Meh >:-/

[dsm]

In a nutshell: My motherboard decided to put fried cpu on the menu, so I had to get myself a new motherboard as well as a new CPU and a new ram module. It took forever and I also had to format my hard drive but now I'm back online.
And I missed a great art contest, because without a computer, I couldn't use my scanner [insert unintelligible swearword here] >:-[

Anyways, I figured that some might be interested in seeing what I cooked up for the art contest.

- now that I got the image scanned (at last), I can see that his head is too damn big, bah.

Btw, who won the second art contest? It doesn't say in the official art contest 2# thread.
[edit]Oh, I see that Agnes won it.....again - we need some more extremely skilled artists on this board that can compete with Agnes, otherwise the art contests get boring and predictable.[/edit]

[Fredrik]

Nice to see you back :) Nice drawing, I like the detail.

I don't think the winner has been picked officially yet, but I'm not sure.

[999cop]

Details are intense, but I don't think the proportion of the body is too accurate to real life model.

[Colusio]

You mean the right arm, I think, otherwise it's quite correct not? Intense it is, it was the first time I imagined the marine with a shot off underarm.

[zabnat]

awesome drawing there, just those proportions look a bit off. But look at that detail :)

[SmellyOgre]

Welcome back and the drawing looks awesome.

[dsm]

999cop said:

Details are intense, but I don't think the proportion of the body is too accurate to real life model.

Apart from the head, I can't see what else is a proportional problem.
Care to point 'em out?
Try and imagine this drawing with a smaller head, before you start pointing out proportional problems. Last time I posted drawings here, someone claimed that my Paladin had too short legs to be proportionally correct, but when I took a careful look at him, I found that they were in fact too long, and I've experienced other situations where somebody misjudged something because the size of the scan confuses you - naturally, this means that I'm sceptical toward what people say about proportions, unless they can point out well enough to make me see the error myself.
What was that about the underarm again?

[SyntherAugustus]

holy shit. how long did that take you to do?

nice drawing.

[wasted]

Hei, man you are back!!! Lets see what we have here 4 ya...

The Effects:
1. Detailed, as always...
2. You've been realy accurate with original doom3 design :)...
3. Thats a piece made by a hardworking man, just look at the shading!!!

The cRitic:
1. His pose seems abnormal to me (hey, maybe its becouse im abnormal myself?!!!)...
2. His head a bit out of normal ones...
3. The whole composition is weird, i mean all that surrounding darkness... Your previous works used to have a background, or just empty space...

[dsm]

wasted said:

The Effects:
1. Detailed, as always...
2. You've been realy accurate with original doom3 design :)...
3. Thats a piece made by a hardworking man, just look at the shading!!!

The cRitic:
1. His pose seems abnormal to me (hey, maybe its becouse im abnormal myself?!!!)...
2. His head a bit out of normal ones...
3. The whole composition is weird, i mean all that surrounding darkness... Your previous works used to have a background, or just empty space...

Ah, first rate criticism.

Response to effects:

1. That's my trademark :-P

2. I always try to update my Doom art to follow the newest iD designs - simply because I think nobody designs iD's characters better than iD themselves. And I like to pratice my skills in capturing accurate details in the highly detailed iD art.

3. Yes, I worked quite intensely on it. Basically, as my first post states, I was working on an entry for Silverwyvern's art contest no. 2 and I only had a week (eight days actually) to do it. You can't imagine how fucking pissed off I was when I sat with a completed drawing, a non-operable computer (and thus a scanner that was totally useless) friday evening, unable to enter this bad boy in the art contest - I'm not sure if I would've won if I had been able to enter it, but the pic would've been kinda nicer if it had been part of that contest.

I completed it on the Thursday one day before Friday and the close of the art contest, so that would be seven days of work that ended up being as good as wasted - not entirely wasted as it's yet another example of what I can do with a pencil.

Response to the cRitic (heh ;-P):

1. I don't understand what's abnormal about it - he's standing with one boot on the raised step/low wall/whatever and he's clearly backing away from whatever he's shooting at (hence his torso leaning backwards), but in order to resist the recoil of the shotgun, his left leg is stretched backwards to stem against the floor, just like a soldier does when firing his rifle from standing position. He's firing the shotgun from pretty close to his shoulder, that's why you can't see his second arm (it's hidden behind his body and in the dark). I tried using myself as a "model" as the drawing progressed, so I can tell the pose is not abnormal, though I might not have been successful at capturing it right (using oneself as a model is not easy).

2. Yes I know, his head sucks - or rather, his head's size sucks (read my first post in this thread), but there wasn't time to correct it when I did discover the error, so I thought "oh what the Hell" and left it like that. After I got it scanned, I regretted that I didn't do anything about it, because his head looks even bigger in the scan.

3. The surrounding darkness was an attempt at making the drawing more gloomy and trying to make the muzzle flash seem brighter and "shinier" - I was trying to make it seem like he's in a really dark room, but since I was running out of time and since I was worried that the darkness would kill some details on the doomguy, I ended up making him seem "cut+pasted" - i.e. surrounding the Doomguy with this light halo thingy. It wasn't meant to be a realistic picture in the first place - merely a cool-looking, possibly slightly surreal and "commercial" pic. But yeah, it does look weird, especially because I didn't have time to make it better.

But yeah, as happy as I am about the details, I do admit that the drawing has some rather annoying errors, though I still think some of the criticism in earlier posts are slightly exaggerated when they state that its proportions are off.

[Colusio]

Nynke says very well done, but the second part of the chest should not be shown. That's my girlfriend partial opinion. I see regulary mutilated people and when I saw the picture I got that rather unwanted /wanted assosciation about a missing underarm.

[Silverwyvern]

Not saying this is an example.. but one of my teachers likes to warn us about what he calls putting lipstick on a dead pig..

Basically, don't go adding tons of detail until you get a solid base (correct anatomy, etc) because it'll still look bad..

This looks good, but the face looked warped.. and the foot closest to us seems like it should be facing us more for the position he's in..

Just some points.

I would like to state outright I am NOT calling this drawing a dead pig ;)

[Use]

The detail is great, and I love pencil work, but silverwyvern's right, the body structure is completely whacked.

[dsm]

Silverwyvern said:

Basically, don't go adding tons of detail until you get a solid base (correct anatomy, etc) because it'll still look bad..

This looks good, but the face looked warped.. and the foot closest to us seems like it should be facing us more for the position he's in..

Well then there's a different problem: I do always make a rough sketch that I can erase as I add detail. The sketch did look solid and anatomically correct - problem is, that once I begin to add details, I run into various conflicting problems - for instance, the head ended up larger than the sketch's head and I didn't really notice how much larger until I'd finished up the rest.

I can agree with the foot, now that it's pointed out to me - still, it's a tiny issue imo - I've done worse.
Not sure about the face though.

[BlueSonnet]

Having looked at that pic, my first obvious critism would be that the background looks messy and could have been smoother but since the background isn't the main focus i won't dwell on it too much.

I overall like the detail the face and the pose, however the right leg looks a lil messed up. It's at a weird angle and it looks shorter than the left leg. And the head does look a lil too big as you put it.

Never the less keep up the good work. ;)

dsm said:

[edit]Oh, I see that Agnes won it.....again - we need some more extremely skilled artists on this board that can compete with Agnes, otherwise the art contests get boring and predictable.[/edit]

I aim to please. That's my top priority next time.

[Agnes]

Aw. Too bad you didn't get to enter. You'd have had a fair chance, I think. :)

dsm said:

[edit]Oh, I see that Agnes won it.....again - we need some more extremely skilled artists on this board that can compete with Agnes, otherwise the art contests get boring and predictable.[/edit]

Heh. Well, Silv won the first one, so I'm not the only one you need to 'worry' about ;) If it's any comfort, I'm not planning on entering that many of these contests. At least not the next one, so there's your chance ;)

Last time I posted drawings here, someone claimed that my Paladin had too short legs to be proportionally correct, but when I took a careful look at him, I found that they were in fact too long, and I've experienced other situations where somebody misjudged something because the size of the scan confuses you - naturally, this means that I'm sceptical toward what people say about proportions, unless they can point out well enough to make me see the error myself.

Oh, I didn't mean to refer to the Paladin. Sorry. I meant to say that it was more of a general problem, but didn't... Somehow. I'm not quite focused these days. Anyway, I can't remember where I found it, but Andrew Loomis' "Figure drawing for all it's worth" can be found in .pdf format somewhere. It covers pretty much everything you need to know. Perspective, anatomy, proportions, etc. I should probably spend some more time reading that myself, so that I'll actually know what I'm talking about. ;)

[dsm]

[QUOTE]Agnes said:
[B]
Heh. Well, Silv won the first one, so I'm not the only one you need to 'worry' about ;) If it's any comfort, I'm not planning on entering that many of these contests. At least not the next one, so there's your chance ;)
Sorry, I could've sworn that I saw your name displayed as the winner under Art contest 1# - oh well, congrats on winning no. 2 - you definitely deserved it :-)

Oh, I didn't mean to refer to the Paladin. Sorry. I meant to say that it was more of a general problem, but didn't... Somehow. I'm not quite focused these days. Anyway, I can't remember where I found it, but Andrew Loomis' "Figure drawing for all it's worth" can be found in .pdf format somewhere. It covers pretty much everything you need to know. Perspective, anatomy, proportions, etc. I should probably spend some more time reading that myself, so that I'll actually know what I'm talking about. ;)

Oh I see - yeah, I did take a close look at my other character drawings and I reached the conclusion that the Amazon's legs were too short (they were a bitch to do too, pardon the expression) - but I didn't see any problems with the others although the Berserker was close to having legs that were too short.

I really need to take proportional issues more serious - normally I care much more on just making the pics extremely detailed (that's my trademark after all :-P), but since I always get my fair share of criticism on proportions, I'll need to be more paranoid in that area too.
Now that I have a scanner myself, I should aim at doing preliminary check scans on future drawings, to better be able to see what the proportions look like on scan - the usual problem is that proportional issues are much less clear on the real drawing than on scan.