Snoop's 2D and 3D Art

Well, I've been doing 3D art since I was 14 (I'm 25 now), and I used to love drawing. Not really sure why I stopped, but I decided to draw again for the first time in at least 6 years. I'll show off some 3D stuff later, but I'll start this thread with something I just finished:
Attachment 9337

My reference (was really difficult to get proportions even close to right since I was drawing on a pad perpendicular to the computer monitor), from the NGE Manga:
Attachment 9338

I didn't draw in the Lance of Longinus completely because I accidentally made the drawing too large for it to really fit, and I also originally drew this 3 weeks ago. I messed the proportions up really badly at first and nearly gave up in the first 20 minutes, but then wound up doing pretty well. I drew everything you see here, minus the hands or the Lance of Longinus (originally 3 weeks ago, I mean). The arms are slightly too large, but oh well. I decided to revisit it today, add in the Lance and the hands and one of the forearms, and try my first real attempt at shading (I've always been awful at it). Unfortunately, my camera on my phone didn't get a very accurate picture, but it turned out well enough I suppose.

Actually, looking at my picture now, the way I changed the position of the left forearm (it's left) makes the position of the forearm spike/armor bit thing going an impossible direction, woops. Oh well, lol.

I'll be sure and update this from time to time.

edit:

Actually, I forgot I did a drawing of Unit-01 from a scene in the manga around the same time. I wound up giving up because I couldn't get Unit-01's pose right (not to mention some perspective headaches), and kinda just lost interest. Looking back, it's not all that bad, maybe I'll work on it some more, idk.
Attachment 9339

It's a nice observational drawing. Your shading makes the image pop. That's really great. If you want to take it a little further. Darker darks and whiter whites. Perhaps, use a kneaded eraser for precision. You could also clean up the graphite smudges.

You are right, it's challenging to draw references in that way. But don't worry, I still think you did a great job. The reference seems low quality and you used your imagination to fill in that void. Even in those 6 years of absent drawing, there's still improvement. You have great potential. And I'm sure you will make leaps forwards in your art.

Small tips for observational drawing.
I don't know how you go about drawing from reference. I reckon you start of with the head and fill in the body as you go. That way you'll realise too late that you made the drawing too large. And it goes off the page. With this way of drawing, proportions wil fail inevitable, no matter your experience. Never start of with details right away.
What you need to do, is to make sure that your early stages are accurate. Don't go to the next stage, when you're discontent with the previous stage. The most important stage being the first one. But keep in mind, there's no one right or wrong way to do this. Many books will give you their interprentation, draw a circle, draw the chin, etc. But in the end it's all about carefull observation. A few things that might help. Use the pencil lightly. Don't forget to look at negative space. The arm, abdomen and staff, encircle an area of negative space. The legs make a large area of negative space. In the early stages you could box in your figure by making a 2D cage around it. You could use simple straight lines or fluid ones. You could use spheres, cubes, cilinders. Even simple gestural lines are enough to define the necessary relations. It doesn't have to be complicated at all. In other words it's all about the relations between different parts, distances and angles.

Looking forward to your 3D art. Though, I know nothing about 3D art. :rolllaugh:

Thanks for the tips! You're right, most often I do start with the head. I know I shouldn't draw using the technique I do, but it usually winds up good enough that I've never bothered to change (not to mention I never did it very seriously). I do however kinda do the outlining like I should. As is a bit more evident with the second drawing, I just scribble the outside pretty lightly, and generally the right shape shows up darker in all the scribbles, and at some point later on I can go over them and make the outline very sharp and how I want it. Otherwise, I try not to get too far into the details until at least getting the major outline of the body done (the Mass Produced Eva on the bottom right with it's arm cut off in the second picture probably shows how I first work out the outline best). The only difference with the way I do it in regard to what's typically taught is that I add a bit more detail to the outline than is typically given. I suppose that may be a mistake, lol.

Also, I lack most everything that a 2D artist would probably have equipment-wise. I have a mechanical pencil that somehow has some crazy sized replaceable lead, like 1.3mm, lol. I don't have any erasers other than what it has, which proved problematic in the shaded drawing. I also couldn't get a lot of the areas that should've been brighter bright again, unfortunately.

When it comes to 3D art, I used to do a lot in 3ds max and make game art, I'd make the model and use photoshop to texture it. Nowadays it's a mixture of 3ds max (a lot less often), zbrush, photoshop, and substance painter. I'm really thankful I got into 3D art if for no other reason than how it allowed me to get a significantly better lighting, shading, and topology (this last one being the most helpful). Honestly the first drawing is the best I've ever done, so I'm thinking the reason I got better despite not having drawn in forever is that I have a good background that spans several years for base knowledge, then my improved understanding of how perspective works and 3D objects would actually look at when viewed at whatever angles, etc., is what gave the extra improvement.

edit: Here's an example of something I started in zbrush about a week ago, need to start working on it again:
Attachment 9343

The GPU fan in my laptop has been broken for months, so the only thing I can really do with 3d anything is sculpt in zbrush (thankfully it's CPU based). I've always sucked at organic anything, so decided to work on my lack of skill in that area. I'm sculpting Rei Ayanami in her plugsuit from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I kind of want to sculpt Asuka more, but Rei's hairstyle is symmetrical and I'm that fuckin lazy so I opted to make her instead. Tried remembering how to use zspheres and made a quick base mesh, and quickly dynameshed and sculpted it around a bit to be more anatomically correct/ not as weird as it initially looked. Still has some proportional and anatomy issues, was just a cursory clean up job on what I got from the zphere mesh I made. Gonna be posting updates.

http://i.imgur.com/j3q1HYC.jpg

That looks amazing! :)

Small update with about 35 min of work earlier this morning. Probably all I'll have time for today.

http://i.imgur.com/V6S3LQ0.png

Thanks for the compliment DreamVixen

edit:

Trying to make the proportions more realistic; I've been mostly ignoring the arms though.

http://i.imgur.com/OeaCQ6F.jpg

WOW!! Keep up the great work! you're welcome!