The shading on the mane is very sharp, you could try blending it out in some places? The mod also mentioned the pixelated lines which may need to be redone even though that sounds like a lot

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Thank you, Robin! The thing is, I have tried blending it, and all it seems to do is smear the black onto the blue and make it darker, not blending the lines itself. I don't know if the "smudge" tool is the incorrect one to use, or what, but it doesn't seem to blend well at all.

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Honestly, it does seem to be a case of just overall lack of familiarity with anatomy.

Lioden has a very realistic lion style, which ultimately means you'll have to do quite a bit of anatomy study and practice on proportions, and pair that with a softer sketchier lineart style and shading style. Unfortunately a lot of that cannot be short cut around and simply will improve over lots of dedicated learning and practice.

Drawing lion skulls, drawing lions from photographs and paying attention to proportion, using lioden art style as a reference (cannot be copied for decor or too heavily referenced for poses, as they will not allow that) all will help lend you the building blocks to make your own decor. It can definitely be tough to make a full on character as a custom decor vs clothing or little trinkets.

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As far as better line quality goes, it's best to work on a canvas 2-3x the size of the lioden required size, and size your art down after that to the required size to retain quality. It will look a bit blurry/fuzzy but it won't be sharply pixelated.

The brush type you'd want to use is a simple round brush on around 85% opacity to keep it more sketchy and soft

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Yeah... I am most familiar with drawing Lion King style lions, which, while overall realistic in many ways, definitely have more... stylized faces and the like than do Lioden lions. Which parts are incorrect, do you think, Sakasu? Like... the cheekbones, the limb length? I used a reference drawing of an actual lion, but I don't think I copied it very well.

I would do better with trinkets, I believe. This is my first attempt at drawing an entire character, but he is meant to be my King, Mikazo, who just retired. The idea is for his spirit to always be watching over his pride, so I really want to do this and do it right.

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A round brush? I have been using a square brush (and a mouse). I am not sure of the size of the actual picture in the art program, as I resize it outside of the program. Opacity of the brush itself? I had not considered that, either. Thank you very much!

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It's hard to pin one specific thing, I do think the proportions read more like a dwarf lion though (which i thought was what he was meant to be, honestly!)

And ahh yeah working with a mouse can be pretty limiting, but it doesn't look bad at all especially considering the mouse!

It's more just like several little things in the face to be lightly tweaked, needing more lineart on the face. With lioden art, they have a LOT of lineart , as you can see with this adol male primal, the bulk of the detail is in very soft and sketchy lineart. There isn't a ton of shading with colour alone. Using a lighter opacity brush helps build up the lines with kind of a pencil effect.

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I have wondered if his legs were too short... I will try to fix that, too. Thank you! I can see how he looked dwarfish, for sure. Thanks :) Working with a mouse is a pain, but any sort of drawing tablet is not in the cards yet - at least, not any that can then port pictures to a laptop.

So, lineart is specifically the parts that are there before the color is filled in? I wasn't entirely clear on what lineart was, compared to coloring and all that. In fact, a lot of his "lineart" that I made was done in shades of color, which may account for some of the oddities of it. Part of it is that I can't seem to get the paint brush pen in the GIMP app to go small enough to leave thin lines without being EXTREMELY zoomed in, and then, when I zoom in too much, the brush simply stops working. It is confusing. The other part is general lack of skill and/or familiarity with the style. Thanks again.

That adol male primal... the detail is much easier to see as separate without the color. Thank you so much for the example, and for the tips! I will see what I can do my picture.

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Is this better lineart, do you guys think? More proportionate? Imgur Link to Mikazo's New Lineart

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It's still very pixelated unfortunately, the only way to fix that is going to be working at a higher resolution(DPI), probably want to aim around 300 DPI if gimp will allow you to change that setting, if your canvas isn't too small still either.

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I'll see if I can find a DPI setting. Thank you! DPI means resolution? I really don't know any of these terms used in art programs, I am starting to realize.

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It should be DPI or PPi or just resolution yeah! And art programs def can be hard to navigate, I honestly always struggled with learning gimp myself vs other programs, but it's not a bad free program by any means, just has a bit of a confusing layout in my opinion haha

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Definitely confusing! It seems to be PPI, but when I change it, it doesn't seem to alter the size of the image. Is it something that doesn't show until exported or something? I did manage to change the size of the canvas. (Sorry for all the questions, and thank you so much for your help).

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Usually it does change it and make the picture look a bit fuzzier when you do, but I'm not totally sure how gimp works since I haven't used it in over a decade

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I'll have to play around with it a bit and see if I am just doing it wrong. Thank you :)

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