I think I've finally begun discovering my art style!

[GideonWilhelm]

After years of flailing at Blender and trying way too hard to do way too much, I finally have something I'm incredibly happy with and can see going far!

How I made it was a little deranged, too.  Every tutorial is like "just start extruding faces around the eye/nose/mouth and connect them" and "make sure you do your topology like this" or "take a cube and stretch it this way" or sculpting.  But me?  I could only describe the process as 'scaffolding.'



I collapsed the starting cube into a single vertex, then extruded out to frame the face, and pushed those extrusions back to give it depth.  Then I extruded a front silhouette for the face (like the nose, lips, forehead) and connected its top to the top of the face framing.  Then I extruded out to mark the lips, then again to mark the eyes, and just sort of started filling faces in from there.



I also marked a lot of edges as sharp, and it's not something I'd ever thought to do before, even experimenting with this technique.  But lo and behold, it moved the shading PERFECTLY!! 



I did the same thing around the back of the head and under the jaw, and here's the final product after a lot of tweaking and bikeshedding! Now if only I could stop procrastinating on the rest of the body lmao

I don't know how to end posts

[MediocreMetastasis]

Your topology looks really good so there's nothing wrong with your method. Some people sketch out drawings before doing lineart. some people go straight to lineart, and some people say "screw it" and throw paint buckets at canvases.

Usually I first make a rough version of what I want with primitives and then extrude faces around it but sometimes different methods are better in certain situations.

Here's a little tip. Learn about mirror and subdivision modifiers they're really helpful.


(Oh yeah thanks for showing me that you can mark lines as sharp. Seems really useful to know.)