Hieros Gamos, Fakemon and More

[megaMasquerain]

it's the way you shade that bothers me. here, i've found a few, but there are many more:

it's the shape of your shading according to the form in which it's in, it's also where you put your highlights... now there are probably several reasons to this: the first would be you're not sure of where the light source is, the second how it impacts the subject; the third would be you still need more practice on refining your pixelling technique (pixel clusters and such). i recommend you go look on pixelation for helm's "tutorials" where he talks about several things including pixel clusters.

Alright, I read those tutorials and a lot of it went over my head but I did my best to understand what Helm was saying in the context of "why does my shading suck"

What I'm thinking is wrong is that I shade things according to how they look from a certain angle and perspective, rather than thinking of how they look from every angle and applying the lightsource that way. Unfortunately that's how my mind works and I haven't yet found a way around it. (I blame autism. Autism fucks everything up.)

For example: Helm's little face-plane guy.
In the same situation as Helm, I wouldn't do the face-plane step (another issue, I can't seem to wrap my brain around any kind of anatomy and have to work from direct references at the exact angle of the piece I'm trying to make, which is why I LOVE edits), rather, I would just jump into shading, shading as I saw fit from the current angle with the lightsource I specified, ending up with something like my Vriska portrait.

Am I correct in my hypothesis? If so this is a fundamental error in how my brain is wired and I'm not sure how/if/when I'll overcome it, but at this point all I can do is try.

I feel like we're getting to the crux of the issue however, and that makes me feel accomplished, at least knowing -what- is wrong, you know?