Fizzy's Space

general art tips

bring a sketchbook with you everywhere, but dont worry about how good it looks. doodle anything. want to draw a bunch of poses but dont know how? draw them badly. want to draw something you've already drawn 100 times? do it anyway!

if you want to draw something new, take some time to reference a bunch of images of it at least once. i usually find that after studying its anatomy a little, i understand it better so that even if i continue drawing it badly i'm able to catch my mistakes & progressively get better at it (this is oddly specific since it's how i got into drawing dinosaurs)

try drawing things really fast without caring much about how perfect your lines are. it could look pretty whacky at first but over time you'll build line confidence and be able to make some really nice shapes, as well as avoid "chicken scratching"

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how i shade/render/color

^ over time, blend modes can also help you understand color theory if you pay attention to how they change the colors

as with your (asker's) art, i noticed that when you shade you probably just move the color closer to black. when i shade without a blend mode i usually shift the hue closer to blue THEN make it darker & more saturated (sometimes i dont need to make it closer to black at all, i either just make it more saturated (yellow example) or just leave it (blue example)) which looks really nice imo!

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backgrounds

i used to make a ton of layers when starting the background and then get caught up in changing the color of each individual layer. a way faster & nicer way to do backgrounds though is to make thumbnail sketches; zoom out and roughly block out where each color should be. once this is done i usually just merge everything into their respective layers (sky, background, props/foliage, foreground is what i usually do) but if you want something cleaner you can take a screenshot of the thumbnail and draw beside it while colorpicking from it

^ for this one i did the side-by-side method, but i copied the flat colors first then copied the blend mode layers after. you can see a speedpaint here

^ all of these were done by merging the rough colors + sketch then painting over it which is what i usually do. speedpaints of these are on my channel

other things to note:

when objects are further away, they fade more into the background; when they're closer, they're darker

i avoid foliage brushes / things like that because they look really unnatural to me but if you want to use them, use them sparingly especially if you have a simpler artstyle because they tend to draw away a lot of attention

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poses/perspective

here's a really great video on how to do poses!

when you think of a pose, also think stuff like: how would this look from the side? top? bottom? what if the character's head faced the opposite way from their body? what if this body part was in front of this other body part?

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