My Virtual World :3

I feel like my process is different every time lol! Generally I try to thumbnail first, keeping everything really loose before getting caught up in the details.

^ some of the thumbnails for that fish market painting,

I'm not always the best at holding myself to this though! ToT Sometimes I'll start getting into nitty gritty stuff before I have a good foundation. I usually don't like this as much compared to a piece where I spent more time planning and experimenting. Gestures/thumbnails are so important and I keep learning this lesson over and over lmfao. Even in these examples I feel like could've pushed them more.

As someone who looks at hundreds of completed works a day, its easy for me to forget this stuff doesn't just come out of thin air lol After I have a good sketch going I'll either clean it up a little and leave it as is, or I'll do line art on another layer. It kinda depends on what I'm making. (comic vs. painting, stuff like that)

I'll usually do colors on one layer underneath everything, and then slap another layer on TOP of everything to add little details. It puts some dimension back into the drawing. It's also a nice way to change things without losing anything.

This is where I feel like its a different process every time I draw because there are a million ways to depict something, and it's really hard to keep things consistent when I think everything looks cool lol

FOR ANATOMY SPECIFICALLY

I start with a gesture, and line of action type thing. I place the head, angle of the shoulders,collar bone, hips, and curve of the rib cage. I find that these are pretty good landmarks to help with posing! It can help to draw over your reference images for these markers :3

Sometimes I'll study a subject specifically for one body part, I don't usually render a full human when I'm studying a reference. Stuff like hands and faces I'll draw separately but I could probably benefit from putting it all together more often. I like to make ellipses and planes over studies, so I can actually understand how the object is positioned in 3D space. At first glance it can be soooo deceiving. There are reference images out there where people put strips of tape over their bodies so you don't have to do as much guesswork , they're pretty helpful! Checking the negative space between the body parts of your reference can also help if something feels off but you don't really know why. If the legs feel longer it might be for another reason like the torso being shorter, blahblah ITS SO HARD DRAWING IS SO HARD. I also think sometimes when anatomy looks "bad" or inaccurate its more interesting so I sometimes throw this stuff out the window. Still important and fun tho!

I could've included better examples + I have a lot more thoughts about this stuff + this is obviously an oversimplification of a lot of concepts but I've drawn this out way too much already. Hopefully all of that made sense!