TL:DR questions marked at bottom

Hey guys, something's been bothering me for a while and I guess I finally got the idea to ask about it. It's concerning my works (Artist:Lamar) and their quality and reception. The thing is, I can't really bring myself to like my own works, despite all my attempts to improve. So I thought to post them, in case anyone else would like them.

I started posting my adult works on both e621 and FurAffinity, but to what seems like a lack-luster reception. I'd like to say I don't really care about others judgment, but its starting to get to me now. It's not so much that people are telling me my drawing's suck, but the general lack of response at all, really.

I fully understand and accept that you can only expect people to like a work if it's good. When it comes to the quality of pictures I've drawn, I keep feeling like something is off, butchering what could be decent pictures. The problem is, I can't pin down what's wrong and it seems no one is willing to, or cares to, call me out on F'ing up somewhere. I'll get an occasional complement, but no one's being critical.

I hate stagnation and I've been doing my best to improve where I can, but things are starting to get to me. Part of it could be with how slowly I've been producing pictures, which, among other issues, is due to my lack of creativity when it comes to thinking of things to draw. I seem to want to avoid drawing anything too generic, while I also need to have a reason for the scene/pose or a story for the characters. It's slowed me down, so I'm not practicing on drawing as much as I'd like.

If you guys are worried I'll flip my lid over criticism, you don't need to worry. I won't say it won't affect me, but I'd rather be poked forward by a sharp needle than stagnate and fester where I stand.
Besides, complements, while needed occasionally like for most others, make me uncomfortable. At least when someone tells me I'm wrong, it gives me a direction to work in.

+ + + + I guess you could boil it down to + + + +

1) What am I doing wrong with my drawings? (Either design or coloring or after-effects, ect.) (One area I'm having issue with is dicks. Others can draw them so that I like 'em, but I can't.)

2) Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make drawings or where to look for suggestions? (Thinking of what to draw and how to draw it or what poses to draw)

3) A curiosity for me; do I have a particular art style or is my work generic? (lol, sorry for the repeated "2)")

PS. I'm sorry if this is a bit wordy or erratic in it's flow. I've not really eaten in a while and thus I'm tired and spacey. But really, it seems this is when I'd have the courage to interact with people, especially on a forum.

I don't have too much time right now, but I'll give my first impressions.

First off, your art is better than I expected. Most people I see coming to the forums looking for critique are much earlier in their drawing careers.

Second, you listed "2)" twice at the bottom. there, and it is bothering me.

Beyond that, I think the problem you are facing has to do with art style. I'd tend to call your art style generic. Better than most such work, but still, generic.

The least appealing elements of your drawings, I think, are that you tend towards quite scrawny-seeming arms, and that you are sometimes too heavy on the black outlining. That's not to say that your outlines are thick, but there is too much outlining of details within the drawing.

Compare the penises in post #774957 and post #693699

Yes, your styles are very different - but I think it illustrates, the second has a good amount of detail on the penis, and quite a few lines, but it doesn't look distracting, because they are more melded into the image. In yours, the lines stand out far too obviously.

On that note, I think you could use to work more on shading in general. I think that is what makes your art look generic - it is almost entirely flat.

Anatomy-wise, structure-wise, you are ahead of the curve. But your art is lacking depth.

Personally, if you wanted to improve, I would suggest these things:

1) Try various other art styles. Try to draw something without black outlines. Try to paint something. Try to imitate the style of another artist you like, just to see if you can.

2) Try drawing a character with no background. Really focus on the character themselves. Put the effort you would have put into a background into shading and depth.

3) Keep at it. Don't get discouraged. As I said, you have a good grasp of anatomy and structure.

This is purely opinionated, so take it as you will~

1. For me, the proportions are a tad on the lanky side, if you're aiming for realistic/human, might wanna make the limbs a tad shorter. Aside from that you might wanna use anti aliasing, your lines look really jagged and the shapes/angles are hard and rough. I mean no disrespect with this, but it kinda makes it look like an MS paint drawing, that's not to say they're done badly, the quality just seems low. Colors seem fine where they are, and as far as penises go, good luck :/ My "field of expertise" is with vaginas.

2. I can't really point to any one specific place. I just filter through a bunch of art sites for ideas and what not. More often than not I go to Pixiv, but that's because my style of drawing fits in there. I say try to shuffle through DA or FA.

3. Hard to say honestly. Personally most all western anthro styles kinda start to blend together and look the same at some point, cause all it really is, is just a variety of animal, alien, etc parts glued on a human body. But yes, from face value, it does seem rather run of the mill.

TL:DR same as before

Fist off, thanks for responding. I think I've been building in tension or anxiety over this for a while, and now that I've some directions to head in, I'm relaxing a little.

Anyway,
I kinda expected the whole 'scrawny' bits, I tend to like guys who are skinnier and I guess I was aiming to draw that. Truth be told, I guess I was starting to apply it to characters who don't need it. I guess I need to try other body types then... and fix the arms...

When it comes to the outlines, I'd never thought of using both lines and shading to define things, before. I mean, I've done pics where I've attempted to replace all the lines with shading and highlights. However, I've never approached the idea of using the lines to make a general outline, then using after-effects to fill in the details. Other than that, I'm not really sure how the other artist made his lines look like that. They seem lighter at times and even cleaner... which probably leads into...

To the comment about anti-aliasing... what's that? If I remember from gaming, that's supposed to blur rough edges, but I've never seen it in art programs. Mostly, I was using Gaussian Blur for about a pixel. Then I started using some kinda trace tool to make the lines look better. This all takes a ton of work to get a more natural feel than my initial attempts... and you're telling me there's an easier way to do it?... is it in GIMP?

As for shading, after-effects have always been a problem for me. I've been trying different ways to shade and highlight to varying success. The biggest problem for me seems to be with how long it takes. I use to have to spend a couple of days to do things like shading, with my most recent attempt at speeding up with minimal quality loss being to use a 'custom shape' selection tool. I'd select the area I needed to shade, then fill it with black, use Gaussian blur on it a couple times, then turn the layer to overlay. Is there an easier way to do this?

I've also done at least a couple pictures with no background, but I could always stand to do more (even if my OCD tells me to add it or the pic's not finished). Otherwise, I've not really tried any other art style than “vaguely realistic while adding dashes of un-realism”. The first thing your suggestion made me think is to try something more cartoon-ish, but maybe that's not what you meant.

Also, I've tried starting to use other's pic's to draw specific body parts (the one posted was one of the one's used for the deathclaw pic), but I've always been afraid of plagiarizing others works. So I've not really used others drawings for pose/scene ideas... is there any advise I should know if I were to start doing so?

P.S. I think the MS Paint comparison is what best fit my problem with my line art.

1) So mix using lines and shading rather than one or the other? As well as... what is Anti Aliasing.

2) Is there an easier way to shade, or at least a way that isn't so time consuming?

3) I'd love to use others works to help me think of scenes/poses, but when is it inspirational and when is it plagiarism?

Lamar said:
I've also done at least a couple pictures with no background, but I could always stand to do more (even if my OCD tells me to add it or the pic's not finished). Otherwise, I've not really tried any other art style than “vaguely realistic while adding dashes of un-realism”. The first thing your suggestion made me think is to try something more cartoon-ish, but maybe that's not what you meant.

Allow me to give some examples which might explain what I mean:

post #607940 post #499232 post #426771 post #647947 post #566237 post #503131

All of these images were drawn by the same artist.

You see how he varied many things about his art? Exaggerated details, speed painting, full painting, black and white, manga style, clean style, sketchy style...

Trying new styles, new techniques, testing new elements... those things help you to improve. So that's what I mean by trying to vary your style. Try to do things that wouldn't even be recognizable as your art. Use tools you aren't familiar with. Try to limit yourself in some way. Make something made of nothing but vibrant colors. Make something black and white. Make something over the course of days or weeks. Make some things in half an hour.

You might not always be happy with the results, but you will improve.

Your art style is fairly decent from what I've skimmed over. And you only have one more watcher on Furaffinity than I do, despite our vastly different content.

Practicing, implementing new styles, spending more time doing and less worrying, watching online videos of what other artists do and see what you can learn from them to evolve your own style, reading illustration books, understanding anatomy, etc.

First off, I suggest that you listen mainly to people who can give you direct, simple, uncomplicated advice, for the sake of keeping a clear idea of what you're working on.

Personally, I can identify two main issues here:

1. Weak overall framework for thinking about art structure. As demonstrated by comments like 'As for shading, after-effects have always been a problem for me.' -- excuse me if I'm misinterpreting that. Shading is not an 'after effect', it is the very next most important thing to lines in terms of structuring a picture; a majority of the '3dness' of a drawn object comes from value structure ('value' is the formal art term for degree of darkness). Most artists who teach acknowledge the importance of this as coming before color (to the point of 'you can make a good picture without color, but you can't make a good picture without value')

2. Specifically, lack of understanding/ experience with value.

To address #1, I would recommend buying Vilppu's Drawing Manual. It's really good at getting the student (in my case, me;) to build up a structured understanding of art, going from the most essential elements of art to the most subtle finishing elements. If that's not something you're willing to look at, I'd suggest starting with
moatdd's basics of digital drawing+painting playlist, practicing the exercises shown there, and after that going on to Arne's painting tutorial , which covers things like how light falls on a surface, important light effects like radiosity, and other painting topics.

To address #2, I suggest two measures, to be taken together:

a) do value studies. Of photos, mainly (studying the X structure of an artwork you like is prone to 'copying the mistakes' problems until you have a good working understanding of X). Simply attempting to break down a picture into different brightnesses, and painting these as grey values in your study. Personally, I find using a heavy time constraint (eg 1m/study) is useful as it seems to push me to quickly find the correct simplification of the overall structure, and stops me from over-analyzing.

b) Use a 3d program that has real-time lighting (eg. I like Blender). Position some primitives (cone, cylinder, sphere, cube) in the view, and a single light source. Move around the single light, or the objects, observe how they interact and what structure of 'faces' is used by each object (as this face structure has a direct relation to how light will appear on the object.

Now finally, in regards to this:

1) So mix using lines and shading rather than one or the other? As well as... what is Anti Aliasing.

Your pictures do actually have anti-aliasing (ie. the edges of lines transition smoothly to the color they are drawn over). I suspect that what they don't have is oversampling (a typical technique used by digital artists, that simply involves drawing the picture at a higher resolution and then shrinking it before posting. Done in order to a: improve smoothness and b: disguise small mistakes). The line quality is also very 'vector-y', like you had used the path tool and Stroke Path to generate it, rather than a brush tool with a slightly soft brush.

one thing that really sticks out for me is how the thickness variation in lineart is very minimal or nonexistent. it gives it cheap and boring look. for example you can try to 'sharpen' the ends of the strokes with eraser tool if you dont have a tablet with pressure, it instantly brings some variation to the lineart.

Sorry I took so long to get back.

but yeah, I always thought the steps were; Sketch, Clean Lines, Color, Shading and Highlighting. That kinda tells me I've got a bit to learn on this.

As for the sources, I don't really have the money for a book right now, but I'll look into the videos. They might even help me expand into these other art styles, mentioned earlier.

I'll need to look up what value studies are, but I'll try that too. (If you explained in your post, I must have missed it.) Aside from that, I tried downloading Blender a while back, to make models for game mods, but couldn't figure it out. Been a while now, though, so I might go back and find it easier.

… and for the last part of savageorange's post... yeah, I use the path and stroke tool. I do that cause my hands are already shaky, but when trying to draw lines with a mouse, it gets even worse.
With the Deathclaw Pic;
This is the physical sketch: http://i.imgur.com/d6qi6Y4.png
So I cleaned the Lines: http://i.imgur.com/d0qtPXW.png
And while trying to multitask looking everything up and downloading Blender, I tried to start to redraw the original pic using a brush at 75% opacity and the brush just before a solid circle: http://i.imgur.com/FGGC237.png

To me, just starting on the leg, the lines just look so jagged. I've tried using the smooth lines setting for the brush, but it only helps a little. I'm almost thinking that buying the pressure sensitive tablet would be my best bet... but yeah, that's probably going to be more expensive than the book.

… I guess there's no questions for this post... I'm kinda just giving feedback on what I got from this.

Edit; did some looking, and it looks like the Huion H610 is both cheap and well rated. It's also the only tablet I've seen that i could afford, if I make some sacrifices and stretch my wallet.
Does anyone know of a better tablet?

Lamar said:
Sorry I took so long to get back.

but yeah, I always thought the steps were; Sketch, Clean Lines, Color, Shading and Highlighting. That kinda tells me I've got a bit to learn on this.

Not to say you can't make good pictures in that order. Some artists, particularly those who are more 'painty' rather than going for the typical digital-art extremely clean look, combine color and shading into one step. My comments about the priority of value are in terms of learning: If you know more about color than you do about value, that's worse for your picture quality than the reverse. Value is really 90% of the 'punch' of a picture. Carrot's work is a good example, he has both greyscale and color works and they a) read equally well, b) have strong value structure.

I'll need to look up what value studies are, but I'll try that too. (If you explained in your post, I must have missed it.)

hmm, I think I did: "Simply attempting to break down a picture into different brightnesses, and painting/drawing these as grey values in your study". So for example I have a file here that is full of just 1min copies of photos, using 4 different grey tones (which is IMO the minimum). Whenever the result 'reads' similarly to the original photo (or more strongly, preferably), it's a good result IMO.

I've done some digital value studies with Grafx2 and MyPaint, but a sketchpad and 2B pencil is way more flexible and most of my value studies were done like that. (The technique of blending the tones with your finger is really handy here)

Aside from that, I tried downloading Blender a while back, to make models for game mods, but couldn't figure it out. Been a while now, though, so I might go back and find it easier.

It's commonly criticised as being hard to understand. That's why I didn't just outright say 'Use blender'. However, the level of understanding needed to add a few primitives to the scene, and move them around, is fairly low.

Short summary:

ADDING OBJECTS: Press Space, type 'add ' followed by 'cube','ico sphere','uv sphere','cylinder', or 'cone'. Paying attention to this process allows you to reduce it (eg. I usually just type [Space] 'cub' to add a cube)

ADJUSTING VIEW: 7, 9, 1, 3 on numpad change to different views (front, side, etc). 5 on numpad toggles between perspective and orthographic view. 0 on numpad shows camera view. Arrows on numpad rotate the view.
Middlebutton-dragging rotates the view.
Shift+Middlebutton-dragging pans the view.
Ctrl+Middlebutton zooms the view (as does numpad - and +)

SELECTING OBJECTS: Right-click. If you Right-Drag, that is equivalent to both selecting the object and immediately initiating a Move operation (see below)
Do not left click (this is nothing terrible, but it sets the location of the 3d cursor rather than selecting an object.
At a very basic level, all that you need to know about the 3d cursor is that any new object you add will initially be placed at the 3d cursor's location.)

MOVING, SCALING, ROTATING: Press 'g' ('Grab') to move the selected object, 's' to scale it, 'r' to rotate it. During a move/scale/rotate, press 'x'/'y'/'z' to scale/rotate/move on a particular axis, (The camera is an object too BTW, in case that isn't clear). As mentioned before, you can also Rightbutton-drag to move an object.

DISPLAY MODE: There is a bar under the view, with a button saying 'Object Mode'. Immediately to the right of that, there is a button that has some kind of sphere depicted. To get real-time-lighting (only active in some display modes), click on this and select Texture or Material (the difference between these is not particularly important at novice level). At some points you might want to switch to Solid or Wireframe modes -- these are often more practical when editing, as they are drawn in a way such that the shapes of things are never disguised by insufficient or excessive light.

RENDERING:
F12 to render.
In the Scene Pane (-- for me, this is the leftmost tab of a section that has an icon that seems to contain a button at the bottom. This section is on the middle right of the screen for me --), there is the Render button, which is equivalent. There are also a bunch of settings. For the purposes I suggested, most likely the 'render size percentage' slider is the only thing that you might want to mess with.
You don't actually need to render for this particular use IMO, but it's nice to have for more quality / pure picture (no grid/axis lines etc)

this image hopefully shows what I'm talking about by 'render size percentage'

… and for the last part of savageorange's post... yeah, I use the path and stroke tool. I do that cause my hands are already shaky, but when trying to draw lines with a mouse, it gets even worse.

Okay. When somebody talks about digital art, I generally assume they're using a tablet, because doing digital art with a mouse is a nightmare (worlds apart from doing it with a tablet).
Pixel art is really the only form of digital art that mouse is practical for. For other types, well, I remember someone describing it as 'like drawing with a bar of soap'. Tablet is more like drawing with a ballpoint pen IME. Really lets you avoid that stiffness (which IME is somewhat unavoidable when using mouse).

With the Deathclaw Pic;
This is the physical sketch: http://i.imgur.com/d6qi6Y4.png
So I cleaned the Lines: http://i.imgur.com/d0qtPXW.png

And while trying to multitask looking everything up and downloading Blender, I tried to start to redraw the original pic using a brush at 75% opacity and the brush just before a solid circle: http://i.imgur.com/FGGC237.png

To me, just starting on the leg, the lines just look so jagged.

Yeah, I agree.
There are various tricks that you can try here (GIMP: Fade Stroke, MyPaint: Speed -> size mapping, Inkscape: Powerstroke), but none of them are particularly good. It just comes down to mouse being bad for this stuff.

I've tried using the smooth lines setting for the brush

Do you mean 'Smooth stroke'? if so, the value of 'weight' is important for the result. I currently have Quality set to 16 and Weight to 251.

It can have an extremely strong effect if you want (try weight=1000 or more) but getting the lines to meet up nicely can become quite hard (sort of like ice-skating TBH; I know that's a weird simile).

, but it only helps a little. I'm almost thinking that buying the pressure sensitive tablet would be my best bet... but yeah, that's probably going to be more expensive than the book.

… I guess there's no questions for this post... I'm kinda just giving feedback on what I got from this.

Good to hear you got something from it, I'm always nervous when I post something that could be considered a short essay.

Edit; did some looking, and it looks like the Huion H610 is both cheap and well rated. It's also the only tablet I've seen that i could afford, if I make some sacrifices and stretch my wallet.
Does anyone know of a better tablet?

I haven't tried it personally (I use a Monoprice 12", which was $80 AUD), but IIRC GameManiac recommends it.

EDIT:
Before you buy you should check out compatibility. Ideally try to find exactly someone using GIMP with Huion H610 on Windows (I'm assuming you're using Windows here..). This is a potential issue because there are several 'parts' to the tablet interaction (Drivers talk to the system, which provides events to the drawing application). Using the tablet in mouse emulation mode (no pressure, screen resolution) is always possible, but getting the full functionality may require a little research.

Hope that's not too overwhelming, I tried to break it into chunks ;)

savageorange;
Nah,dude, you and everybody else have been unbelievably helpful. Hell, after hearing I'll want to try Blender again, I started getting anxious about fumbling with it. Then you went an posted lots of instructions.

Hell, this whole process/conversation has helped me tremendously. I've not gotten back to working on the picture yet (Anxiety about going back to the pre-finals weeks at engineering has left me gaming hardcore), but just getting the criticism, a direction to improve and the amount of aid you guys have shown... well, it's really helped me to relax. Not getting anywhere with my art was, like I said before, really getting to me.

But, while I'll always need help, I think I've got enough to at least to get started now. So I'll start trying to work on what everyone's given me and give this topic a rest for a while.

Still, you guys don't know how much you've helped me out and I really appreciate it.

Ok, so after a bit of finagling, I was able to get a tablet. Between classes and finals prep, I've been attempting to get it set up. In the end, I ended up dumping GIMP in favor of Photoshop. It took a bit to get it to work, but it works now.

I went and spent a night working on re-drawing the Deathclaw Pic with the tablet; http://i.imgur.com/Yuk98Yt.png

The lines still look a bit iffy, partly cause I can't draw a straight line to save my life (and as cold as it is in my room, I'm probably loosing dexterity in my hands). I tried to fix that a bit with the whole, "work with large canvas (3000 px) and size it down before posting (1200 px)."

I also found I had the bad habit of hitting the size brush down button instead of the drag view button. Didn't notice it till almost done for the night, so I kinda just fixed the brush size for the part I was drawing and hoped it wouldn't be noticeable... might need to go back and darken those lines a bit.

I've also been leaving a bunch of lines out, planning to use shading to fill that in. I haven't had time to do blender yet, but it was next on my list after making sure I could even use the tablet.

Edit; BTW, I also read somewhere that the minimum size of lines should be about 3px, so I up-sized that from 1200px to 3000px and ended up with 7.5, which I rounded to 8. It seems to have worked, at least for the part where it's actually 8px.

+ + + +
In case anyone's left to read this, I guess I'm asking if it at least looks better than before.

Lamar said:

get lazy nezumi or paint tool sai. they have stabilizers which allows you to draw smooth lines even if you had the shakiest hand in the world. or alternatively draw every single day one A4 full of straight lines, curvy lines and circles until you have your hand completely under your control. but photoshop alone is not very good for drawing clean lines, photoshop is better for digital painting.

Mutisija said:
get lazy nezumi or paint tool sai. they have stabilizers which allows you to draw smooth lines even if you had the shakiest hand in the world.

So does GIMP, Krita, Mypaint..

But if you have bad hand coordination, that just means that you get a bunch of smooth lines that do not match up well at all.

So IMO both smoothing and drafting practice are necessary to get a good result.

Lamar said:
Ok, so after a bit of finagling, I was able to get a tablet. Between classes and finals prep, I've been attempting to get it set up. In the end, I ended up dumping GIMP in favor of Photoshop. It took a bit to get it to work, but it works now.

I went and spent a night working on re-drawing the Deathclaw Pic with the tablet; http://i.imgur.com/Yuk98Yt.png

Looks a bit more relaxed. Still need work on gesture. Can I backtrack a bit process-wise and ask if you do gesture drawings for your stuff?

You know, being self taught is good n' all, but sometimes it leads you to knowing a squatting guy by the name of diddly. So yeah, no clue what you mean by gesture or drafting practice (If that isn't what the comment above your's just described).
I should probably look into some kinda free art classes at the near by college, if there is such a thing... The classes, not the college that is.

Well, Loomis wrote a book about figure drawing too -- "figure drawing for all it's worth", and like I said, those are freely+legally available as PDFs online -- see my earlier link.

I personally prefer the way Vilppu teaches it, but Loomis gives a decent idea too.
I've uploaded this excerpt -- pages 38-41 of Loomis' figure drawing book, which go into gesture.

Loomis' emphasis on relating figures correctly to the horizon is also a very valuable insight for drawing solid, believable figures. Pages 34-37, 45 illustrate some of the thinking needed.

In context of your latest image, I ask about gesture because you seem to be focused on nailing the proportions, at the cost of a sense of overall motion (the whole body seeming to be 'doing one thing'). This is sort of like.. If you don't have a gesture you like, then you don't have a starting 'framework' on which to 'hang' the features of the figure, and you tend to be constrained to overly literal copying (rather than as Vilppu emphasizes, -analyzing- the figure and adapting its design to suit your intended purpose).
The result tends to be an image that is technically accurate but lacking in 'soul'.

As for drafting practice, I was referring to the exercise Mutisija described:

or alternatively draw every single day one A4 full of straight lines, curvy lines and circles until you have your hand completely under your control

There are various ways to do drafting (draughting) practice. The channel I linked before, moatddtutorials, shows some.
That same person also made this , which condenses pretty well several types of drafting exercise and explains why you would want to do them.

I'm also self-taught btw.

Savageorange: Yeah... well... You used books, so you're a cheater!

But seriously;
To be honest, I'm getting a lot from these links, but it also seems they would be best used on a fresh pic. I'm almost thinking, especially with a final Tuesday, that I should just focus on improving on what I've got to work with so far.

I mean, I've drawn this damned thing in three programs now, attempting to get it right (Not angry yet, don't like repeating myself with things like work, but I've stuck it out in hopes of improving).

As for the gesture pages, I'm going to make use of those. I already knew about the "Where is the weight carried," but I seemed to only apply it to sketches and part time to full drawings (As well as robotics conceptual design sketches and ideas). Been trying to get better at it, but must have hit a stump or something. It looks like this book you mentioned will help with that (among other things, like motion, which I had an idea of but didn't know how to pull off).

I'm almost thinking now that I'll need to actually plan the next few pics ahead of time. Cause I was kinda getting into the idea of making a "painting" for the next one. It'll still involve these concepts, but for some reason the idea of lined art impresses me the with the idea of using more of the concepts I want to aim for right now.

Also, before I forget (been a long night), I downloaded Paint Tool Sai for a try. I don't know if it's the program, if I'm getting more comfortable with the tablet or something else; but I think my picture's getting better... at least as far as lines go;
http://i.imgur.com/uOZAxwu.png
(Edit: at quick glance, I realized how similar the this looks to the last. It's cleaner, I guess, but I don't know if it's all that noticeable.)

I sure as hell know I'm getting faster at this... Like, WAY faster. Like, with studying for the final, I've no time and yet I still churned out in around an hour or two what would normally take me a full day.

Lamar said:
I'm getting a lot from these links, but it also seems they would be best used on a fresh pic. I'm almost thinking, especially with a final Tuesday, that I should just focus on improving on what I've got to work with so far.

Yes.
It's very easy to become fixated/stuck. The more time involved, the more likely IME.

I mean, I've drawn this damned thing in three programs now, attempting to get it right (Not angry yet, don't like repeating myself with things like work, but I've stuck it out in hopes of improving).

My understanding on this is that repetition is extremely valuable, and if you are taking too long on each iteration, you lose out on the habituation effect caused by repetition.
One way to circumvent that is to impose explicit time limits and ensure that your requirements are simple enough that it's possible to achieve them. http://www.posemaniacs.com/thirtysecond gives an example of that.

As for the gesture pages, I'm going to make use of those. I already knew about the "Where is the weight carried," but I seemed to only apply it to sketches and part time to full drawings (As well as robotics conceptual design sketches and ideas). Been trying to get better at it, but must have hit a stump or something. It looks like this book you mentioned will help with that (among other things, like motion, which I had an idea of but didn't know how to pull off).

Your uniform line width probably contributed to that.
Personally I recommend a large 'inky' preset -- one that strongly varies dab size according to pressure -- to actively enforce the idea that details don't matter at all at this point, it's entirely about feel. Exaggeration is even desirable, as you need to plan for some of that 'extremeness' to be lost in the process of developing the picture.

Here's an example of what I mean. It uses an elliptical brush that rotates to match the drawing direction (not sure if this is achievable in Sai, I know it is in GIMP, PS, Krita, MyPaint). Good for any organic object.

I'm almost thinking now that I'll need to actually plan the next few pics ahead of time.

I hope you do. Thumbnailing, gestures and other prep work save loads of stupid fiddling and failed images later.

Also, before I forget (been a long night), I downloaded Paint Tool Sai for a try. I don't know if it's the program, if I'm getting more comfortable with the tablet or something else; but I think my picture's getting better... at least as far as lines go;
http://i.imgur.com/uOZAxwu.png

Yeah, I agree. Your lines are flowing a bit better now. Little issue at the top of the head imo, where the clustering of black draws more attention than you might want.

I sure as hell know I'm getting faster at this... Like, WAY faster. Like, with studying for the final, I've no time and yet I still churned out in around an hour or two what would normally take me a full day.

That's a very good sign. At the very least I think you are getting used to the tablet (which can be a bit weird tbh -- like a biro with a greased tip. easy to 'skate around' beyond your intended location until you get enough practice)