HMS Dido (1896)

This is my very first drawing and feedback would be very appreciated, I've been working on this for a long time and I think it turned out very well.

Very good, excellent job for a first drawing. Not without things to comment about so here they go:

[ img ]

From stern to bow:
Free standing structures bigger than 1 foot as seen from the side should be outlined in black, I've shown them on your drawing. These are mainly air intakes in this case.

The skeg and rudder, while under the ship and covered from light, are vertical to the viewer so they should be painted on the base colour.

Any surface meant to have people standing on should be 3px thick and correspondingly outlined in black.

We draw portholes with 1 or 4 px of "blue" "sky reflection" colour, (a very rich deep garish looking blue in classic SB drawings) surrounded by a black pixel outline, in this case the 3x3 with 1 blue pixel probably fits better. If the portholes don't have glass then its up to you how to display them but i've done them as open squares with a very dark grey filling.

Funnels and other large cilindrical structures benefit from highlighting on the face pointing towards the light source (top right), the palette you've chosen has a lot of contrast so this looks a bit exagerated right now.

The front air intakes kept going below the deck on the bow.

Overall pretty insignificant issues that don't detract from a fantastic entry into the forum. Once again good job and welcome.

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Charguizard wrote: *

June 27th, 2021, 6:37 pm

Very good, excellent job for a first drawing. Not without things to comment about so here they go:

[ img ]

Thank you so much for all the feedback, I was pretty unsure what to give black outlines and what not so thanks for clearing that up. Also are these all sort of standard things that I should do or are they just artistic decisions? For example the thickness of a surface, that people can stand on. Also thanks for all the other tips, especially with the highlighting and the skeg. It adds a lot more depth. I'll hopefully get working on my next project soon. I very much appreciate you taking all of this time to even demonstrate these improvements to me.

Welcome aboard!

This is a good first drawing and Charguizard has outline the main points for improvement.
The only thing I might add is that the light grey shade where you are shading lighter surfaces might be too bright.
You should probably look at the gun barrels too, for the 3pdr QF guns a 1-pixel thick barrel will suffice.

As to standard things to do, most are covered in the Style Guide: http://www.shipbucket.com/styleguide
This will give you useful pointers to shading and things like portholes and railings.

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It looks very nice. I like how you turned the deck guns to 45'. However what I noticed is an error commonly made. You haven't allowed enough room between decks. Remember two pix equal one foot so twelve equal 6 feet. That's pretty tight and allows no room for the captain to wear a chapeau. I have been aboard the USS Olympia and on the main deck my head just clears the cross members (I'm 6'1") and can just touch the underside of the deck above - about 7', 6". Charguizard mentions 3 pix for a platform - a total of 15 pix. Top of the porthole should be about 6'. However, this varies a great deal with turn of the century ships. Going lower into the ship the decks are closer and members thicker.

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