Freyalupen's Sketches (2025)

[freyalupen]

New year, new sketchbook topic, but same me.

I want to aspire to “be the change I want to see”, to make and share things I would actually want to look at myself. But that won’t be easy. Just thinking about it makes me want to give up and hide under a rock.

So instead I’ll try to just post whatever I have and hope that makes it easier to keep going instead of giving up.

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From the end of last year; fanart sketch based on a screenshot of Link surveying the Great Sky Island from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

It’s from the beginning of the game, when I decided to ignore the plot and explore without any abilities. You’re meant to hook a cart to the rail with said abilities, but it’s also possible to just walk on it. That open-endedness makes it possible to explore most of the island before doing anything else.
I should spend more time looking at my drawing and less at the reference; to make sure I’m actually getting things across. It’s really hard to tell what’s going on.

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First thing I drew this year;

it’s just a ~15min doodle of a tree, there’s not really anything to say about it.

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From the end last year;

Fanart based on an official illustration (the boxart) of Ace Attorney: Investigations Collection, featuring the main characters of the duology (Miles Edgeworth and friends/enemies.)

I’ve spent about 7 hours over four days so far, I’d like to continue at some point.
I’ve been thinking I need a better fill brush. The one I’m using now is an oval (custom brush), but maybe I’d have more control of the edges with a soft rectangle? Maybe I need to tweak the size and rotation settings? Though it’s hard to get good rotation with the drawing angle sensor.

[YRH]

Honestly, I really like that tree for some reason. It’s a nice balance between the leaves and the branches making additional detail emerge when viewed at a distance.

And the fan art piece looks great, because it becomes more than the sum of the parts. I say you’re off to a great start

Yeah, just keep drawing is the best advice, at least until you already draw enough. I need to take that to heart myself

As for the filling advice, I think it depends. If you have well-defined lines, I would just use the bucket fill, that’s what I do typically. Then finish the edges with a basic round brush if needed.
If your lines are not well-defined, or have too many gaps, etc. then I would actually try lasso to mask the areas and use a big basic brush or the fill bucket again. I think it’s best to have a solid flat base color, then add variation on top, if needed.

[freyalupen]

Though my lines aren’t very neat, I probably could use the Fill Tool if I tweak some settings. But I prefer to do it manually. Besides, there are some shadows that aren’t defined by lines that I still like to have in the base color.

I started tweaking a new brush but haven’t drawn anything new yet, so I’ll try to explain my process instead. (I also have a timelapse, but if I posted it here I’d end up compressing the heck out of it to save on filesize and it’d be incomprehensible…)

Initial rough sketch to figure out where everything is and warm up a bit.
Like I mentioned before, copying an existing image makes it easy to not pay enough attention to the comprehensibility.

Part of the guy with the hat on the left (Eddie Fender)'s hair is missing and I didn’t notice it until much later.

Then nicer sketch on (a copy of) the same layer.

And yes, every character is on the same layer. I don’t have the patience to switch to separate ones for that or for erasing bits of the rough sketch, and I’m not using any kind of effects that needs anything separate.
I had to move Eddie Fender over to make room for cow-kid (Shaun Fenn), but I just lassoed him (Freehand Selection) for that.

Roughly color everything in underneath the sketch, mostly focusing on choosing the colors. It’s easier to color the major shadows too, although if it wasn’t a copy it’d be difficult to place them.

But it could be a bit cleaner. Probably should Shift+drag brush resize more. Some of background element colors are on a different layer (the kaiju and the statue, etc), since there’s a lot of overlap.

Then the rough background, but probably should’ve done it first because it reveals all the holes in my colors.

Finally I try to clean up the mess I made, freely switching between the color and sketch layer to add details to everything, wondering why I didn’t draw things better in the first place. That’s where I am in the above post.

[Michelist]

Congratulations! I would have a nervous breakdown with a stuffed picture¹ like that. Or is it because so many people crowded together cause me mental difficulties?
But it’s kind of funny, filling a treetop with leaves was never a problem for me, there are many times more individual objects, but their placement doesn’t have to be as precise.
Be that as it may, you have done a great job here!

Michelist

¹ In German, it is called a “Wimmelbild”.²
² Wimmelbild in German Wikipedia.

[freyalupen]

In a way I think drawing a bunch of smaller drawings at once can be easier. Because it’s small there’s less detail to worry about. And if you want to take a break from one you can go to the next one, instead of stopping.

WIP fanart “study” of Marisa from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, about an hour’s worth.

But I probably would learn more by instead of straight copying, trying to redraw it while only occasionally looking at the reference to check if I’m succeeding. If I don’t practice that more creative mindset of actually thinking about what I’m doing, my original drawings are going to keep sucking.

Like this one, I still can’t draw this character of mine right.

Maybe I should come up with a character that’s easier to draw. Or try to draw fanart that isn’t just a copy (maybe then it could more rightly be called “art”).
Or maybe I should just draw whatever I want and not care if it sucks, just try to stay positive.

[Lynx3d]

Honestly, you’re pretty good at capturing the essence of a character in this rather rough way, you’re probably better at it than me…I should practice that every once in a while too, I guess.
And putting more than 2 characters in one picture is something I totally avoid, because It’ll probably take me way too long to get them all to a level of detail that is presentable

But for designing an original character, I think you should try to work a bit more structured. All those pose collections with models in underwear or tight body suits exist for a reason, to get the pose right, it helps tremendously to see the whole body to understand human anatomy.
Some even study skeletons and individual muscles to really understand how to construct their own characters…

Anyway, what I wanted to say, most character designers seem to start with a “naked” character, so you shouldn’t be shy and first draw the character without the thick clothing (and hair that hides the neck or other contours) too. Some abstracted mannequin style can help getting the proportions right, but I have the impression that I can judge more naturally drawn characters better, so I only do a few extra markers for things like ribcage and such.

Since you seem rather good at recreating a reference, you could just start with a photo reference (e.g. this one shows people with crossed arms) and play with proportions until you’re happy.
I personally need to define the lines rather well on this step to get a good final result, that may be also be lack of experience though…

And when you’re finally happy with pose and proportions, you can finally get to the fun part and do the outfit.

I made it my exercise for today to try drawing your character and show how I approached it:

I deliberately didn’t use any references, but I’m afraid it shows
Roughly 4h of work (yes I’m slow…and I can’t do good hairstyles either)

[YRH]

I think copying is good when you want to draw something and struggle too much with getting an interesting pose, composition, or an idea in general.

However, looking back at my work in the past two years, simple copying won’t help you draw an original pose, and you even won’t remember that much in terms of the body structure. You get some benefit of course, but it’s slow and then when you try something new, it’s frustrating that you can’t get it to look right.

So I think what works better is copying it as if you were drawing it on your own, that is following the process from a very rough shape to a more and more refined body. You won’t get an ideal copy this way (there’s a different exercise for that), but you will learn the skills that will help you draw more easily.

Of course putting in enough hours is very important too, perhaps the most important.

[freyalupen]

Yeah, for loose clothing like the coat-thing, it’s probably better to draw what’s underneath first, it tends to cause me confusion. On the other hand, I don’t really see the point in drawing things like feet which will be covered by rigid shoes.
Either way I’ve never really liked constructing things or drawing things that aren’t visible, I try to do it the “lazy” way and avoid it as much as possible.

Maybe if I could concentrate on it for four hours, and spend more of it making the rough sketch look right, it would be better. But I have trouble focusing on even something easy for that long. (Instead I spend hours thinking about it)
Tried drawing a similar thing again last night, but I got frustrated and distracted and gave up after 20-30 minutes. Couldn’t really “get in the zone”.

The next step probably would be to redraw some cleaner lines on a new layer instead of messing around with erasing and redrawing on the sketch layer. By “clean” I mean “with the right place/shape”, not necessarily “neat”.

[Lynx3d]

Granted, many shoes force the feet into their shape, and there’s stock photos with the model wearing open shoes with high heels for that very reason.
But high boots are still not actually rigid (unless we’re talking about motorcycle boots, they are so stiff that you can barely walk in them), so for many poses you need to be aware of the ankle joint to deform the boot properly.

Of course you don’t need to draw a detailed foot with toes even for soft shoes, but good abstraction skills also need practice, I’m afraid.

I can understand you want to jump into illustrating original characters, I’m totally not the person to get all the training books and work through lessons that don’t produce beautiful artwork and trust the author it’s an efficient way to improve your skills.
But to skip drawing all the things that define the character’s pose and only draw what you actually see, you need to have a very clear mental image of the things underneath. Maybe you’re better at that than me, but by now I’m pretty certain that I won’t reach a point where I can just skip hidden parts without having ever actually drawn at least the abstracted body in such poses. And since I don’t really practice pose sketching separately, it’s basically still a mandatory step for me to sketch the entire body first.

I don’t know if you follow ynr_nohara’s activity here, but he shares a lot of his struggles and solutions. To me it’s fascinating and motivating to see stuff like e.g. in this post:

Nohara's Sketchbook

I wrote around 5 paragraphs, and I don’t even know if what I write is valid notes or just ranting. Anyway, this is drawing pose without reference. Turn everything into base variables and it is easier to tweak them. I think the key point is to understand the core variables. Say for a pose sketch, I think the core variable is perspective, shape, and lines. Sketch doesn’t need to be pretty, just need to know what shape, how much space it is going to fill, in what angle of view, and what’re the li…

Just don’t forget that this is someone who put quite a few years of work into his skills already.

Unfortunately I don’t have any good advice about staying focused, for me the hardest part is usually to actually decide on something specific and start working on it, but when I started, time goes by so fast…
A lot of the practicing techniques set very tight time limits, something you can do whenever you have a couple of minutes, and some people apparently do them as warmup before an actual drawing session.

[freyalupen]

I’ve been following that thread, sometimes I wish I could think of something encouraging to say. His art is way more professional than mine’ll ever be, but at every skill level people can struggle to improve. I don’t have that kind of drive to improve at all, so I feel kind of silly when people try to give me advice knowing I’m probably not going to follow through on it…

To answer my own question about staying focused, I think listening to albums instead of shuffle helps, because it’s coherent and fixed-length. Then I want to keep listening to the end, even if something tries to distract me. Though some would saying listening to music while drawing is a distraction, especially when you’re trying think creatively… there’s probably some truth to that, but it helps me focus.

Still, that doesn’t help with feeling like I actually know what I’m doing and care enough to continue. Some sort of quick practice things might help with that, if I could figure out something.

[Katamaheen]

I think someone might have already given this advice, I don’t remember… but why not use a reference mannequin? You make your pose, sketch your puppet (preferably each member of said puppet so you learn at the same time) then you make a layer on top and make another sketch, with all your character’s characteristics? You’ve clearly have a good skill on using reference, so why not?
I found this one on a quick search, just for an example, so I don’t know if it’s good:

JustSketchMe - Character posing for artists

[freyalupen]

I have one of those wooden artist’s mannequins, and that can be useful for thinking about shapes and proportions. Not flexible enough for really complex poses (like crossed arms), but could be for simpler ones. If, you know, I actually thought about taking it out and using it.

And yeah, there’s also 3d models that can be used in a similar way. I could take one of those pre-rigged models for a spin in Blender and see what insights I get out of it.

But anyway,

Random tree landscape doodle drawn using only “f) Textured Crease Update - deevad 25.01”. Need to study some actual landscapes and how to give it more depth and detail. Also, to actually color the background first instead of having all the white show through.

Some quick birds sketches based on photos. On the left, a carolina chickadee with a seed in its mouth. The right, a cedar waxwing.

It’s quick because I didn’t bother sketching the outline first, just start off coloring areas with a pencil.

[YRH]

I find posing these 3D mannequins very difficult. Very non-intuitive without Inverse Kinematics (moving the limb by the hand/foot, etc.). Vroid Studio is pretty nice for those who are into anime stuff.

My hope is that I can get good enough someday that I can piece together what I need from imperfect references, e.g. one ref for a hand/arm detail, another for clothing folds, another for a general body pose, lighting, and so on, until you can cook up a good picture from all of them combined.

[Katamaheen]

My hope is that I can get good enough someday that I can piece together what I need from imperfect references, e.g. one ref for a hand/arm detail, another for clothing folds, another for a general body pose, lighting, and so on, until you can cook up a good picture from all of them combined.

What about knowing how do draw/paint all these things without needing reference at all? Would that be an unreachable dream?

[YRH]

I’m not that greedy
But I do believe it’s possible on some level, probably at a level that I would find satisfactory. My biggest concern now is getting the rough drawing looking good and balanced.

[freyalupen]

Another five or six hours (over three days) on this study fanart thing of the box illustration of Ace Attorney Investigations Collection.

Not sure if I’ll continue. There’s still plenty to work on, but the time might be better spent on starting something else.

[sooz]

That’s amazing! So many characters and they all look great.

[freyalupen]

An hour or two fanart study sketch thing of Mythra’s render from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate:

Obviously there’s a lot of things I haven’t fixed or finished yet. Posting it as a reminder that I shouldn’t feel compelled to finish it just for the sake of finishing it, only if I feel like it. Maybe I’ll try to draw something more original in the meantime, and come back to it when I want to go back to lazy copying.

With my process, it’s ended up focusing on quickly making an overall rough sketch that looks “okay”. It looks okay when viewed at a thumbnail size, but the details are quickly and lazily put on there. Like with all those green lines, they’re just approximately in the right spot, but I’ll have to completely redraw them to look nice. It’d probably be more efficient to spend a little more time to get them more correct the first time… unless everything else was still off and I had to redraw them anyway.

But if I was drawing without a reference, I’d have to focus more on details as they’re part of constructing the drawing, of knowing how it works. Like Mythra’s sword, it’s kind of crooked because I roughly copied the pieces. But if I was constructing the overall shape, drawing a sort of rounded triangle with a line through it and then cutting out the pieces, it would be more cohesive.

I wrote this post several days ago and almost didn’t post it. I get in a bad mood and think “why would anyone want to look at this?”. But I think I forget to consider what I want to look at or say.

Next drawing is something somewhat original, mentioning it now so I can’t be a coward and back out of sharing it once I’ve worked on it some more.

[YRH]

I like it! You know that you got it reasonably right if you can squint your eyes and it looks good The only part that I think needs work is that the hand in the back blends a bit too much with the body, making it hard to read. That is usually solved by adding a slight coloring gradient (a bit like atmospheric perspective) in these types of artworks.

[dragonscales]

It may be something you’ll appreciate after more practice. You’ll always be you’re own worst critic but at least you can look back and see progress is being made.