My adventures on learning how to draw #1 (lots of images)

As you may know, the artist had to step off the project some months ago, and I don't know if he will ever come back someday. I hope he will.

I've contacted some other artists, and they agreed to work on this project initially, but after some days of interaction, each one of them suddenly vanished. So I'm still working alone.

I started a drawing course on Udemy, but if I had to follow every step of the program, it would take months to see the results reflected on the game. Then I started to do some machinations to make the results pop out way faster.

These are the results of my first drawing exercise ever. I noticed three things: first, I have no problem constructing sketches from pictures, and they look somewhat pretty from the start; second, I have almost no motor coordination to control the pen pressure, which makes my sketches look way better than the final product; third, I'm too newbie to drawing straight from memory or imagination. It will take a lot of time and effort to reach the same quality as the previous artist in motor coordination and visual repertory.

As soon as I realized what my current problems are, I decided to put the object drawing exercises on hold to figure out how to draw Martins and beautiful women faster. So I tried to follow some tutorials on Youtube on figure drawing and got the following results:

First attempt: no idea what I'm doing, just blindly following the steps.

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Second attempt: now I know a bit of what I'm drawing and I like it!

At this point, I noticed again my lack of visual repertory kicking in and started to think of solutions to mitigate this problem. Then it came to me the idea of making a serious attempt to make a 3D version of Martin with enough details and markings to remove the construction, anatomy, proportion, and pose problems from the table. I also put together a 3D hair to make it even faster.

I also put some markings on key parts to help me distinguish better what I should be drawing or not.

This 3D effort took way too much of my time, but it was for a good cause. That lack of visual repertory haunting me at least got silenced in face of these nice results:

This was my first attempt using the new 3D model in photoshop. I turned off the pen pressure and focused only on drawing the lines to figure out if this was a good strategy.

After this, I tried to draw it again, but trying to make it look more cartoony and with some line thickness:

I stopped drawing this one abruptly because I noticed the pretty dirty lines. It would take two or three reworks to make it look good, and I can't afford to waste precious time. So I started to figure out how I could make good line art without the need for months of muscle memory building. Then I saw some videos of people showing some Clip Studio Paint features, and I fell in love. It has a robust line stabilization engine, and I can edit every line the way I want individually!

My first attempt using Clip Studio Paint. I took my time to learn how to use the tools I need, and the results are way prettier than before already.

With these findings, I have now a workflow good enough to solve both the absence of an actual artist and my lack of skills. I got way more confident in handling the drawings from now on.

Now, my most recent serious attempt:

Using Clip Studio, I was able to reproduce even the line style and thickness from the previous artist! This is the closest to the original quality I could reproduce so far, and now I feel ready to learn how to draw Martin's facial features properly. It will be my next step!

Today I bought a Clip Studio license thanks to this month's support, so I can save the files and use more features without restrictions, so thank you guys so much for your patronage! I will make all this help worth it!