ElfQuest Fan Art

We worked to out and we had picked pink and orange but the orange is a little to soft, Like you said Afke bright colors, so I will find a brighter orange.And when I have a little more time I will add some back ground to it...

I agree with what you are saying about the head. I just don't know how to fix it...never to drawing classes.

I usually do the head first...I will try something different what will it hurt....Thanks

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet, but one of the things you should probably learn to do is to block out a figure in rough form before getting into the detail of each "piece".  This builds a bit on what Afke is describing above, and I think it would help you with the problem seen in this figure, which is that the individual parts are good, but they don't quite seem like they fit together -- in particular, with the head not seeming like it belongs to this figure.  One of the issues that many artists run into (and this is certainly true of me!) is that if you start doing all your detailed work on one piece of a figure, you "lose sight" of the figure as a whole.  In this case, knowing that you started on the head, it seems to me that what happened is that you had an idea for how you wanted the figure to look, but the type of head you drew actually wasn't that well-suited to the pose of the figure.  You would avoid this if you blocked out the figure in a rough way first, and then worked on the details of each part of it. It also helps to get the proportions right (or at least, it's a start).

Unfortunately, I'm not having a lot of luck finding visual examples to show you, of what I mean by "blocking a figure", and I sympathize with the fact that if you don't already know, then it's silly to expect this advice to do you much good.  Maybe this would be a useful new Tools of the Trade thread?  I mean, I'm sure that a number of artists here have their own approach to laying out a drawing before they start doing the detail work.  I don't know that I have ever scanned that rough stage before -- it usually gets obliterated by the more finished sketch, but every drawing I do starts with that stage.  I'm also sure that each artist here who does it, does it slightly differently, and seeing a variety of such approaches may be useful to others -- in part, to emphasize that there's no one "right" way to do it, and it's a matter of coming up with a technique that works for you.  But at the moment, I'm not having any luck just finding a tutorial that already talks about and illustrates the concept.  So maybe we need to create one.

(I should also add that I could swear that one of the EQ Gatherums had some pieces by Wendy that showed figure blocking like what I'm talking about, and also proportions of elven heads, and so on.  But I don't see them online anywhere.  That's something that might be useful for one of us to scan, if we can find them, and post in such a Tools thread.)

Some of them are, but not all of the same ones I'm thinking of.  Unless I missed them!  But I just looked again as I was writing this comment.

Running out of room is exactly the problem you may encounter, if you don't do a rough sketch first of where you want everything to go. I think starting a thread on this in the forum is a very good idea!

So what part of the body do you start with? So I could try something else.I all so use 8.5"x11" paper to. I do remember those sketches of Wendy's. I have to agree with you there are very intimidating. Now does anyone have problems with the lines showing up even though you erased them? That is why I try to limit how rough my rough sketch is.

Well, I seldom do things that are intended to stay as just a pencil piece.  (Even when I do, I do my pencil finishing with a black Prismacolor pencil, not a graphite pencil.)  Usually I'm doing a pencil sketch in order to ink over it.

In order to avoid the problem of having to erase pencil lines, a while ago I moved into doing all my sketches in non-photo-blue pencil.  That's what I use for the very rough blocking layout, and then I also use it to add all the detail.  Then I ink over it (or go over it in the black pencil).  When I scan the piece, I can scan on a setting that just won't pick up the light-blue pencil marks.  (And I always scan in order to clean up some of the ink-work, and usually to print it out for coloring.)  I have also employed Afke's suggestion of using a lightbox to "transfer" the pencil sketch to a new piece of paper -- like, when I've erased some bits on the first sketch so many times that I can't even draw effectively on that bit of paper any more.  (Another "cheap light-box" method is to hold the paper up to a window with daylight beyond it.  I've used that method when I didn't feel like hauling out the light-box.  I agree, the cost of those things is no joke.  I was lucky enough to inherit my father's, which probably dates from the early 70s and is quite different from the ones they sell today.)

I also start my sketches by blocking out the figure roughly. I often use the "classical" basic shapes, like making the head a round shape first and starting to get a more detailed shape from that. A bit like described in this tutorial, especially like the female figure on the left lower part:
http://odduckoasis.deviantart.com/art/Anatomy-Tutorial-27484310?q=boost%3Apopular%20human%20tutorial&qo=3