I can relate to this. Every time I "freestyle" it's just basically a garbage mess. If I'm lucky something might turn out interesting. I have been focused recently on my visualization skills. Instead of a total "freestyle" I picture what I want on the page first THEN I let go a bit and be loose with the pen. I have found that to be much more likely to produce anything legible with any consistency.

I have just got an XP-Pen Decon Fun L, their latest release, and I'm really impressed. Feels much better in every way than the Wacom tablet (Intuos Pen&Touch Medium) I was using before. Smoother, more accurate, pressure is much smoother too, and has tilt sensor - and it costs a mere $50. Probably the cheapest tablet out there with tilt support. My only issue was that while they claim to support Linux, their official Linux driver does not have tilt so I had to use a workaround, so now I have tilt but the second button on the pen doesn't work. On Windows or Mac however, it should work without such problems.

Hey, I've been using XP-PEN DECO 03 for a few years now - it's great and cheap! ;)

Hi Kalvin :) I used the HUION INSPIROY H950P for a while. It's only around 50 bucks and really does its job well. What convinced me to buy it originally was this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9IKIGCNcSM) by Jazza. Hope this helps!

I tossed most of my books in my last move and I only kept the following art books: "How to Render" Scott Robertson: https://www.amazon.com/How-Render-fundamentals-shadow-reflectivity/dp/1933492961 "Constructive Anatomy" George Bridgeman: As above "Colour and Light" James Gurney: https://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Realist-Painter-Gurney/dp/0740797719 "Drawing the Head and Hands" Andrew Loomis: https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Head-Hands-Andrew-Loomis/dp/0857680978 "Designing Creatures and Characters" Marc Taro Holmes: https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Creatures-Characters-Portfolio-Animation/dp/1440344094

Amazing work! Realy love the second to last one. Very expressive and love the texture and composition!

Amazing! <3

Looks great! Keep it up!

Good overall I think. Just one note that you probably need to take care of (depending on what you want to express): You can't only care about vanishing points, you also need to be conscious about your optical centre. If this framing is not shifted (That is you essentially cropped the content off-centre instead of rotating the camera so that you get your stuff onto the optical centre), all corners in the frame should have equal "stretch". This is more prominent when you have a wide angle linear lens, the edge of the frame tend to stretch very heavily. Looking at your example image, it appears to be you wanna have a 3 point perspective with a vanishing point on top, that means your camera is actually tilted up and you have to only showing the bottom portion of that "tilted" view. (See attached image for a quick 3d demo) Some times this off-centre effect is used to deliver wide lens edge effect, establishing shots and so on, ideally also towards the edge of a page, normally not for main stuff because it stretches unevenly. That is not to say it's a bad drawing, just a loop hole that you might need to be aware of. That's why a lot of artist use curvy-linear perspective, much like a fish-eye, so the stuff towards the edge naturally wraps around, reduced this unnatural stretching effect.

It looks like you understand the basic concept and steps to plot out your vanishing points to make a three point perspective box so you are off to a good start. I think if your goal for a drawing is to get better at perspective, you may want to hold off on the organic objects and creatures for now and really push yourself to explore how you can use three point perspective to make more interesting complex objects. By putting this limitation on yourself you can try to experiment with what else you can create using only three point perspective besides boxes. You could try taking a box and work on adding pieces to it and subtracting chunks from it for example. You can try taking boxes and cutting them into letters or numbers or nonsense. Have fun with it and experiment. A major step forward for you might be to try arranging multiple objects in a space that don't share the same vanishing points (VP). For example, as the terrarium is now, it is placed perfectly parallel to the walls of the room, which in real life is unlikely to be the case. If you rotate the box a little bit it will feel more natural. Also different line weights can help define how far back an object is in space. If you use heavier line weight on the objects in front and lighter weight as they recede into space it will help show depth and what objects are in front of others. Go have fun with it and experiment.

Everything with the lines work looks correct using the vanishing points you have currently, but it the perspective feels a bit forced. I think the horizon is too high to have a top perspective look natural , which makes the top vanishing point look really forced. So I would move the angle of the camera so the vanishing points are all "off screen" and drop the horizon line to below the center of the image. Attached is guess at what that might look like. It would also give you a better chance to see what is in the cage in more detail and remove some of the background details that are less important to the storytelling.

Let's see what the community wants. We were planning on keeping this category clean with only official challenges, but if there is enough interest in allowing user created challenges, I'm ok with it. I can just pin the official ones to the top. Let's VOTE.. Reply to this comment with your thought!

[Update 3] I think i've gotten alot of the "line of site", scale and some overall composition issues solved. Welcome any critiques on the composition, color/lighting, and perspective. Excited to start locking stuff in soon and fleshing out the actual character drawings. Ignore the sloppy part on the picnic table on the bottom right. As well as the sloppy leg in the same area. Trying not to waste too much time on refining certain things until i get this composition down first.

Looks really good! I think you nailed that saturday morning gaming feel from the early days! Love the expressions!

Hey David! You posted the first stone golem so thank you. I love seeing the exploration and great job on the finish. I know this is your own project so you must have had set ideas in mind for this guy- but I'm always an advocate for variation in exploration. Especially for fantastical subjects like stone golems I think we'd be remiss not to explore what different silhouettes could look like based on different rock formations and foliage. I took some time to play with your shapes below. At first, I want to find fun shapes and push proportions. To take it further (I'd love to but I could work on stone golems forever) I would imagine different rocks and minerals to inspire both new silhouettes and internal details. There's so many different qualities of texture, pattern and form of rocks out there in the world! I like paying homage to the classic stone golem but I would also take artistic liberties to push a few designs beyond it! But again, it's your project and you know what fits best in your world- I'll always just tell people to explore either way. Great work!

Definitely the best way to know is to apply and ask for feedback if you get a rejection!

Just find your source of truth (aka calibrated screen) and make it work there. I think iPads and iPhones have pretty good colour calibration. I use a calibrated monitor. To be honest most people won't even notice unless it's WAY off. You can probably see a million more colours than the average instragramer :D

Hey Thomas, totally understandable to be a bit overwhelmed with the amount there is to learn. That list will probably be ever changing and ever growing as you become a better artist. Which is GOOD because that means you are aware of your weaknesses and know what you have to improve. Personally I think you should do art that you find joy in and focus on a style or content that lets you focus on one or two of the areas you want to improve. For example, your an engineer, so drawing machines, or architecture might be an area you are interested in and you can focus primarily on Perspective and Lighting. Do that until you become more confident of your skills or bored with the subject matter. Do something that excites you and focus on just a few skills at a time. For me the absolute fundamentals were Construction and Lighting. So for a few years I focused on those skills almost exclusively, practicing for hours to be able to draw perfectly straight lines and circles by hand and moving on to constructing objects and lighting them. After that I spent almost two years improving my painting process (which gives me confidence that if it looks like it's all going sideways I know by the end I will have something that looks decent), composition (a huge lightbulb moment was understanding that I should spend 50-75% of the time on a drawing at the sketch and lineart stages) and colour. I'm by no means an expert in any of those areas and I still have a lot to improve, but now I'm looking to move more into creature and character design. Hope that helps!