The basics.

Here is an excerpt from a critique I did a couple days back. It's a great place for beginners to start or anyone who isn't too sure on how to progress. I'll be using this for now but I'll write a more detailed explanation in the future. Hope this helps! 





Getting known is half networking and half having good work. Both work great together but someone could thrive moreso off one other half then the other. What I find with your work is that it lacks a basic understanding of fundamentals. You may or may not have heard that term before so let me fill you in on that.

Things you should always practice and understand are:
Basic Shapes - Practice drawing cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones etc in three dimension and understand them and how they act together. The point of this is so that you can build your drawings with basic shapes and better illustrate depth instead of having things look flat.

Perspective - 1, 2 and 3 will serve you fine for starting out more point perspectives are for advanced types of drawings. I suggest looking up a book called Perspective by: William F. Powell it's short and to the point and easy to understand. It'd be great to pick that up or even any perspective book that will teach you basic perspective.

Anatomy - There are tons of ways to go about anatomy but one way I was told to do it and a good place to start is to get an anatomy book of your choice. The one I was recommended was Bridgman's Complete guide to life drawing by: George Bridgman. The idea is to go through the book and draw every image from front to back. While you do it you should think critically about the function of each body part and how they act. It will greatly improve your drawing skills with characters.

Composition - A good basic place to start here is with a book called Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes by Jack Hamm. Despite the title the entire first half of the book is a basic introduction to composition and is invaluable for a beginner.

Color/lighting - This can be done many ways. Study basic color theory and understand compliments and the like. As for lighting you should try doing still life drawings. That or really look critically at images and how the light affects it. There are so many ways to go about this one. There are also tons of books that teach these two subjects.

There are others as well but for now this is a good place to start. I don't want to overload you too much!

As for networking you gotta start soft really. Offering free requests or some kind of service is a great way to get noticed. Make forum threads that offer some kind of service. Such as, myself who writes these critiques for people. It's hard to find this type of thing so by doing it I can teach a lot of people and they'll in return appreciate my art and want to follow me.

Hope this helped!