>>23675 I am aware of loomis yes. Started out with his "Fun with a pencil", but eventually phased it to online tutorials as they are usually more in depth relating specific topics, and don't suffer as much from the "draw the rest of the owl" as the book itself. As for the lines, making her shoulder lower does fix the length of her arm, but then she would be grabbing the air with her other hand, so while her left shoulder isn't visible its position can be derived from that fact. >My best advice is to pick a light source... I was more talking about the mechanical part of it. Using the right brushes and selecting the right areas, etc, as i don't quite know how digital coloring works, I've been working with just the regular pencil in Krita. >>23678 Hmm, i think i recognize this artstyle...

Iteration continues. Using fur to cover up awkward connecting parts. Feet still look off to me.

>>23696 I see. In that case my recommendation is to get use to soft blend with the basic brush first, since you can do 90% of things with that even professionally, then branch out for detailing. I'm still working on this, you have the WIP pic I posted here a bit ago to start, Skrats's Gazer speedpaint as something that might take you more time, and for the pro-level I recommend Kuroshiro, like his girl-and-tiger pic here (he has a ton more if you want other examples) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4La_fwvftRs The three things I'll point out for special attention is first, how in most cases he's using the same shade-base-highlight color picks that I do but with more blending and a willingness to layer on some "glaze" (broad brush with very low opacity). This technique makes it easy to try a thing and back it out, you can see in several places he stops and undoes the section he was working to get a better effect. Second, when he does fine detailing, almost all of it is him drawing a pattern separate from the main drawing, then using it as a texture on its own layer (starts 13m in). Last, when he does use a textured brush, it's usually in a defined region or an extra layer like the decal textures, and it's not a fancy brush, just either the "watercolor" or "canvas/coarse-brush" effect. For your Arachne and her highly geometric design I would suggest little to no blend on the chitin, as with the Gazer, and experiment with coarse brush on her hair since that would be an easy way to differentiate it, but also easy to separate out if you don't like the effect. Then with those done you can pick how you want to blend for her skin, either soft and realistic or anime style. If you're not sure, a light/shade and flat color pass would be a good start, I could say more once I get a better idea what you're going for. The solid, closed lines will help a lot here, you should be able to layer the selections so you can paint just the skin or just the features. For the wolfgirl, no argument that it's flawed no matter the assumptions, just musing how she got that way. It's easy to misjudge reference, and even easier to "keep going wrong" once you do. If he made the rear shoulder higher and rear leg longer by poor judgment, the near hand and leg make more sense in context (so he know the hand should be on the shoulder). I've been there and sometimes it's bad enough that it's easier to resketch the whole thing later rather than try to fix the parts while half your mind things it's still kind of okay. >>23707 Nice. For the feet, two quick things that may help are to make the middle toes stick out a bit, closer to a wolf foot, and to make the claws look more like they come from inside the feet using more of a "diamond, then curve down" form like in the MGE Hellhound pic or my pg.3 here >>23678. In both cases easy enough to try one and toss it if it looks bad or is too hard.

>>23717 >If you're not sure, a light/shade and flat color pass would be a good start, I could say more once I get a better idea what you're going for. That's more or less it, just something basic to start. I don't know myself quite what i'm going for, if to keep the lineart thick, or thin it out, or leave it out entirely. Probably the first or second. Then there is the whole process itself. Painting it by hand by using the normal brush seems wrong, so perhaps you can give me some advice as to how to do it. From what i see most peopke use the lineart to select areas and color them with flat colors, but they don't quite explain what brushes they use, if they apply anything special to the layer they paint on, etc. To most those seem like secondary things, but to me it's more of the "draw the rest of the owl." As for the lighting, i'm going for an afternoon scene, so not much natural light. Instead she's being iluminated by the gemstones incrusted on her egg behind her, which are also present on her skin on sevedal spots. Also thanks for all the help.

>>23720 No, I get it, it's a pain in the ass at first. If that's where you're at, I'd say first look up Krita specifics, since it has some horribly unintuitive UI like the RGB colors being "click the top of the two tiny color switch icons in the upper left" while while the color wheel is useless HSV (I close it entirely). For which brushes and commands to use, especially with outlines to color, the on-site Krita tutorials are quite good: https://docs.krita.org/en/tutorials/flat-coloring.html Then to show two options, with commentary on the pics. On the left is my very first speedpaint from years and years ago, where you can easily see the problems, and where I got screwed by not using enough layers (layers are Walt Disney's greatest gift to the world, even a 15-minute speedpaint benefits!) On the right I've given a Krita example of the Kuroshiro way sinc he uses Clip Studio. His method, in short, was to break out several layers and start coloring with a broad flat-color brush, then highlight/shade with either the same brush with light fade/blend or a super-fat fade brush to glaze on a color. Here I did all fine shading with superfat because it was really quick on your drawing, which is easy to split into parts and is a contrast with my blending. Colors were navy/purple to get close to Rachnee colors, but you could pick something entirely different if she's a wolf spider or the like. If you've got time, try both fat fade and medium blend and see what you think. So long as the lineart layer is unchanged your experiments cost nothing but time.

>>23852 Oh yeah, and for the pencil still showing through the leg, that's because the brushes were the focus here and I got lazy. But if you haven't tested, the parameter that matters is "fuzziness", and setting it to 40 instead of 20 will include all pencils but respect the black outlines. But if you did make the mistake, by not knowing or forgetting, you can fix it with shift + drag a circle around the pencil bits using the outline selection (lasso) tool.

>>23852 >the on-site Krita tutorials are quite good Oh hey, didn't know Krita had tutorials about that stuff too. Should check the other ones out when i'm done, though this one seems a bit outdated, as Krita now aoutmatically starts you on a transparent layer. Don't know how to feel about antialiasing, it looks fine when it's just lines, but it's a pain in the ass when coloring. Any recomendations? For now, growing the selection by one pixel seems to give the best results. Krita's UI is fine, mainly because you can customize it yourself. To fit your needs, and there is always some kind of external tool you can find, or code with python if that's your thing. About the process, seems like layering the individual pars will probably be the best, otherwise blending will pull in colors from outside the selection. I ended up going for a bit of a more blue-ish color closer to what i dreamt, and then "separating" the plane of her leg into five pieces, meaning painting stripes of black, deep blue, light blue, deep blue and then red,(from bottom to top to really sell the shiny matte surface and the red highlights from the light of the gemstones, although it took me quite a while to find out how to achieve that, and i'm still not sure that's what i want.

>>23907 Nice. Only thing I'll say for the leg is that the red-to-blue at the top can be jarring. There are two common solutions, the realistic and artistic. Artistic is to take a thin blend to get a streak of desaturated purple as a transition. This is very obvious in the Blade Runner example here, where the mid purple on the jaw is less saturated than violet or magenta, and lets them connect without clashing. The realistic alternative, well-shown in the Empire Strikes Back carbonite chamber, is that realistically there's usually some reflected light that can more easily get everywhere except right after the highlight, which will be darkest - seen clearly on Luke's nose and upper lip, while the reflected light makes his cheek more legible. This is harder unless you can really think it through or have an exact reference. Here the lower chin/lip are brightest orange because it's coming from the floor grating as well as the rear stairs, and his chin and lips furthest right have bluish tinge because there's another floodlight like the background one but more to the fore and side. That's all obvious if you see the set, but you can't see it here, and I also suspect they cheated his position somewhat to get more dramatic lighting since this happens twice and both do full cuts, even the second where it's still just him walking. You can usually learn a ton from analyzing your favorite artists or movies, good for inspiration too. For Krita, I'm happy with a lot of it, but the lack of an RGB option in the advanced color picker ruins my tablet workflow, since switching on the little icon really needs a mouse. I'd otherwise be able to go 90% pen and hotkeys, and as it is now it encourages a unified palette so I can use the color picker instead. That's good for impressionist pieces but not naturalism. I do find a few of the other initial keybinds unintuitive but as you said the configurability there is great.

>>23912 You can get RGB with the specific color picker, i think its called. It's how i input the excact hex codes i get when i googled the colors.

>>23937 I'll be damned, I saw CMYK and didn't realize the dropdown had more than the advanced picker. Thanks!

>>23912 >>23852 Pyw?

hav bird and cowder

Posting the finished pic here too. Advice and critique is always welcome.

>>23678 an encore sounds nice

>>24705 Wonky, but I quite like it >5th pic has just pasted in photo of a dessert Unironically great

>>25176 What are those squares on her body? And what's this big thing behind her?

>>25191 The thing behind her the egg she was just born from. Those bits are gems that grow on her skin.

>>25176 Very nice, congrats on a finished piece. For critique, do you have any aspects you'd like to improve? Focus on one area will make it easier, and it coming from a dream may also affect things. I had a dream about the strangest library because it was effectively a videogame. >>25184 I'll get on it, are you interested in going through the original lessons or looking for a topic not covered there? If the former just start on the first lesson and post here for critique. If the latter suggest a topic. Finally have a good break this weekend and I plan to split it between this and my own art.

>>25288 >do you have any aspects you'd like to improve? A bit of a strange question, wouldn't know how to answer without saying "everything.". If i had to pick the 3 things i most struggled with, then it would be. >Hair:The strands and occlusion shadows don't look quite right, and neither do the highlights. >Skin: Still no idea how to make it more than just a flat color. Details are quite difficult to capture. >Hard edge vs no edge: Some of her parts still have the lineart while stuff like the legs doesn't. If i put lineart over all of the picture,the rest of her looks weird, and if i take out all of the lineart, she has no features. Guess it goes back to point 2 A small bit was the shadows in the folds of her clothes. It's supposed to be loosely hanging from her breasts, but no matter where i placed the shadow, how dark or light i painted it, i never got it to look wavy.

>>25323 That's actually really useful feedback, because all of them boil down to "the trouble with shadows". There's no shame there, it's one of the hardest things to learn since it relies on knowledge of light sources and planes, and most photos have boring lighting so reference is hard. Lacking time for a full breakdown, here are a few quick pointers. >Skin and Clothes If you know the light angle and tension points, having a plane create a sharp divider gives a cel-shaded feel. Blend a bit for more realism. The black & white pic here could be adapted for how her top folds below the boob line and how to do her arms >Hair The advice to use planes still applies, but it's much harder to see what the planes are. I've done a drawover to make a set of simple N64/PSX style 3D planes, where then knowing that the light is from behind the camera and a bit above, you get why the right-side "down" planes remain dark (blue hatching). You can tell the light angle more easily here by looking at her shirt, which is also brightest from the upper-left. To actually get hair-strand like highlight and shade, use a few strokes of hard blend from the central highlight/shade line, or at least zig-zag it with each "chunk" you've drawn, 90s anime style. Currently you neither zigzag or blend much, it's just a highlight layer with some opacity. >Odds & Ends Blend vs. Opacity is going to be a "draw the whole owl" thing without a step-by-step, so for now let me suggest that all realistic skin can be done by blending a round shape, which you can practice with a sphere at high contrast. Actual skin will be lower-contrast but follows the same principle, see how Z-Ton does it, especially on the boobs, thighs, and flower hair (which also uses strong planes). This can also be adapted to the gems, making them seem more 3D and also casting a slight shadow on the skin beneath if they pop out, or a highlight if they sink in a little.

>>25330 Sorry anon, but that "breakdown" of hair is pretty worthless, and arguably even bad advice. Sure you can think of hair as polygons, but you won't get far with that, its much better to think about it as strands, like ribbon strands or sheets of some material (especially useful with hime cuts). Even that only applies to long enough hair, short hair works completely different.

>>25377 Care to give a tutorial? I don't entirely disagree, I did call out major hair clumps in my ponytail mesh, and for animation clumps are certainly better since what matters is the sense of motion, not precise shading. But for lighting I find this versatile and not too hard, here's a short hair example that would be tricky without the mesh since it does a double wave in the front that creates two highlights. Z-Ton's Alraune is a simplified version of this hairstyle and you can clearly see the plane cuts. That said, no harm no foul if you find other methods easier. I got this from Loomis, who treats hair as just a few more planes of anatomy. But even he says it's good to experiment, and he didn't give a great breakdown for hair specifically so I figured I'd try. You can see with his woman's face that he doesn't bother with individual hair strands until the final detailing pass, saying you should focus on the values of planes, but he's advanced enough that even step 2 to 3 is a bit of a leap and this is how I think of it. Arachne anon, I'll be back with specific critique later, maybe a few hours from now.

>>25176 Time for real crit. First starting with the requested point, the hard part about making the body seem 3D. I will use grayscale photos both because these match your Arachne's skin more closely and because it makes it easy to focus on shade value. The first thing is that with poor light, reality can look flat (first photo), but as an artist you choose the composition! From experience, I know a sidelight gives good shadows that accentuate the fine details of anatomy, so I chose the sun to be more to our left (her right). This let me put the second reference photo to good use on her abs, arms, and roughly on the contour of her breasts. I applied this to the cloth folds on her shirt freehand, but done quickly and without accounting for her arms beyond the hands. That's because if all gems glow with internal light, they'd brighten anything near them and totally change the lighting, whereas if they only reflect, they'll be fairly dark and the arms will case additional shadow on the shirt and ribcage. The best way to see how low the arm shadow would go would be to try the pose in front of a mirror, I'd bet you'd get a diffuse shadow even on the upper stomach. Moving on to hair, and the gems which share the ability to do bright reflection, I only did a small portion of what would be needed, in a few different styles. Her hair on the upper left gets a bright single shadow that dips with each clump of hair in her bangs, making them seem more 3D. This is the "90s anime" style except done very quickly and poorly, whereas in some of those drawings I'd wager they spent an hour on just the hair, like this Eva pic by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. You can see that he uses sharp planes on the Eva itself, but chooses to fine-detail the hair by breaking it into 3-4 sections like the Z-Ton drawing, then dividing those into 3-4 clumps each, then drawing a few hair strands individually. He also cheats on the lighting for Rei: it would seem to be upper-right by her face and plugsuit, but that should also light the center-left portion of her hair instead of the far left. He gets away with it because locally, it looks correct, with the center-right hair partition being highlighted as if light was coming from the left. I call this out because it shows how you have to learn the rules to get away with breaking them. Like perspective and shadow make you think a flat drawing is 3D, ensuring an area looks locally correct will be fine so long as it's not a major focus of the drawing. For the gems here I give two examples: the upper-center on her stomach is the "typical fantasy gem", a polished circle or rounded rectangle. The upper-right stomach gem is directly referenced from the attached garnet, and so feels much more real, but out of place unless you gave similar treatment to every gem. All of the stuff I've done here is just a set of hints. You could make it better by spending more time on blending and applying the techniques everywhere, and you could choose other solutions like going for full Sadamoto hair rather than my "Eva as animated" hair, which has far less detail in the highlights due to cost of animation. Last, to go over critiques not explicitly asked for, and probably not worth adding here, there are several things to think about. My stance here is that if you just keep redoing one drawing while learning it can get frustrating, so even if she's your literal dream girl you might be best served doing other pieces and returning in a few months for a complete redraw. >The front spider-thorax area feels flat like the body did and for the same reasons, it would need to change shades on the sides/bottom to indicate a more 3D form. Darkening the bottom quarter and right side would help as a quick test (50% opacity dark blue/black in its own layer on top) >It would be more striking if the spider body cast shadows on the ground coming out from the legs. In reality this shows poorly in thick grass, but if the grass is that thick, draw long strands that obscure her feet so at least it's clear >On the other hand you use same-length or longer grass strands in the distance and it hurts the sense of depth, though luckily not too much since they're not high-contrast. The two solutions are either to let them go above the horizon, in which case it seems like a hill that crests a few meters beyond the egg, or if as I suspect it's a long plain, then to halve the height of the grass strands for every clump you move up, reverting to clumps and then whole features before you get to the horizon. I'll attach the bootcamp on how planes for bodies and landscapes can be similar in a followup >Color-wise, the very green grass is perhaps too strong a contrast with the red glow. Shifting it to red in the current glow radius, orange (as now) in the rest, and blue-with-hint-of-green shadows would unify you around a red and purple palette that's more striking. If nothing else, as an experiment think how you'd color this if the scene was on the night of a full moon instead of during the day >Simply because the rest of the Arachne is high-detail, I would add more definition to her neck: a darker shadow from her chin, and maybe a shade/highlight for the neck muscles that make a V-shape connecting to the collarbone (the sternocleidomastoids if you want to look up a muscle diagram) And remember, all of this is just fuel to do better in the future. I still often find flaws in my drawings, and either have to correct the sketches, or if I'm further along than that usually just finish and resolve to do better next time.

By way of giving options, first see what I did in the Bootcamp 3 exercises: the title stained glass is what you can do with flat shades, just shape and color. The android girl (6) uses facial planes to define all shaded values, feeling very angular. However, the soft succ (4) uses no values, just hinting at 3D shape with lines, a trick you see in da Vinci's sketches. Finally, the E2 Nekomata hug uses Loomis construction, leaving it fairly visible, while the E1 Gazer mom combines that basic approach with more use of texture and a softer touch to get what I'd say is the best overall pic of the examples. The other pages of Lesson 3 show examples, but the ones I feel may be useful for the Arachne pic are the pg.3 Scenery section, which combines planes and textures, and the pg.4 Inspiration section where the Kejourou Venus and Harajuku Nekomata show some solutions for body, hair, and clothes. The Mood Colors is just here to show some effects you can get by unified palettes, so my commentary on that makes a little more sense.

Quite a bit to go through >>25330 For the clothes, I found it's helpful to think about the folds that portrude out, and then fill out the negative area with shadow, which is a bit counterintuitive. Taking a tshirt and draping it over two round objects also helped. As for the hair, after some hours of research, i found a tutorial that goes well in depth as to how to shade and highlight it, basically a combination of a base color, a textured brush for strands and then lines of highlight that you smudge blur to create that zigzag pattern. Should do well for the time being. If anyone else is interested it's https://tips.clip-studio.com/en-us/articles/6039 As for the body and the shadows, taking a more geometrical approach seems to be best. Like the anon suggested, divide the body into polygons and shade/light wherever the light hit/doesn't hit. >>25377 Somewhat rude considering you didn't provide any explanations or examples yourself. >>25405 >hat's because if all gems glow with internal light, they'd brighten anything near them Yeah, i quickly realized that too, so i decided to make them opaque and have them only light up when she's feeding.. As for the lighting itself. i guess it was supposed to look flat in the original, as both the sun and the egg are behind her. I Shaded the joints of her legs and highlighted the rim of the abs, and it looks a bit better. >My stance here is that if you just keep redoing one drawing while learning it can get frustrating, I know. I intended that version to be fully final, and won't change it any further. She's also not necessarily my dream girl, just a very visually striking monstergirl i dreamed about, and i took that inspiration. Drawing characters from dreams is a good exercise too, you have a vague reference with only some details, and your creativity can fill in the rest, while you are forced to learn to construct the scene from scratch. there are also more characters from dreams i need to draw, i had a streak of several mg dreams some time ago. I did also notice the spider bottom looks flat, but it is also indeed a very simple fix. The grass and floor in general were more of an afterthought, but thanks for the advice. At least the clouds came out nice.

>>25470 Thanks for the hair tutorial and nice job on your own hair there, I especially like how now it matches the lighting values and texturing style of your legs, which makes sense since hair is very similar to chitin. The body also "pops" now. I'm still not thrilled by the shirt. On the plus side the pink shade fits the general color tone, the fold shading is a nice gradient and the upper crease cause by tension in the boob gap is well observed. The problem is that with no bottom shadow, but also no glow from the lower gemstones and a very high placement of that upper crease, the flat tones create the sense of boobs bouncing up and out. I could imagine that fitting more on a Holstaur cheerleader just coming down from her jump's peak, while thanks to inertia her boobs haven't quite got the message and fly up to obscure half her face. If you're looking for practice, I'd say to try something wild with hair next, be that a Wight with drill hair or trying to apply some motion/inertia to any longer hairstyle. You already made good progress here and are armed with a tutorial on different hair types, so this lets you keep the streak going by using your composition and texturing skills in a different context. On the other hand if you already have inspiration, do that. I always get more done when I start from a strong idea.

BORN TO DRAW PERSPECTIVE IS A FUCK 天宇受売命 Draw Em All 2007 I am art man 410,757,864,530 FAILED WIPS

I'm still going. The little bits of fur connecting the leg were awkward. I'll have to think about how to do those properly.

>>26277 In all seriousness though, great job with the toes and I dig the tomboy hair. I don't know why her shins have a robot joint now, is that just a graphic artifact? >Arm and leg fringe A solution that's harder but nice and hopefully not a crazy amount of work is to make the fur tufts like miniature tails, with maybe 2 bones to respond to gravity/impact. That avoid the current flat look and adds visual appeal when she runs or lays down (and the fur droops like the leather fringe on cowboy pants). You can see the idea on my High Orc here, the upper arm fluff is still springy, but the longer tufts on her hands droop down to cover them.

>>26355 It's pretty untextured. I'll try to make ambient occlusion for it sometime soon.

>>25176 Way too late, but I'll still want to say it While overall its pretty wonky, you actually went all the way through and finished it, and that alone is pretty good. You're also attempting something difficult colour-wise (sunset + weird skin color + glowing red crystals) so no worries that it looks off. My boring advice would be try shading something in normal condition (just look at photos done in direct, but not harsh sunlight, and copy those to understand it), then decide how much you want to alter it. Generally speaking, good cellshading (hard edge on shadows) looks good on most manga, more complex shading depends on the style you're using. Some actual jap manga artist that come from a realistic background have trouble with drawing moe girls and they look really weird, despite the fact the artist is actually a skilled professional. I guess look for some pics that would be your "goals" and try to learn what they did.

>>26277 Local 3d anon still at it! Though please do something about the lips, they almost never look good on 3d anime characters.

>>26479 I'll disagree, what he's done now looks fine to me since it's not full-on anime, but more like Stellar Blade style fur. I also like her athletic look, and most anime outside certain doujins don't do that either.

>>26916 wow, that's pro stuff

>>26916 I don't remember ordering a lim

Did you know roses can grow fruits? Phew, this one has been quite the labor. I think I improved quite a bit on the aspects recommended to me before. I finally figured out the correct layer setup for light and shadows, so they should have improved substantially. No lines needed for the features, just the magic of lighting. I hope i could portray the semitransparent nature of the petals well. Pose was definitely hard for this one, couldn't quite get it right. There is much to improve yet in that aspect, so i'll be concentrating in exercises for that for the time being. The left arm was especially hard. Figuring out how to draw overlapping body parts and having them not look like they are tiny/short isn't easy. Anatomy should be looking good. And i don't mean just the "big and obvious" parts. Face is also a bit stiff, like the pose. It's second in line in terms of practice. Anyways, as always any feedback/constructive criticism/advice is welcome. The ones from last time were quite helpful, and having feedback has helped me improve a lot faster than if i was doing this alone. Now to write

>>27089 you drew that spider girl from earlier? >>25176

>>27103 Yep

>>24705 Best one is the ushi from a technical perspective and from a quality perspective. The joke on the first one is pretty amazing too. Naisu.

>>27089 Excellent work, this is good use of reference, fun monstergirl design, and a big improvement in light & shadow rendering and post fluidity vs. the Arachne. I agree that the effect you did on the petals is great, and it's nice to see Alraunes get some love. The left arm is indeed one of the hardest foreshortened poses to do and it was smart to use a 3D model, but to get it a little better my trick is to use a second, highly shadowed reference just for the hand and forearm to make that look believable. I'm pretty busy this week, so I'm giving a quick and dirty version now and will revisit on the weekend if you want more and time allows. My take is that here the anatomy is good enough that general composition would make the biggest impact on the piece as a whole. >Floor perspective makes this look unnatural, I just drew a full grid in red but you could mostly get this from the 3D model floor >Light should extend strictly from the window, with the focused light in orange and the diffuse light in yellow >Given this light source, her body shadow would mostly go to the lower right, with my quick outline in purple but I didn't test it at all and at this angle it would probably be longer, going deeper than the front of the picture >Her right upper arm is very slightly too long >The volume vs. shadow on her breasts is off such that it's hard to tell their size. I suggest a little more shadow on her left (purple), also in line with the new direction of the cast shadow, and making it a little bigger (orange). If you were going for a more modest bust, instead curve her right boob in towards the stomach a little sooner, which keeps the current negative space between it and the upper arm since it's also a little long >To try to fix her left arm, I'm attaching my reference and then drew a very rough block-in, but the two key points are that the full dark-blue area would be shaded more heavily than the forearm, like in my ref pic, and that the connecting wrist joint has a little flare-out and curve where it connects A lot of this is literally my quick-and-dirty advice, which also happened to have an example Alraune that anon requested coming out of her flower, so here you go. This suggests one more improvement would be to detail the rose "stem" so it isn't just a big orb, I attached a really quick comp of what my Alraune would be like on her flower and you can see the extra petal and root connection helps sell it. For a rose you could do a whole twisting mass of thorn vines beneath the flower to match your girl's sinister-looking legs and it would be a cool parallel. Since lighting terms like diffuse and penumbra can differ based on tutorial and light vs. shadow, I've just attached the Week 4 lighting page I did to show what I mean.

>>27440 Nice, thanks. About the lighting, the rays are coming not from a window, but from a hole in the ceiling, shining down on her like a spotlight, from top left to bottom right. Don't know if that would change your view of how it should be. That's also not a window, it's a fog-covered doorway(see: Dark souls boss arenas) The floor and stem were definitely the weakest parts. For the stem i tried to Look at some other alraune, but most i could see had the flower extend into the floor, which wasn't quite what i was going for, so the thorny vines is a great idea. Should have come up with it myself. Also, where or how do you look for those references. Do you have a stock website where you look for it, or do you just simply look it up in google.

>>27452 For stock, yeah, just use various image searches (Startpage, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex are sometimes notably different from Google, and setting Google to pre-2023 keeps out most AI images). The boorus are good for anime art since the character tags are comprehensive, and things like ConceptArt used to be good for pics with full backgrounds but it's been in decline. For the pic, I did consider the ceiling hole option, but there are three composition problems that made me choose the archway. First, the light beam aligns pretty closely with the arch, which is something we try to avoid. Another common problem of this sort is having background and character get equal focus, which is less pleasing to the viewer. You usually want character focus, but you can also imagine scenes with background focus, like if it was a grand waterfall in an establishing shot of a movie or comic. The second problem is an outright error in that the light on the Alraune's body vs. the rose below isn't really consistent. Above the waist it looks like light is coming slightly from the front, matching the shadow, but for that to be true the inner-left-upper rose petal would be catching a lot of light, and the inner-left-lower petal would need to curve up to fully block light on her left leg (highlight would be on our far right). The easy way to get something close to correct here is to use a prop. In this case, turn a chair backwards and let light come in from the next room (or a desk lamp if you're in a small apartment). If the chair is either wooden or a mesh office chair it will even have light penetration similar to a thin flower petal. The desk lamp solution can also be used for time of day sunlight if you have a few stand-in props. A desk plant becomes a might oak, some Warhammer minis become an army at dawn, and an artist's desktop mannequin stands in for a single-figure focus like you have here. If you prefer to do any of that digitally with a 3D engine that's also fine, but I find knowing how to do more manually can also be a source of inspiration. For one great example, the flowery Naboo palace in the Star Wars prequels was a scale model, and the flowers were colored sprinkles like on a cupcake. The reason there's less flowers as the war goes on is because ants got into the studio and ate some of the sprinkles, and when the FX team thought about it they realized it worked better that was as a sign of the war's impact. The last thing that would help sell "not a window light" would be to go beyond pure videogamism in depiction. Now that you mention Dark Souls I get it, but they do that as a convenient shorthand where you can slap a fog FX on a flat polygon and it conveys the game message "you're locked in". Mist and fog from a colder room will tend to sink, which is what you see with fog machines in haunted houses or old Hollywood horrors. Alternately, you could use an energy texture like Jack Kirby did ("Kirby dots" or "Kirby krackle"), which is a great visual in itself, but also very easy to separate from a focused light source, like in my last pic here. More than anything else, if you take inspiration from a huge range of sources you'll probably end up with something unique to call your own.

>>27470 Ah, i see what the issue is. What i imagined the composition to be was the light coming from the side, slightly behind, and she's angled about 45° compared to the wall, hitting her upper body while also casting shadows on her features to accentuate them. You are probably right in that the petals are probably not long enough to fully cast a shadow into her left leg, and that coupled with stronger shadows on her upper features should help clear out the perspective confusion. This is where photographs would have helped much more, as 3d models tend to have more weaker lighting. As for real life props, it'd be quite difficult to simulate this one specifically, as the petals are all on different angles. The upper ones are practically upright(except the one she's holding onto, which is slanted forwards), and the lower ones are almost horizontal. The closest i could get to something that can mold itself into a variety of forms for the purposes of monstergirl drawing is plasticine/clay, so i'll see if i can pick up some. As for the clouds in a doorway, they are there for a specific reason.

>>27505 Gotcha, and yeah if you want to stick with the door as-is then all the easy fixes are composition. Given good layers, with Alraune and light separate from at least the rear wall, the simplest fix is to move the Alraune and light to the right maybe 15% of width, which pleasingly centers the Alraune's roots and gets the bottom quarter of the door out of the light beam so it'll just be gray and leave no doubt that it's a source. The only new work work is drawing a few more floor tiles, not to bad if you just do that and call it done. For practical effects there are usually ways around it. A mesh office chair gives a pretty good approximation of a flower petal for light filtering through (the little dots from the holes blur away unless the light is very close), but for the petal itself an umbrella or rain poncho gives a similar translucent effect. If this were a pro commission it also wouldn't be unreasonable to just buy a rose and have at it with the desk lamp, especially since that level of light simulation isn't available in most engines, where the advice seems to be "just use transparency". I wouldn't be surprised if there's an advanced technique that works since Ioannis Gkioulekas described the algorithm a decade or so ago, but I don't know it.

Did a thing. Went smoother than usual. Using a photograph for reference helps quite a bit, especially with the minor details. The one thing i struggled with is the clothing folds. It seemed impossible to make them look like folds, and not like random patches of color. Ironically, i had practiced that beforehand, and now i can't reproduce it.

did some sketches and turned smtn i got in a game into a monstergirl cuz i could game kept kicking my ass tho.

Everything is slow to make.

Holy nigger, we've reached the bump limit of the first OC thread! Hell yeah, time for a sequel! Niu thread >>29010