Art Tips, Advice, and Questions thread

[Scarlet Illusion]

Thought it would be fun to have a place where we can exchange art tips and advice with each other! Questions are welcome as well!
Some good places to find art tutorials (intended for CSP, but can probably be applied to other programs with some tweaking):

Make better art | Clip Studio TIPS | Sharing creative knowledge

Learn how to create character art, manga, comics, webtoons, animations and other forms of digital art to elevate your creativity. Get to know the Clip Studio Paint app and learn from the best around the world.

tips.clip-studio.com

Art Rocket

Art Rocket | Tutorials and art advice for digital creatives

www.clipstudio.net

 

[pico]

Naoki Saito's YouTube channel is a goldmine for character illustrators, particularly anime-style illustrators. Most people recognize his work from the Pokemon TCG, where he's created card illustrations from the HGSS era onward. His trainer illustrations have become incredibly popular. He's also created work for Crypton, among others.

The videos always include good visual examples and in some cases, templates/practice materials are included as well. Lots of good videos are translated, and if you understand some Japanese, the rest of the videos are easy to follow.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxuipVSw8ajLZPgSyKmw6Ag

 

[Scarlet Illusion]

Naoki Saito's YouTube channel is a goldmine for character illustrators, particularly anime-style illustrators. Most people recognize his work from the Pokemon TCG, where he's created card illustrations from the HGSS era onward. His trainer illustrations have become incredibly popular. He's also created work for Crypton, among others.

The videos always include good visual examples and in some cases, templates/practice materials are included as well. Lots of good videos are translated, and if you understand some Japanese, the rest of the videos are easy to follow.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxuipVSw8ajLZPgSyKmw6Ag

Thanks for sharing!! This looks very interesting!!
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Unrelated, but as for the reason I'm actually here: something I've struggled with is drawing something based of a reference--how do I change things up to better suit the character I'm drawing? I have to "redraw" a lot of things for the PV I'm working on and I find that 9/10 times it looks like it doesn't necessarily fit the character I drew? Say for example I'm drawing one of the chibi Gumis from the PV for "Ah, it's a Wonderful Cat's Life" as Tei...
1. I feel like my drawing looks too much like the original and doesn't offer anything... unique, I guess?
2. The pose doesn't really seem to fit Tei? If that makes sense. I don't know how to explain it other than it doesn't fit the character/personality of who I'm trying to draw it as.

Any advice for mitigating these issues?

 

[Mika]

Unrelated, but as for the reason I'm actually here: something I've struggled with is drawing something based of a reference--how do I change things up to better suit the character I'm drawing? I have to "redraw" a lot of things for the PV I'm working on and I find that 9/10 times it looks like it doesn't necessarily fit the character I drew? Say for example I'm drawing one of the chibi Gumis from the PV for "Ah, it's a Wonderful Cat's Life" as Tei...
1. I feel like my drawing looks too much like the original and doesn't offer anything... unique, I guess?
2. The pose doesn't really seem to fit Tei? If that makes sense. I don't know how to explain it other than it doesn't fit the character/personality of who I'm trying to draw it as.

Any advice for mitigating these issues?

I personally first draw from the reference and after I'm basically 'done' with the sketch I put the ref away and see what I need to change. So if I don't think the pose fits I start to think about why and what exactly bothers me and then I change parts of it. If it's too close to the other style I try to examine why that is. Is it the look of the face? or the body proportions? And then I take my own drawing as a ref and draw the thing again or just over it to fit the changes I thought about. That takes more time but it feels easier to me. Hope this is helpful

 

[Scarlet Illusion]

I personally first draw from the reference and after I'm basically 'done' with the sketch I put the ref away and see what I need to change. So if I don't think the pose fits I start to think about why and what exactly bothers me and then I change parts of it. If it's too close to the other style I try to examine why that is. Is it the look of the face? or the body proportions? And then I take my own drawing as a ref and draw the thing again or just over it to fit the changes I thought about. That takes more time but it feels easier to me. Hope this is helpful

Ah! How did I never think about that? This is very useful and I'll certainly keep this in mind as I press on with drawing these PV assets! Thank you very much, Mika!