Sietje

Love the style you used for the costumes! They remind me of illustrations you can find in old children's books, especially Celica. And cool that you've also done some stuff for Inktober. I managed to get through the whole month; it was rough, but also fun. I can definitely feel your pain about not being able to fix mistakes with traditional media, it's so frustrating at times.

@ruruo Thank you! Working with colored paper is really fun, as it gives you a bit more options to explore light and dark tones. And I'm happy to say that so far I haven't missed a day for Inktober! Inktober is almost over and for day 29 Hector joins Eliwood (day 6) on the page next to him.

I just updated this whole thread. All the non Fire Emblem related images are put in spoilers, so people can choose to see only my Fire Emblem related stuff or everything I post. For day 6 of Inktober I decided to draw Eliwood and I'm going to do a companion piece to this one later this month. For all my other Inktober drawings you can check out one of my social media pages.

I'm not sure if people here would be interested in these, but I'm participating in the Inktober challenge. Here are the first four days, so let me know if you want to see more of them.

The main problems I see are with your black and white values. The ones you use in the face and hair are fine and have a nice contrast to them, but there is a complete lack of contrast in the rest of the image. In the paintover I did not change the face and hair, but only changed the contrast on the clothes. The shadows on her armor are darker and I added more highlights on the dress. I also did a quick fix of her arm, because it had an odd bend like Rezzy pointed out. You can also see how much impact the background can have on your image. In the original artwork the background has the same value as the dress and hair, so the image doesn't read very well. With a lighter background there is more contrast making the character stand out more. Also when shading stuff like the arms and torso, keep in mind that most of their basic shapes are cylinders. Right now everything except the head and hair looks very flat. Something I occasionally do when I work on an artwork is to turn the image into a black and white image. It helps to see if there are mistakes and if the image reads well.

Not FE related, but still something I'd like to share. It's the design process for a fun personal design challenge I did. The goal was to create a character based on a few keywords, so here's my excited mermaid from outer-space.

You've got a really nice soft style which reminds me very much of my own. And I love the texture on the dress! It feels like a very shiny smooth fabric, which can be very hard to paint correctly. People have pointed out that the face looks off and I have to agree. The problem lies in the symmetry of the face and to show you I did a quick edit with the Liquify tool in Photoshop. The biggest issues are the jaw and the mouth; they are not evenly divided in the face by the red symmetry line. In the edited version I also moved the eye a little bit closer to the center of the face, but that's just a minor detail. Hope this helps and good luck on your art journey.

Your Ninian and Marisa look great! The style is so clean and really nice to look at. They have a certain flow to them that captivates the eye and the colors are also done really nicely.

There is so much that can be said about a topic like this. First of all practice does make perfect, so yes you have to invest time to improve. For improving on the technical side of drawing, I believe learning from realism is the way to go. This doesn't mean that you have to go out of your way and only focus on making everything super realistic. I mean that there are elements that can be taken from real life that can be implemented in more stylistic styles, like proportion, character balance and making a character feel solid. (I find proportion to be the most important thing to learn) Personally when I started to draw more seriously I started out with drawing in a manga style. Thanks to that I became more comfortable with drawing bodies and characters in general. I feel that manga styles have quite a lot in common with realism when you take your time to compare them. At least for me it made it easier to take the next step towards learning from real life, so now I try to do figure drawing and value studies more often. As for character design there are multiple ways to go about it. Some people like to write down everything about the character first (backstory, personality etc) and then base their design based on that. When you just have a general idea/feeling then try a bunch of quick thumbnail sketches and pick the one that feels the best. When you just want to focus on the clothing of a character, create a base, copy it a few times and then draw the clothes over that. It saves time when you don't have to draw the same base over and over again. Resources: Any book by Andrew Loomis is great and ctrlpaint.com has some good beginner tutorials. For figure drawing I always use quickposes.com Art related youtubers: Sycra, Draw with Jazza, Proko, Istebrak, CGcoockie Concept, Tyler Edlin

I've been a bit out of it lately and I'm trying to find my daily rhythm again. Anyway here are two of my recent Fire Emblem drawings. The Sonia one was requested over on my Tumblr. I'm still taking requests over there, so check out this post if you're interested.

@Shuuda Thanks for the feedback! Regarding the face, I think the nose might be a little too big and it's really showing with the shading. Thanks to that the side of the nose catches a lot of light, making it the center of attention. These pieces are just some personal stuff. I've been trying to do some more original art that are meant to just create and have fun.

Finished piece of Tiena. Though I'm not completely happy with the face, her hands are a bit too small and one of her feet is too big. I did try to readjust the face but that was only making it worse, so I just kept it this way. And despite all that it's still a pretty decent piece.

I follow you in Instagram and you've really been improving on the hair! This Zelda portrait is so far one of your best works. You asked for a critique, so be prepared to get one. First up the face has a mashup of two different perspectives; the shape of the head does not match the perspective of the face. I decided to do two paintovers to show the two perspectives. In the first one I changed the perspective of the facial features and left the shape of the head mostly the same. For the second paintover it's the opposite, I tried to match the shape of the head with perspective of the face. Another thing I changed is the lighting. For paintover 1 I chose a soft light coming from the front, which is a pretty common lighting type. I also made her eyebrows less arched and thinner and added more dark tones to the eyes to give her a softer look. Paintover 2 has a more extreme lighting setup with the light coming from the right. I tried this type of lighting to match the dark stroke next to the nose on the original piece. It gives the piece more drama to match the intense look she has. Just try to keep your lighting more consistent and it'll help to make the piece look more coherent. And here's a rough guide for the rest of the anatomy. I hope this helps and good luck!

@GenericHero Thanks! It's nice to hear that you can see improvement, it means I'm doing something right :D @duchesschrysanthemum Thank you for the support! I've just updated the whole thread, because quite a lot of images weren't showing up properly. So hopefully that's fixed now. Anyway here's a work in progress piece for a community project. It's Tiena from the Fire Emblem manga.

The last two paladins to finish it up my series are Sirius/Camus and Xander. The original and the successor of the same archetype.