Sorry for the long absence! I switched over to DeviantArt as my main art account for a while, but I’m back. I’ll be posting art and sharing links to great resources here as I continue building my art portfolio and discovering useful tools.
Speaking of which, there’s a fantastic group of artists who get together to critique artwork on the first Wednesday of every month—W.I.P. Podcast. I posted my work last week and received some great critique on my latest piece. Here are the before and after pictures:
As you can see, I changed the hair and finished the legs—much better! I tend to fall into the trap of making my subject matter pretty rather than realistic, and the most helpful comment I received was to give the hair as much dynamic movement as the rest of the piece. It’s always good to have another pair of eyes catch things you don’t even notice.
Check out the forums as well—there’s a great little community for artists to post their work and receive feedback. It’s an excellent stepping stone for beginners who are just getting started and want critiques. Plus, building a network of artistic friends is a great way to break into the industry. You can’t go wrong by offering others some helpful comments, either! The podcasts are also packed with useful information.
Another great resource I stumbled upon is a link from The Art Educators Blog about DAZ Studio—a powerful 3D tool for posing. I’ve played around with it a bit, and it looks promising for capturing hard-to-reference poses (especially action poses) and for finding body types that are difficult to source. I’ll experiment with it more, but I’m unsure how useful the program will be once my 30-day trial is up. Plus, while the software itself is supposedly free, many of the content packs cost money, and I’m not too keen on investing heavily in something that requires additional purchases to be truly effective.
The picture to the right is a quick snapshot I took of an action pose—cool stuff, right?
