Hey there,

Please don't say you don't know how to draw. You just have to work at it is all, perspectives are really tricky and I think you have potential for greatness.

The guidelines for perspective and Pyro were a good idea and a great start. Though I think before you start with drawing any particular details you should get the base to be what you're looking for first. Otherwise there's just gonna be a lot of frustrated erasing later.

First should be fixing those guidelines. That will make the figure fall right into place. I'll demonstrate what I mean by adding some of the guidelines in red to the picture.

I feel bad about drawing over your piece, but it's difficult telling you what I mean with words haha. Please forgive my utter lack of photoshop skills. I hope you get the general idea though. In case you don't I'll just go into excruciating detail and give you some tips of the trade.

A good tip for perspective when you're doing an ant's eye perspective is having a 'build from the bottom' mentality. You want the most weight to go into that left foot. Make that heel really defined. I think a quick google search of the structure and where someone puts weight on their feet would be a good idea. Just so you can portray a realistic feeling with Pyro. It's the largest part of the image and what I look at first so you want to make that what draws the viewer into the rest of the picture.

Next I would suggest having some of the calf show past the foot to give the foot more direction.

It looks like you're drawing a somewhat slimmer Pyro, which is completely fine, but I think weight placement in this pose is still crucial. Take a look at a glass cup for a moment. Tilt it so you are looking at it from the same angle as you would ideally see this image. See how the lip of the cup closest to you is facing up? Make sure Pyro's belt is curved more upwards like that. The way you have it right now is like you drew it face on with a foot kicking out.

In terms of the arms, I think the biceps could be more defined (or perhaps that's just my like of ripped muscles showing through, haha) but other then that I think that is fine. The ribs under the arms could be more shaped though. If you look at the figure as a skeleton first, and do the cup thing I suggested before, you'll notice that Pyro's chest will stick out a bit. Especially for that particular pose. If you were to lift a gun up and take a leap, it'd take some good upper body strength. The band across the chest should also be facing up more, instead of drooping downward. I'd suggest almost mirror flipping it. It may give the figure more weight and, mid-jump, would probably be lifted off the chest a bit too.

Pyro's face should be tilted up a bit more. For this you could look into a mirror and tilt your own face back a bit to see what I'm talking about. The chin area should be facing out more, and you'd see less of the forehead. In Pyro's case, the big filter would be protruding much more.

The forearms should be much shorter, as you can see in the red I marked, the oval-shapes are roughly where his hands should be. With perspective the horizontal lines will get closer together the further back you go, so if you were to fold the arms in this piece as you see them right now, the forearms should be drastically shorter, not the same length as the upper arm. Also, the elbows should be sticking out a bit more. The strongest point of a stance like that would be in the upper arm to the elbows, think of it as having them less 'reaching' and more 'lifting up' if it makes it easier. If you were to push Pyro over in this stance you have now Pyro would easily fall back; but if you had the weapon closer to the head and the upper arms facing out more it'd be slightly more difficult to push em over (it's so early in the morning, am I even making any sense?). I guess to sum that word jumble up, Pyro's quite vulnerable in this pose so make up for it in stronger stance/structure (I'm not saying change the pose, just make this pose as dynamic and edgy as you can!).

The weapon is a biiit more tricky. I'm not particularly familiar with Pyro's weapon and don't fancy drawing machinery in my work all that often, but I think if you studied Pyro's flame-thrower a bit closer and used measurements and guidelines more carefully you could make the perspective of the weapon work a bit better.

Hopefully I'm not being too critical. I don't want to kill your spirit or anything. I think if you google searched life drawing models and drew a few people at different angles and perspectives you'll get a better idea of weight placement and proportions. Essentially, Pyro's stance should take up less length on the page and expand a bit further in terms of width.

I hope I was of some help. If you needed any additional tips of the trade or suggestions or anything at all really, feel free to send me an email.

>>3387
Thank you so, so much, that was all REALLY helpful. And it did make sense, no worries!
I think I'm gonna start the drawing over on a new page, so I don't have to deal with erasing everything. But I'll post again once I get some lineart down!

>>3388

That sounds great. I'm looking forward to seeing your updated version and I am glad that I was of some help to you! Best of luck!

FINALLY I RETURN
dear god I'm sorry that took me such a /horrendously/ long time, but you know how it is.
As I said, I ended up completely starting over, while basing it off my original drawing and taking much of the advice in mind. I think it looks a lot better now though I'll reserve my back-pats for after I've had another set of eyes look at it and tear it to shreds.
Have at it!

This pose lacks oomph for me. I tl;dr about it in the redlines, but here's a summary:

If you're going for "oh shit incoming Pyro", then the perspective should be even more extreme.

Or, if the focus is "Pyro's about to do something badass", then the pose needs to be more dynamic, with more of the Pyro's body shown to be in motion than what you have here.

Whichever pose you go for, I suggest you constantly have a reference on hand. There's little details with regards to Pyro's uniform that you've neglected, and those add up. http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Pyro is a pretty good bare-bones starting point, and if you have Team Fortress 2 installed on your computer, you can also download the Source SDK, which contains a model viewer that allows you to rotate and room all of the in-game models, either as a still pose, or animated. You can even load the default weapons to see how they are wielded.

>>3406
I do have TF2 installed but I don't have internet at home right now so I can't install or load anything with Steam. Gah.
Thank you muchly for the advice and the redline, I'll see what I can do to fix it!

Oh, and something else I realized way in hindsight:

Pyro's hands are not positioned correctly. The left hand should be facing the other direction, since he's just temporarily holding the flamethrower over his head to be menacing. (Try the pose yourself to see what I mean. It makes more sense for the left hand to be cupping the barrel of the flamethrower from the bottom, as then you don't have to relinquish your grip on it when you bring it down to fire.)

This took me a disgustingly long time oh god but here's my most recent version of this
Changed a lot, including turning that arm around, which took me longer than it should have to realize why it wasn't looking right. Right now I'm having trouble getting the mask to look even remotely plausible, and his left foot may or may not be able to bend like that.
Tear it to shreds, luvs!

Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

First, let's look at Pyro's head straight on and break it down into basic shapes. It's made of a half of a sphere for the head, a tapered cone for the mouth, and three cylinders (the eyes and the filter).

Now, the "camera" is aiming upwards at Pyro's head, so it's time for some extreme foreshortening. What I drew was very approximate, using an actual prop to help with the how it's supposed to look because I suck at imagining 3-D space, so I suggest you redo this step yourself.

I played around with some 1-point perspective, but I found that it warped the Pyro's head to the point of being unrecognizable. It's up to you if you want to take that step. There's plenty of tutorials on how to do 1-point perspective.

Same goes for the rest of the body. As a whole, Pyro is rather pear-shaped, but for the same of simplicity start by breaking the body down into boxes, the limbs into cylinders, and the hands and feet into boxes.

The other comments that I made the last time about the composition, the body proportions, and the details still apply.

Whoops, hit send too fast.

This was supposed to be the accompanying picture with my wall of words. Hope it helps.