Battery's Robot shop

[Chen]

I have noticed that you had extended the paint of Koshi, now she looks more robotic, and we can see her long leg! Great!
Hahaha, I also love legs, too XD

[--NightBattery--]

when i was done with the original i still wanted to make it larger, but i didn't wanted to explain too much in the floating text.
yes, to show how selfless koshi let the students use her as a learning tool. how vulnerable.
so, i take i have your blessing to use your characters* again in the future then chen?

[Chen]

Sure, actually I am the one who expects you to draw my characters more and more XD

[--NightBattery--]

Hey.
let's play a funny game.

Show me images of the art style of someone and i'll mimic it to make a robot girl out of it.

c'mon, don't be shy.

weekend is just around in the corner.

[--NightBattery--]

don't worry even something kinky could be taken out even from south park.
heh heeh
This' gonna be interesting.
oh boy i always wanted to do abstract BS!

[dale coba]

Ralph Steadman


Peter Greenaway


David Lynch


Hah!

- Dale Coba

[--NightBattery--]

This is going to be harder than expected.

[--NightBattery--]

You know, i'm still on do this.
it just seems i don't have as much free time as i thought.

[Morlok]

I skimmed through the thread and didn't see any in-depth critique of your work so I thought I should give you my opinion of your work and how it could be improved.

First off let me state that you have great ideas and that I always rejoice whenever you post a new drawing. Also you've shown strong improvements over the past few months.

However, your drawings still come off as somewhat clumsy and rudimentary, for a number of reasons, which I'm gonna list in a very blunt and pretentious manner, but I think it's still the most efficient way to explain you what I think should be fixed:
-no shading, which makes all your characters and objects look flat, which is bad when you draw porn
-sketchy, wobbly linework. You've shown improvements but it's really important that you manage to draw smooth and sleek lines, otherwise skin is going to look rough and coarse from the lines alone. Also it sometimes ends up distorting the shape of your characters. Spend more time on your preliminary sketches, don't hesitate to use many layers to progressively refine your linework until it's elegant and clean. Also, experiment with different brushes. If I'm not mistaken you probably use Photoshop or SAI, both of which allow you to customize the shape and functions of your brushes to a great extent. Make good use of it.
-unelegant anatomy. It's somewhat of a subjective issue, but your characters often look goofy more than sexy. I know that most of them are robots, that they aren't supposed to be perfectly correct anatomically, and that stiffness can be attractive in their case, but it's very very useful to have a stronger understanding of anatomy and how the human body works before stylizing it into simple robotic shapes and adapting it to your own tastes. This is especially true of the faces your draw: they often look a little skeletal and creepy, like you haven't really decided how cartoonish or realistic they're supposed to be.

Again, it's partially a subjective issue, but from your drawings alone, I have a hard time imagining what your characters would look like in a more realistic style without being really uncanny. I think it's because you're trying to draw characters that are both realistic and cartoonish at the same time, but haven't found an elegant way to do that. If you could post a few examples of real-life women you'd like to base your drawings on, or examples of other artists you'd like to imitate, and describe me exactly what you find attractive in a female body, I could probably give you more advice on how to do that. I'm not a professional artist or anything of the sort, but I think I can at least provide relevant commentary.

So far my advice has been way too general and vague to be truly useful, but I hope we can at least agree on the points I brought up, and that you're still eager to draw more. If you want we can even do a collab or two and learn from each other, cause I think we both need it.

[dale coba]

Be brave to critque;
and brave to listen.

[--NightBattery--]

( Dale?, what the hell? i am not Mirage, i play nice all the time!)

Greetings Morlok,

I knew we would talk soon.
Yes, I too see what is lacking, and my blood boils as this disgraceful illustration programs reveal not their secrets to me. I do have sketchbook after sketchbook of all short of things, but I have yet to find the proper tools that could emulate the speed of my hands in this limited piece of electrical garbage or at least the correction tools that have been created given the zooming problems when illustrating in a machine. Now that I have a project in mind I am seeking to find the final solution to those problems so I can finally create a professional piece. And now that you bring attention to those and other problems I am more determined to do it so. Your timing, is perfect.
Please do advise me, I am still redeemable.
I don't even know the size of digital paper i should use or the DPI OR ANYTHING! i don't even know what that does!

It is funny, today, a few hours ago, before your post, after seeing what is needed, I decided to try and look where the FFFFF are the pattern papers in manga studio 5.0 because i need them like food needs MSG, and I got all dire and angry on all those boring works with a beautiful shading on them that I lost the mood to read instructions and ragefully searched for them by myself with no useful result. I guess you can understand that kind of tantrum.

tell me what you have in mind.

i want to do more, so much more!

[dale coba]

Battery, I never had a hint of doubt in your character.

In my confusing way, I was celebrating our community's delicate attempts to give and receive insightful feedback, over the decade of Fembot Central.

It ain't been easy.

- Dale Coba

[Morlok]

tell me what you have in mind.

i want to do more, so much more!

I'm glad you feel that way.

I need you to clarify a few things: what program and hardware do you use? I'm not sure what you mean by "proper tools that could imitate the speed of my hand". Do you mean that your computer is too slow for you to work comfortably and that it doesn't display lines and color in real time ? You mentioned that you have a sketchbook full of stuff, is it significantly better than your digital illustrations ? At any rate i'm curious to see what's in it. Because if your troubles are all caused by defective hardware rather than by your own abilities, I'm not gonna be of much use.

I can't help you with Manga Studio's specifics, I've never used that program. But what I can tell you is that I generally work with 2000px to 4000px canvases to be comfortable and have some creative control.

Otherwise, as I said:

If you could post a few examples of real-life women you'd like to base your drawings on, or examples of other artists you'd like to imitate, and describe me exactly what you find attractive in a female body, I could probably give you more advice on how to do that.

[--NightBattery--]

I am currently using Manga studio 5.0.
I was using Manga studio 4.0 on a default configuration that was changed for this new version.
I don't know where anything is now.
My computer runs on a dual core processor T3200 2.00GHZ with 2GB ram, which is below the current standard Icore and AMD.
The video card…
I am not even sure.
It’s not listed anywhere.
But it can’t run two YouTube videos at the same time that I can tell you.
I had to upgrade the drivers just to play League of legends on shitty mode, but I had to stop playing it because my machine couldn’t handle team fights.

[--NightBattery--]

And I can’t use photoshop.
The mouse can’t real time.

But any way.

I love from Jeff Smith to Yukito Kishiro. I am not trying to imitate any one, I would rather be capable of drawing like anyone, to pervert their creations...

I like young women, that’s what I do.
Tall, short, white, black, Asian, all is good, except morbid obese, because that doesn’t t go with my genpool, I am not working on any model, I just shape things according to the theorical context the character is supposed to be in whatever idea I come to have.
So I can’t really say what is what I am exactly trying to show to myself, but I in personal love women naked well shaped arms and long necks besides their erogenous zones.
So I guess I favor Ballet Physique.
I am using a Wacom bamboo to illustrate.

And Manga studio is what I am using right now for sketching and used to use photoshop for coloring.
I recently installed SAI but I am yet to give me myself a time to explore its functions.

but hey,
so… what we could do together, you and I?

[Morlok]

Damn. Do you at least have control over pressure-sensitive brush opacity, brush definition and shape? If not do switch to SAI. It may not be perfect but I know it at least allows you to control that.

Anyway here are a few observations that may or may not benefit you:
-make sure that the facial features are aligned with the overall shape of the face. I've seen you do it perfectly right sometimes, but when you try to simplify the shape of the face to two strokes (which I advise against since it doesn't take into account the difference between jawline and cheeks), you often end up with a nose and mouth that don't match the position of the chin. Spend more time during the sketching phase to make sure the face looks like a solid object, and DON'T HESITATE TO USE REFERENCES as long as you don't just trace them.
-also remember that even stylized faces (I mean, those that look attractive) usually retain the same general relative proportions as real human faces. Read up a little on that. Also one thing you might need to do more often is to draw the fold of the upper eyelid that's a little above the eye itself.
-Pay attention to the relative length of limbs. The thighs should be roughly as long as the body, the fully-extended arms should reach down mid-thigh, the shins are about as long as the thighs, and the body is about three to four heads tall. Knowing that you should be able to make your characters look more convincing.
-you always draw arms that are very spindly and shoulders that are very small. If that's your fetish keep it up, but otherwise try to fix it cause it's a little freaky.
-I use a trick during the sketching phase to make sure all the limbs and segments are well-connected and proportionally correct: I sketch the whole character's silhouette almost without lifting my pen from the tablet (and of course I try to keep my hand relaxed). That makes one big squiggly line which I find very convenient to work with and get the outline of the main bones and muscle groups right. It also works wonders for the hands (not for the faces though). Of course this works better when the opacity of the brush is pressure-sensitive. Like so:

This is a shitty sketch but as you can see it already looks more or less three-dimensional (kind of like a very messy wireframe model) and I think it's one possible way of approaching Kishimoto's way of drawing bodies during the sketching phase.
-be careful with foreshortening. In your latest comic page there's one arm that's all weird because of this. The technique I just mentioned is especially useful for this because it forces you to keep all the segments connected instead of just guessing where stuff is supposed to connect. But overall using references is the surest way.
-Jeff Smith has great penmanship; all of his lines look bouncy and elastic, but are all perfectly connected, which is what you should strive for (at least during the clean-up stage); the thing is that lines are primarily stylized shadows, so their thickness depends a lot upon the roundness or sharpness of the shapes they define: sharper edges usually mean thinner lines unless there's supposed to be a strong contrast behind it.


Anyway, if you want to be proficient in several styles, you need to try a realistic style first. Not necessarily with only values of grey; you can do it with only lines, but like, find a few models and sketch them up in your sketchbook, like a ten poses within 15 minutes, using the techniques I mentioned. It will at least get your hand used to it.

As for collabs, I suppose we could pitch each other ideas via MP, then we'd both work on the same picture, each of us would do one small step of the work, pass it on to the other who would do the next, and so on until it's finished. That way we'd be able to correct each other.

[--NightBattery--]

Sounds good to me.
Eggh… yeah.
The arm…
and the “here goes nothing” head position in relationship to the neck.
I will take your advice and try not to rush things.
I just thrown that character there after I tested some things in manga studio.
(I am making these “lies” to test the program until I can finally start the real thing)

I do have limited pressure sensitivity but sometimes I have to restart my machine to make it work.
Eventually I’ll get me a real Toy, but I made the mistake of asking a friend to help me build one, and now he is slowly looking for good pieces the goddamn bastard….

I did used that technique you mention once after seeing someone using it to partially do this
But then, if I don’t use the right canvas size my machine is too slow to work properly, and I don’t remember what the size of the original file was…

[--NightBattery--]

MP?
he hehehehe.

[Morlok]

It certainly worked well for the hands and arms.
I'm sorry your hardware sucks like that. I guess that's an opportunity for you to make the best out of your sketchbook.
Anyway, if you have any cool ideas just hit me up with a PM (that's what I meant by MP, it was a typo).

Eggh… yeah.
The arm…

What do you mean? Did I fuck it up?

[--NightBattery--]

no, I DID.

[--NightBattery--]

yOU GOT IT!
WE WILL BE IN CONTACT!

[Morlok]

Your latest pic is pretty great overall, especially the face.
The structure of her body is still a little weird however, like her hips aren't symmetrically shaped (regardless of her clothing), and her thorax a bit elongated and very narrow. But she's still recognizable and the execution is appealing.

[--NightBattery--]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Thank you

[zerodin]

Yeah, that latest one you posted about the excretion system, I was all like...

[--NightBattery--]

Okay, okay. I was gonna leave it to imagination anyway. hah ha ha!