D’oh! Sorry, I thought you were replying direct to me.
I’d still go with roughing shit out in thumbnails, though.
The second thing is knowing when to stop. Commercial work is great for getting you to stop “improving” art. When you reach the deadline the art goes out the door, ready or not, or you lose the commission and the client. If you’re doing stuff for yourself, it’s hard to know when to stop twiddling with a picture, or what constitutes pointless twiddling.
Try giving yourself a set time to do the picture. When you reach that time, the job’s over, turn the page, start a new pic, using what you learned from the previous pic. If it took you several tries to get that expression right, this time try to get it in one. Throw away your erasers and just live with the mistakes, or work around them.
Hard to tell, but it looks to me like something is connecting to a point on the inside or other side or is unintentionally overlapped in a way that messes up the faces (not the right number of vertexes). It’s possible that adding a vertex or cutting a face might fix it, but I don’t know. I found 3-D modeling very difficult because things like that kept happening and weren’t easy to fix, although other people seem to have no trouble with it.
For gesture, one of the ways I was taught was to practice by tracing pictures (photos and/or comics) not entirely but just a few key pose points: approximate spine line (as a curve), ellipses for shoulders, elbows, and wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. Then taking the picture away, with just that spine line and those 6 ellipses (possibly moving a couple to alter the arms/legs, stretching or condensing), flesh out the figure, being careful about balance and that spine curve. It helped me improve somewhat at least.
I’m no good at expressions, so I sought out someone who was and they suggested I practice using something that exaggerates expression, like anime or caricatures, and once I get a feel for that, tone down the exaggeration to get more natural but still expressive expressions. I haven’t put in the time to test that suggestion yet.
Heh. That started as a scrap I was just going to throw out (circles I drew to practice expressions). When I got home and went to throw out my scraps I saw a character in it and I think I ended up doing more with that than any of the things I was planning to save that day and work more on.
I was also born in '74 and I moved around a lot between S’field and Ann Arbor, but when I was in Southfield, it was 12 and Greenfield. If you went to Vandenberg or Thompson, then we went to school together. Moved to TN before high school, tho.
I’d model them myself, but I’ve lost weight, so they might look kinda peculiar. Except for the Levi’s skirt, they all fit like hip-huggers on me. The London jeans were those that were tailored at the waist, then they had the wide legs narrowing down to the ankles from the knees. But I’ll see what I can do.
Are you kidding? I’m 5’8", 115-120 lbs, and the waistline is tight on me. Plus, they have no give for hips of any sort. And they’re 100 percent cotton, so no real “give” in them, either.
When I weighed 150 pounds my waist was about 29". That was way too thin.
I’m not sure who buys pants with 36" or 38" inseams. They would have to be nearly seven feet tall or else have disproportionately long legs. I suspect that they just buy outsized pants and roll the legs up.
