Unpopular art opinions 🖌️

Roast me for this but trad art and digi art are the same

Black to shade is soo nice man. And thicker lineart. And sharper edges. REALLY sharp edges. That looks so good. I wanna see eyelashes that'll take someone eyes out and hair that is impossible 

I don’t particularly like when people draw my OCs. The thought put into it is really sweet, but I only feel like my own drawings of them actually *are* them. It’s like I don’t really like or want to see them in another style (^^;; The only exception is ship art made by the person who owns that character’s partner. 

Admittedly this was originally an opinion from a friend (which I reworded to sound less harsh) that I ended up agreeing with.

It shouldn't be too difficult to use a color palette that's provided on a reference sheet if you're unable to directly color pick from the character for whatever reason. If it is difficult to use a color palette and if it's not blending in with the background and/or you don't have a condition that affects how you see colors, then that's something you should work on.

Having an extremely large color palette next to a shaded, detailed character on a reference sheet that consists of 20 shades of blues is useless and almost impossible to use correctly. I've had to deal with a case like that a few times and oh boy oh boy. I blame nobody for not being able to work with a color palette, sometimes it's just a pretty garbage concept. 

However if you're dealing with 3 colors, or colors that clearly differ from each other I don't see the reason behind not being able to work with it. It's pretty self explanatory.

When people say "I don't like color palettes" it means exactly that. not that it's not possible to work with in a normal case. I hate color palettes but I can work when them just fine. I just don't prefer it. And I find them visually ugly but that's just a preference for my sheets. 

In any case, I don't think shaded refs are a good choice. Just call it a regular artwork. As it's not designed to work for and has it's intended purpose. And that is to have a clear visual fullbody of the design, not the light and shadows. Aside from colors, It can be pretty difficult to make out the design in the first place. I once was sent a ref showing flat, and rendered. I could not even see half the design and structure of pattern on the beautifully rendered fullbody. A color palette wouldn't help with that whatsoever.

I love when there is a piece of render as an addition. Including textures fully drawn, it can be soo useful especially when you work with textures yourself and don't have the most flat, cartoony style.

Skykristal I get where you're coming from but I still get fanart of my characters even though I use shaded reference sheets (I have around 51 defenses on ArtFight for example). And I'm fine with people getting the colors a bit off as long as the skin color isn't drastically changed and IMO I don't think it's too difficult to colorpick a character's skin color even if you shaded it. Eyeballing colors is a skill worth learning. And even then, only one person was off for the colors and it was making a character's hair a shade lighter, which no biggie.

I try to not go too crazy with the shading and my shading is not the painterly style anyway. Besides, I feel like anyone should be able to do their reference sheets in whatever way they want. At most, maybe provide an unrendered ref sheet if avaliable if someone requests it.

^ i think shading on refs will totally depend! people can still somewhat colorpick from cell shaded, but paintery/more layered shading will obviously take more time to navigate. i've seen your refs, and i will admit, the shading is pretty simple, and the og colors of the piece is mostly clear! 

i make color palettes nowadays when designing, so i can make sure i'm limiting my colors + drawing blocks of colors satifies me lol, but i will admit it that i don't like using them much? like, even if i tried making ones for my characters skin, hair, and eyes only [which will have similliar colors due to just being humans with a bunch of browns], the whole thing still. yeah lol. in my honest opinion, i think a good ref sheet [or even design] would not actually need a color palette, their colors should be clear enough to be read. i will also say, a useful color palette would also be divided nicely to be readable [basically, not just one long box, but several boxes?]. most of the professional ref sheets i've seen [animators specifically, like steven universe, amphibia, lackadaisy, google em] don't use color palettes anyway? so 

edit: i don’t watch hazbin, tho a visual to kinda explain my point? not saying it's a perfect, or a must have, just what i'm trying to say ksksks

v ah thanks, and right! labels definitely help too, forgot to mention that in oop- :]

Cutegirl920fire cool that it works for you but this is not changing any of the points I made. Sure, you can do your refs however you want. doing something however you want applies to so many things. But not everything is always a good choice. I'm not telling you not to shade your refs. If it works for you that's great. 

dazey-the-goat agreed! also separate pallet boxes are great and definitely my favorite out of everything. But only if they're labeled. Sometimes a color palette is self explanatory but other times not so much and you just got 5 boxes with colors floating around :'D And yeah I very much agree that a good ref doesn't require a color palette. I'm not against it, you do you, but I also think it's not a necessity in a good ref. If you look up the references from the media you mentioned you get a very clear idea of their design immediately without any kind of extra pallette somewhere.

soulless unshaded/very minimal shaded eyes with zero light in them >>>>>>>>

Cluttered refsheets are cool

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I am begging, please stop giving your fat ocs skinny legs and arms. Yes there are instances where this works, I can think of a few character designs. But when you obviously have an overweight character, I always see that same skinny leg approach. That or circle tool belly, skinny face etc. Especially on ferals but sometimes also people. It's just ugly and not intentional looking whatsoever.  Please study body types more.. it's not sticks + circle. Fat isn't just on one or two body parts. Idk how unpopular that is, but a lot of people definitely don't care.

^ sky you’re giving me flashbacks to my past self HELP- i think is just the fact they haven’t got used to drawing fat body types yet. i mean, when i was learning about it, it felt “off” to look at it at first, which might’ve been why i didn’t want to exaggerate features that would’ve been more fitting. 

skinny limbs/circle belly can work for specific things [skinny fat body types, people who are pregnant, etc], but other than that i definitely recommend anyone to consider other parts of the body when it comes to fat and muscles! very fun once you find out the many ways you can draw them :]

limit your colors for character design? depends. limiting your hues? abosolutely yes. idk if this make sense, but some of the more “complex but good” designs i saw didn’t exactly limit the amount of colors, but rather the hues. [there’s still value in limiting colors tho, example: not doing 20 different blues when you could do 6-8]

also, color values/saturation > hue, any combo of hues works well as long as you use the right values and saturations

people who hate to use certain colors in their art will not survive the winter. that "ugly" green will save you one day

dazey-the-goat seems like a good point in general - sometimes things might just look "off" because you're not used to seeing them in your art and style! Heck, I remember when I was a kid and first started drawing eyebrows on my characters after not doing so for years, I thought it looked a bit "off" at first but quickly got used to it and now it would feel weird to not give my human(oid) characters eyebrows unless that's specifically part of their design (like with my alien character Sorbet and other members of his species if I make them). Maybe not the best comparision but sometimes part of drawing something is just getting used to it

not to double post but it drives me crazy when im looking for unusual anthro species and they're all just

this is ESPECIALLY apparent with sharks. google furry shark. they are just noseless dog creatures. obviously theres nothing WRONG with having characters like these, i literally do, but it sucks because other species are interesting! not everything has to be dogified! especially bugs, i love bug anthros that look like bugs.

jeremystrong (sorry for ping if you don’t like them!) I’m not even a furry artist but I think that’s insane. At that point, it seems more like a hybrid species. It’s kind of like when people will have a hybrid species with a human and another animal and it would literally just be a human with cat ears (nothing wrong with that either, but it just seems a bit… boring?) I think the main reason for this is that many artists are too afraid to get out of their comfort zone and just resort to something simpler?? Not sure though because I’m not an anthro artist. 

Simplified skeleton base > stick man / ball  base (I dunno the actual name lol). It makes the proportions a lot more realistic, but it also gives you a better idea of where the joints connect and how the body works. For clarification, I mean something like this: 

Compared to something like this:

Both are helpful, but I just prefer the former!