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marirosaarts asked: Were you always naturally neat with your line work or did you have to train yourself to be neater? Got any tips on having neater lines in a drawing?

http://www.ctrlpaint.com/home/2011/5/10/clean-lines-pt-1.html

http://www.ctrlpaint.com/home/2011/5/12/clean-lines-pt-2.html

Has some great tips and some great stuff on line weight and what not if you dig deeper. And honestly I had to train for neater lines, I have 270 hours of life drawing under my belt from Watts I should honestly have more life drawings to show right?

Haha well what I don’t post is the stuff that was when I was trying to figure out the importance of line and mark making. I would make 20 lines until I found the right one. Watts slowly got me to think about the right line placement and efficiently with line because if your a painter you don’t have that luxury. Right now I’m still working with pencil since I’m learning the basic, but soon I will be moving to working with just ballpoint pens with my sketches to help enforce me to make better line decisions.

In the end of all my training I want to become a traditional oil painter.

Though when I was doing Skullgirls it also helped a lot. Juggling that and work was quite a task and I had many days where I just didn’t sleep. It really forced my to think about my lines harder and time efficiency. Even now when I work I think about workflow and minimizing my time, I have cut down to doing a weapon in 1.5-2 hours and pre-picking color palettes that would go well with certain material types.  I used to take a week to do a full armor set but now I can get 2 and half done a week, I’m trying to set a goal to get 3 full armor turn-arounds + shield and sword, done in a week.

The best advice I can give is set goals and time yourself and think about what your doing. If your making too many lines, do some life drawing quick sketches. That REALLY helped me a lot since I have to make cut throat line placement decisions that could make or break my poses. And helped me sort through better methods and quicker thinking. At Watts we studied in 3’s, 5’s and 7’s and then did four 5 minute quick sketches before doing a 3 hour long pose.

Life drawing is an amazing tool if you have the right people to teach you how to use it.