AWKWARD ZOMBIE

This thread is for serious critique of art projects, studies and eventually a twelve week lesson focusing on breaking people out of their comfort zones.

I'd like this to be an opportunity for us all to improve and share our technical knowledge with one another.

Rules:
1. I wont be holding back and sparing anyone's feelings here (no one else should either), so please don't post expecting an arse pat. Posting in this thread is pretty much giving consent to be critiqued.
2. Style is not an excuse. If the consensus is that something in your art looks wrong, no amount of 'style' will make it look better.
3. Please don't shit post. I don't want people's serious efforts drowned out by puns and in-jokes.
4. As always, please follow the forum's rules.

Note 1: I'm prepared to critique written pieces, but it's not my strength and you can expect I wont be any nicer about it than I am about drawing.

Note 2: I'll try and keep this first post updated with various tutorials and useful resources. Let me know if there's any you'd like to share.


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RESOURCES
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Posemaniacs
"This blog is for uploading variety of poses for nude sketching, and introduces other FLASH training tools for drawing."

Figure Drawing Practice
"Figure drawing tool with standard and class sessions. Classes warm you up with quick gesture drawings, then ease you into longer poses. They include built-in break times."

How to draw all sorts of crapby Coelasquid
"You should fucking trust this woman."

Matte painting tutorial
"Step by step for doing a quick background"

SDL on Tumblr
"SDL is the longest running OCT league on DA and the people running it know their shit (I can vouch for them personally). Just started but they've already been posting heaps of useful tutorials."

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YOUTUBE CHANNELS
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FZD School of Design
"FZD School of Design provides an education in entertainment design. Our courses cover a wide range of topics such as video games, feature films, theme parks, consumer products, toys, television commercials and set designs."

Sinix Design
"More design."

Mary Doodles
"My name is Mary and I've been drawing since I can remember. I like making videos too. True story: my job now is to make costumes and props for Epic Rap Battles of History, so I can't complain about anything."

10MDT
"Ten Minute Drawing Techniques."

neato

Dire Ilu for being the fancy art lady that you are

I'm going to add some good videos and art channels

http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL

http://www.youtube.com/user/sinixdesign

http://www.youtube.com/user/marydoodles

http://www.youtube.com/user/moatddtutorials

Added your channels to the first post.

Oh just curious here, but the 12 week plan was gonna have a lot of figure drawing/portraits. By a lot I mean just over half. Is this a problem or is it okay to start off with mostly human representation?

Could I have some critique on this sketch here please?

It's a bit big.

The main problem I can see appears to be that the perspective is imbalanced; she's sitting in the middle of the righthand seat row, but her feet are going directly across from her yet somehow ending up resting on what should be something several feet to her right.

Yeah, the seats on our city buses are weird. The seat in front of the girl was actually right between her seat and the window seat, so her feet could rest on the edge of the seat in front of her without too much trouble.
That kind of perspective is really hard to draw just right.

Considering you would have been working with moving subjects and you were probably trying to draw discreetly I'm guessing there wasn't really a good opportunity to really stare and study the fine details. Made a good effort though with details on the bags and the base of the jacket.
I'm seeing some issues with proportion and placement though. Head seems a little large which is made more prominent by the breasts which are sitting high on her chest.
The lower leg and the thigh are a kinda disjointed at the knee causing the lower leg appear longer and the thigh seem short. A similar thing is happening on the arms where the upper arm and lower arm don't quite connect properly.
The perspective on the seats is good individually but I'm not quite sure both chairs match up. The perspective of the chair she's sitting on seems more acute than the one she's resting her legs on. (This is sort of happens when you draw from life that close to your subjects though and is something that looks cool if you have time to work on it and make them connect.)

EDIT: So the seat she has her legs on isn't in front of the window? In which case the angle should have been ever more acute.

Shoes are something that were a fucking enigma for me for a long time. I'd see tutorial after tutorial saying "dude make a wedge its that simple! draw wedge, bam, shoe"
and it just never fucking clicked with me, its a lot easier for me to think of shoes as 3 parts, and conveniently most shoes are designed with those parts more or less outlined on them.
A long cylinder for the general foot area, a kind of trapezoid prism deal for the tongue, and another cylinder for the back.(first gif doesn't have one)

Depending on the shoe the tongue trapazoid will be either longer on something like converse, or shorter like on slippers or loafers.

I also find this makes drawing shoes in perspective a lot easier.

Thank you

so much

Yeah, shoes can be a real pain

Dire this thread is golden and you should feel golden

Thanks for the critique Dire and Wry!

So over this weekend I did a 24 hour painting event, which basically you spend 24 hours straight dedicating yourself to make a complete painting, using the art process + references + whatever you need to finish the piece.

The theme for the paintings was Independence, and my word was Imagination.

It was basically like this big artistic sleepover at my friends church hall because we couldn't hold it in the school this year, and we braught a whole lot of food and I honestly got only one hour of sleep out of 24.

Here is the process of my piece.

Here is the finished piece.

seriously it took 15 hours to paint all those books.

So what does everyone think? What I did good or what I could have done better? For a long time I have the proportions off