Even with a scanner that doesn't work so hot, you can fix alot of stuff afterwards. In either Photoshop or GIMP, you can go into a setting called "Levels" and adjust your value range. In Photoshop it's under Image -> Adjustments -> Levels. I'm not sure where it is in GIMP, but I imagine it's comparable since they like to keep their menu's similar. It'll show a curvy bar, with three triangles at the bottom, a black one, a grey one, and a white one. Moving the black arrow changes the darkest parts of your drawing, and moving the white one changes the lightest parts. The idea is to adjust the lighter parts of your drawing until fuzzy smudges and shadows disappear, then adjust the darker parts to restore your lines.

Here's what it looks like from me messing with the levels for a little bit.

Not the best, but it was able to remove much of the grey from your backdrops, and make your lines darker and clearer.

 I still think your characters lack solid construction, but that's completely fine. That's not something you solve instantly, but something you build slowly over time with effort. And this page certainly shows alot of effort. You do a much better job varying your shots and posing your characters. Really, great stuff dude.

  The heavy use of texture is interesting, but you need to be careful to keep the different parts of your art separate from eachother. Heavy texture is fine, but if you make the edges of something too vague, it can make it difficult to understand what's going on. Actions scenes like this can be difficult enough to read even in the best of circumstances. There are quite a few ways you can keep everything clear actually. You can strengthen the outline itself. You can also use lighter lines and texture for stuff as it moves away from the viewer, or simplify their textures as they recede. Ideally you'd be using a combination of all three.

   Keep it up doing, it's always wonderful to see peeps working hard!

   When light hits an object, some of the light reflects off of it. That's how you see stuff. And sometimes that light, reflecting off an object, hit other objects, creating a new, very subtle lightsource, that's coloured based on the objects it's reflecting from.

   Reflective lighting also often refers the lightest area of the shadow form of an object. I posted an image showing the different sections of shadow/light form in your Go For Broke thread, but the text is very small, so it's easy to miss.

    OMG PAGES IN THE FIRST POST YES. You're wonderful! Welcome to void dude! And don't worry about being terrible at anything, that's a great reason to start doing it.

   If you're gonna ink your pages (and I think that's a great idea) you shouldn't do all this careful pencil rendering first. It's gonna make it harder to see the edge when you go in to ink, and there's a good chance you'll smudge while you're working. Just focus on getting your lines down, keeping them dynamic and lively, you can always render later.

   Also, do you know how to mess with the levels in photoshop after you scan them? While your pages are okay, your design sheet is kinda grey, and the dips in your paper shouldn't be that visible.

    It seems like the reason you keep drawing from the same shot is that you've only learned to draw people from a few angles. You know how a person looks from head-on, and you're comfortable with it. Your trying to recreate the shapes you see when you look at a person head on. That's a really difficult way of doing things, and it makes it so you have to memorize the various, incredibly complex shapes that a person's body creates at different angles. It's pretty much an impossible task, and it severely limits the variety of your people.

    It's easier to think of the "form" of the figure, or the 3 dimensional shape. If your person is suddenly made of simplier, geometric shapes, it's easy to pose and turn those objects however you want.

I'm having huge difficulty finding good examples (if anyone else can find some please post it!) but here one that sooorrta shows what I mean. I don't like how the limbs aren't being show in an explicitly geometric way.


You can also look at this, and go down to page 31 of the document (it's marked as 38 if you're just looking at the image). Though Loomis can be a little daunting sometimes, his mannequin is pretty lovely, and it gives you a good idea of how versatile it is to draw like this.

http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/Loomis%20Figure%20Draw.pdf

My next comic (when I finally finish it) is a solid-black comic, and though I haven't done them in awhile, I used to be really into it. I do have a tip, but bear in mind though that the rules for solid black are p loose, and people can and do break what's "right" all the time. It's really more about mood and composition than proper shading.

  You're just dropping your blacks at the sides of your characters, and not really thinking about the shadow as an thing that wraps around the character, a form created by light. Play around with lighting people from different angles, and how that creates new shapes.

   Also, in theory solid blacks represent the darkest shadows, the more technical term for them is core shadows.  Core shadows never appear at the edges of round, 3 dimensional things, so when you put them there, they flatten your forms.


(totally not mine)
This image does a p good job of breaking it down. Not carrying your darkest shadow to edge can help keep your forms round and full. Again though, talented artists ignore this all the time. In the end, you have to make aesthetic choices when to ignore the rules of form for a certain mood/effect, but it's always important to know the rules and practice them.

    Learning anything beyond it's earliest points is a combination of passion and willpower, not one or the other. You have to enjoy what your doing, and more than just "I think it's fun" otherwise it's gonna be hard to keep learning. Because it's not always gonna be fun, sometimes it's gonna really suck. Like when you're trying desperately to make something look just so, or when you sit down to see everything that your art isn't. These are painful moments that you need to get better.

  Looking at your collection of information, story bits, and characters for your Champions comic, you do seem to have a love of storytelling, and you really do seem to care and love this world. Even if you never wanna make money or anything, there's value in gaining the skills you need to tell that story that you want others to hear.


  If you don't like outlines dude, don't use them! Seriously, there's so much amazing lineless art, go for that! If you are gonna use a sketchy line, you have have to at least know how to control the feel of those lines to make your drawings feel more alive. As it is they're just getting in the way. Tofu's examples are amazing, and I have one too actually.


Sonny Liuw has incredibly messy, sketchy linework, but you end up feeling like it's cause he really loves lines. All of his tiny errant lines work hard describing the texture of objects, and their mushy, crinkled shapes. His marks are confident, and under the many lines he understands how to create an expressive line. He also doesn't work with black, using a brown line that let's his incredibly busy linework settle down into the scene a little more.

    If you want you're art to look natural and spontaneous, you need to work hard at it. Art is a like a visual lie to tell truth. The idea of "natural and spontaneous" is actually incredibly difficult to pull off. One of the Renaissance painters ( I forget which) used to make his paintings up to 40 times, just so the the last reproduction would feel effortless. And no one would ever see what it took to get there. And that's really like a metaphor for the whole of art really.


    Don't say stuff like "I'm not an artist". That's duuummmmb. You've already made art, you've expressed yourself through drawing. Therefore you're an artist yo! It isn't like some secret club that you get a membership card to after you've been doing it for X amount of time, or have X amount of skill. You're already one of us. One of us. one of us

Awww yeeaah, peeps getting two arts. Thank god too, I don't want anyone just getting this stuff :I

For Slagglle

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

It's 2014 and that means it's time to see all the amazing art everyone created for eachother! Now you can all know what I know, that you're all INCREDIBLE.

Before we get right into it, sad news first. These are the dudes I need to draw art for. I don't want you guys searching through the post for your gifts when they aren't there. Void totally came through, but stuff is always gonna happen, so sorry guys :c

DOOMED TO RECEIVE PUZZLEART
The Sketch Fighter
Animeshen
Slaggle
DeathlySilent


AND NOW THE ART COMETH. BRACE YOURSELF.

Click an image to make it all big and stuff!


Kent's gift to Wolcik




Wolcik's gift to Sabulive




Sabulive's gift to Hats




Hat's gift to Angie




Angie's gift to Pyras




Pyras' gift to Con




Con's gift to Becs




Becs gift to Kozispoon




Animeshen's gift to Sid_Bane




Sid_Bane's gift to Slade




Slade's gift to NRG




NRG's gift to Evil_Encounter




Evil_Encounter's gift to Mo Rice




Mo Rice's gift to Cherubas




Cherubas' gift to Evi




Evi's gift to G.Lo




G.Lo's gift to Pi




Pi's gift to Nothin




Nothin's gift to A Bad Idea




A Bad Idea's gift to KevJB




KevJB's gift to ProfessorZach




Slagglle's gift to Hobbittastic




Hobbittastic's gift to Wu AT-AT




Wu AT-AT's gift to Mrnoitaull




Mrnoitaull's gift to otakutaylor




otakutaylor's gift to Jackster




Jackster's gift to Ten Dead Kings




Ten Dead Kings' gift to Jetster




Jetster's gift to Gregly




Gregly's gift to ColdShoulderAve




ColdShoulderAve's gift to Tofubeast




Tofubeast's gift to Zest




DeathlySilent's gift to Crafty




Crafty's gift to Bobo




Bobo's gift to pineapple pocky




pineapple pocky's gift to Fern




Fern's gift to SeanJude666




SeanJude666's gift to AtomicFish




AtomicFish's gift to CrimsonKumiho




CrimsonKumiho's gift to Orion




Orion's gift to Kent




Jaykat's gift to The BenT One




The BenT One's gift to Julz




Julz gift to Red






Red's gift to LeFred




LeFred's gift to Majikura




Majikura's gift to Sugha




The Sketch Fighter's gift to CrackingSkulls




CrackingSkulls gift to Jaykat



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That's everything I think! If I made a mistake anywhere, please let me know guys. I'm really scatterbrained, and after awhile it all just looks like one big scribbly mass of text.

I know I didn't respond to everyone, but you should all be super proud of yourselves, this is amazing!
HAPPY HOLIDAY'S EVERYBODY

YOU ALL ROCK SO MUCH OMG

No worries, it doesn't matter when it gets in, just that it gets in. It's totally lovely too!

Last two days everybody! Get that awesome art in, cause New Years is coming up fast and that deadline is carved in stone.

Please send it to me. As long as I get it before I start setting up all the images on the 1st, it'll be totes fine. If you don't send it to me, I'm gonna have to assume you didn't finish in time, and draw stuff for the person I assigned you.

 I think it looks great dude! I work from mid-tones out myself, but there's definitely benefit to dark-to-light and light-to-dark.

  Never ever never never shade with black though. Well you can, but as a general rule it's much more visually interesting to shade with other colours. This is an incredibly basic little thing from tumblr but it does a pretty great job illustrating what I'm talking about http://gawki.tumblr.com/post/65678138390/this-is-a-pretty-basic-one-but-that-doesnt-make There's even a reference to the basic "I am outside in nature" color scheme you're trying out.

    It looks like you really like soft brushes. You should really try using hard edged brushes for setting up your shadows, then scumble the edges (without losing the shape) very gently with either a soft brush or a soft eraser. Or just use hard edged brushes completely and create your transitions by use the eye-dropper alot alot.

  Hey dudes, just bumping this to keep it all fresh in your minds. This is like the last full week to do stuff so start panicking!

I thought mostly what I was gonna get would just be isolated drawings of peoples characters, but they've all been pretty incredible so far! I didn't respond to alot of peoples messages cause hrghhfrasrfhrhfhlle but everyone needs to know you've been amazing.

   Monday you should've signed up, that's so long ago! I wasn't gonna not take anyone who wanted to join, cause I didn't even know Secret Santa was a thing before I made this.


       Well, the first week has gone by, and already 7 of you have turned in your art! It's all really good too, you guys have no idea. I can't wait till everybody gets to see them.

Looking good! You really sell the characters personality, her face and expressions are totally my favorite part of your sheet.

  I don't think you need to write some huge backstory or anything. That stuff can and will change as you do comics. As long as you have enough that you can start making interesting stories, that's what matters. Comics are way important than text right now.

   Your line quality is extremely uniform. With such a great expressive style, you wanna have expressive line art to match. Start varying that line width