I'd like to see you try something other than a toy. It's good, but its just a drawing of a toy. Your skill is being wasted on toys
I get this a lot. I have a writer who has been working on a comic book script for a month now and I keep hassling him to deliver. It's not about Transformers, though. AS FOR drawing other still life images, I rarely find things in my mundane life that look as sweet as the action figures I buy.
-I start by picking the toy. -I then spend a good ten minutes trying to figure out an interesting way to pose it that still displays all the details of the toy I want to draw. I then get frustrated and end up just standing him up in some boring pose. I draw using .7mm mechanical pencils. Standard printer paper, scotch taped to the removed sidepanel of an old computer case. I actually keep two or three pages of paper underneath the one I'm drawing on to give my surface the right amount of softness. Then I start drawing, usually I begin on the chest or head and continue for an hour - I usually don't actually do outlines beforehand and just draw straight. But to keep some things in line, I have a colored pencil I use to make sure details line up. On larger figures, I find some parts a distance from each other that overlap and make note of their relative position, so I don't shift perspective too much. -I generally play music while I draw. By the time I'm done the torso, I'm usually tired of drawing and take a break. Read a comic, say hi to family, whatever. Then a while later I go back, add on the legs and other limbs. Once that's done I add line width variance to give my drawings whatever depth I can. And to make all the limbs distinguishable from the body. I'm still learning how to do this and I think it's mostly a process that relies on instinct. -Take 13 minutes and come back later to "step back" and try and spot areas that need more emphasis/energy. Scan at 300 DPI and have the file load in GIMP. automatic white balance, convert to greyscale, save, upload, circulate on forums. Coloring Load up original scan, white balance, drop the colors. Set layer to multiply. Layer the solids each on the layer underneath, giving each plastic color it's own layer. One layer for paint-aps. Two layers for shadows, one raster, one vector. Same for bright areas. Only solid white and black on the layers, then translucency can be adjusted as needed. Sometimes I'll give different colors their own shading layers, of course. Then a new trick - Layers of grey shading to dull the colors as things get further from the viewer. Then I trim the shading that might have runoff the robot and import the logos, and move them to the same level as the paint aps so they're shaded with the rest of the artwork. Scale, save, circulate. And that's about everything to my process.
I've been meaning to type it out for a while now. O qne thing I forgot to mention, is that I have a desk lamp I position besides me to illuminate the toy from the angle I'm looking at it. On darker toys, the extra light makes a ton of difference. And I don't hesitate to grab a flashlight.
