certainly not in anime. The “ideal” shape is thicker at the shoulders and goes down toward the waist like a V before going back out again like /\ in the legs.

Overall I think you just need a better grasp of anatomy, which can only be done through practise and referencing (and maybe some tutorials…), so keep at it, and be ever self-critical. I’m not sure how well my points came across so if you need any clarification just ask.

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Thank you for being honest with me. No one ever seems to know enough about art (or have the guts, apparently) to critisize my art.
But honestly I’m a bit worried. I’m turning ninteeen in a month, and apparently that’s actually older than half the people here, which really makes me feel old… and I still haven’t cultivated any sort of skill in anything whatsoever. And considering what i do everyday. I’ve seen many people still in high school who draw so much better than me compairing them to me would be like comparing Ancient Roman civilization with 1920’s America. And yes, I draw fairly frequently (though not frequently enough, I guess.) I considered myself better at anatomy than most people are, but a) that’s because I’ve seen a lot of horrible anatomy in other people’s drawings and it’s only that mine is good -by comparison- b) I knew I couldn’t compare to professional artists anyway c) Dunning-Kruger effect.
In the past I would have broken down a lot more when faced with criticism like this (even though I looked for it.) I’m actually better at handling that now (I hope), but at the same time I get a sense of despair that I’ve wasted too much of my teenhood, and that I’ll never cultivate a creative skill because I’ll grow too old to do so.

… I suppose that’s why I don’t even try to do mugs right now. I should go back to splices first. For a long, long time. (I’m not sure how much -that- would help me, though. I get the feeling that there’s much you can’t learn from just splicing alone.) (For the record, my previous mugs were even worse. At least I improved (did I?), but I wonder if I’ve already hit my ceiling, so to speak. It’s not my mugs I’m too concerned about, anyway. It’s just that, well, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually improved all that much, and I’m already past puberty, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be acceptable at art.

But yes, to be honest, I’ve never really looked at tutorials at all. For some reason, I’m a bit reluctant to actually read and watch them. (This applies to everything and me, not just art.) It’s mostly just because I’m lazy, and I’ve always been lazy.

… I -would- take some time and dedicate it to improving, but I’m in university now and I’m quickly losing all of my free time (especially since I’m already in second year.) I should focus on not trying to fail out of my math and CS courses instead, then figure out what I want to do next, then talk about changing majors (but that’s neither here nor there.)

(Sorry if I come across as childish and whiny. I’m not actually -that- upset.)