There is an entire game design somewhere in those slime skills!

My DS1 char is currently in full Havel set, grass crest shield and heavy black knight sword. Not sure I want to continue playing, would have to grind souls at this point to level up for the Anor Londo bosses and grinding is just so boring. DS2 without dying... impressive feat!

Anatomy-annihilation-campaign? Are you referring to complacency-club? Maybe I need more of that again instead of more practice and stressing out about it too much.

Could also be that my theoretical knowledge is too far ahead of what I can practically achieve at the moment, creating a feeling of discomfort and being too judgemental about the output.

Reflecting about it (the feeling of not making progress) some more, I 'should' come to the conclusion that it is probably just mood swings and not something directly related to my practice or a combination of this and the theory/practice mismatch.

Also I think I am a bit burned out after that dragon (on the final stretch of it, I had been listening to the swedish 10 hour loop of "caramelldansen"... the entire 10 hours of it and then some of "they're taking the hobbits to isengard" too).

So I need to slow down and pick up the steady practice again before I really end up hating it.

I want to do more digital work but I also want to train the traditional skill, pencils, pastel chalks, paints, ink... it feels very satisfying to work with "real" materials and to be independent from electricity and equipment that costs an arm and a leg to get started.

DUDE YOU'RE STILL IN HERE PWNING THIS THREAD!?!?! WOW
That is seriously amazing. P R O P Z, B R A H

I haven't checked in here in forever and the moment I do you're posting THIS.
That is truly strange!

'Tis the strange magic of dragon-bro-ship. Also, you're too kind, I wish the part about pwning anything was true. pistachio also recently wrote I'd be outpacing everyone... but I think that's far from the truth. On many days feel like I'm walking backwards, not making any progress at all.

The death dealer case study. jesus.
Can't tell which is which. Is that yours, on the right? :laughtrack:

Bah-dum-tsss.

Did I post my colored dargon. Well here's a link just for continuity. (what if the gaping dragon was female).
I remember your sketch. Still wanna see a trippy dennisCOLORSCOPE rendering. Your pencil rendition is great. Are you using any little eraser things to make lighter/highlight areas, like the rim lighting on bottom side of forearms, or you're just not penciling there?
If I were you, the most I'd do on paper at this point is ink lines over the pencil. Actually no, I'd do that digitally too - why ruin all that nice pencil (imean I would definitely scan it in BEFORE inking over it so I had a scan of the pencil-only drawing, but still) . . . So if I were you, and I wanted to take the rendering to the next level I'd scan in, and actually stay in black and white and work on the values, since right now it's all rather evenly lit, darken the trees up, darken the ground up, make the dino pop, etc etc, just my thots.

Yes, I remember seeing that dragon mommy queen in all the full color glory. Still looks great (also recently started another Dark Souls play-through (vanilla not remastered) and managed to beat the dragon king on the first attempt this time with the help of Knight Solaire).

I always try to just pencil or not pencil first and only erase if I f'ed it up or if I feel like I need to lift someplace that I made too dark... there was a hard limit to how often I could do that however since the paper I used was low-quality-stuff, so there are many mistakes I just have to accept as staying there forever. Lived in constant fear of tearing the paper and in the end I did not dare to try balancing the values anymore. wip states in the spoiler:Spoiler

Many thanks for the c&c, it's much appreciated. There are other things besides the values that I'm also unhappy with: flat plants, boring trees, perspective issues, inconsistent line/shading style on dragon, lack of interesting skin texture... and then last but not least, the composition feels kind of dead and boring as well now. Drew it on and off between 25th of April 2017 and yesterday, happy to be "done" with it. Pondering whether it's worth trying to fix all the problems or if it's better to just start a new dragon scene from scratch, because I feel like that other piece is dead beyond repair (already sprayed fixative over it, so the only way to continue it would be digital).

#postingfee, today's figure drawing practice:

yesterday


today

Many thanks for the moral support @pistachio. Steve Huston's simple method of continuously alternating between gesture & structure presented in his book Figure Drawing For Artists appears to be highly effective.