#going to class like Im ready for my hard days work of drawing cuboids stealthily

[toyotacorolla2008]

hi!!! i was wondering if you could do a tutorial for how you draw transformers? i can never simplify them like you can. do you have any tips?? also love your art sm <33

hi ヾ(•ω•`)o

I WILL TRY MY best to explain what i do… i don’t actually have a very structured system but this is vaguely how i got started and how i simplified the process

1. look up and compile a whole bunch of references

this will be useful for EVERYTHING– transfomos come with lots of shapes and gizmos and details and stuff so a variety of references from different angles and in different poses is really useful because you can see the shapes they’re made out of and also understand how everything connects with each other

trapezoid town! this is a mess but it’s a quick example of how by looking at everything you start to notice trends or details like what moves with what or how flexible some parts are

there are a whole bunch of resources very nice people have compiled on the web like here here here here and here (mainly MTMTE) and there is a discord server (this is a link to a tumblr post about it and not the invite link itself) for it too but you can always look through the source material and just start screenshotting and pasting shit into a folder. 

you don’t have to do humongous in-depth breakdowns if you just want to be able to quickly doodle robots (god knows i don’t!!) but having the references on-hand makes it easier for the times when you’re like This pose is going to be challenging and I’m not sure how all of the cuboids will be positioned.

references also help break you out of thinking of it as just drawing blockier humans because the proportions and shapes vary a looooooot

2. draw draw draw

at first i drew a lot using refs heavily to get an idea of the shapes then i got lazy and just started drawing anime girls and smacking rectangles and kibble on top BUT as you draw more and more you start to pick up on the Salient Features as well as their General Silhouette.

drawing from memory means that what makes them look recognisable will become more emphasised in your mind so you’ll naturally pick up on how you can simplify them without losing what makes your guy Look Like Your Guy. so if you want to simplify the robots just be incredibly lazy like me B)

i'm kind of horrible because i don't even do like Basic Shapes i literally just eyeball it

for poses i rectangle it out while thinking really hard

anyway when i first tried to draw transformers but Something Didn’t Look Right it was either a) the level of detail across the entire drawing was inconsistent and threw it off balance or b) proportions weren’t right and these things only got better with me finangling and doodling and learning by iteration.

of course sometimes i don’t give a fuck because no cops in transformers doodle land but yeahhhh i’m the kind of guy who only gets through stuff by throwing a lot of rocks at it. i don’t have a Method to offer you unfortunately but what i did do was

3. experiment and exaggerate and experiment!!

The First Rule of Gun Safety is to Have Fun and Be Yourself! i took a lot of liberties and rarely stayed on-model when i doodled and waffled around (and i still do…) but it helped me figure out how much i was willing to draw lol and consequently how i would stylise them.

i would play with how big or small or exaggerated or expressive they'd be… even my most detailed drawings are nowhere near comic-detail but my least detailed ones were. turquoise triangle that’s vaguely brainstorm-shaped. having fun with it and just doing it to make stupid jokes makes the practice seem like not practice.

so yeah tl;dr i started by reffing what bots actually look like, would trace comic panels to get an idea of the shapes and details and then start drawing side-by-side → drew billions of perceptors from my diseased mind and played around with lines → ??? → upgraded from goofy-looking rectangles to goofy-looking rectangles

that’s it for advice! (i don’t feel qualified to say that much)

below are just examples of stupid doodles i’d make on my ipad in class or in the margins of assignments lol, you can tell the last one is from when i still didn't understand brainstorm's build very well because the wings are placed wrongly... But i grew.

hope this was somewhat helpful! there are other tutorials from other artists that i can direct you to but this is how toyotacorolla2008 got to shitposting on tumblr dot com