technically there mostly facing right (there own right)
it just means you're most likely right handed

also i do like him allot (equally large soft spots for armor as i have for dragons)
but the legs aren't so boring as slightly odd towards the feet
although i have seen a large number of games
and anime make the exact same foot type....or lack there of?...
so im guessing its a type of style nowa days rather then a problem

glad you're still making pics
(also like the reverse grip)

If you'd like a redline for this I could probably give it a go, but like I said, you can't get around studying figure drawing. The good news is that once you get the method down it's not as hard as it looks like it's going to be: the trick is nobody learns to draw the entire figure at once. You start with this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man

He's the ratios of the figure, the scale of body parts in relation to one another. Once you know the ideal ratios you'll have the groundwork for drawing figures since any other figure's proportions can be derived from Vitruvius' ideals. From there you get the triangular body proportions:

http://www.realcolorwheel.com/human.htm (ignore after the point the author starts blithering about the Vitruvian Man)

And then you have the basis of an ideal figure you can pose. From there you work on the skeleton and muscles from anatomy books (I have "Human Anatomy for Artists" by Andras Szunyoghy and Dr. Gyorgy Feher, which is really useful) and learn how the body changes shape as it moves and where its limits are.

Do not be afraid of the fact that to start with your figures will look like ass. That's normal. For a lot of artists, myself included, your initial work always looks like ass and I can tell you right now every image in my gallery is something I've considered throwing out a dozen times.

(Also, don't try to use one of those wooden pose figures for anything but roughing out poses and checking shading, it will teach you some very badly wrong ideas about where the joints are)

Thank you!

Ok, what I've done is not so much a redline as a redraw with the same rough figure to show you a little about the two issues you mentioned in the journal post, depth and weight. It's a little crude and I'd be lying if I said I was incredibly happy with the breastplate (I usually draw women), but I hope it's useful.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1m3plpiae.....line2.png?dl=0

I kept the too-short right arm and the same approximate armour design rather than referencing it because we're mainly working on other things, and those circles don't indicate where the shoulders are; shoulders are ridiculously complicated things that don't work anything like how they feel they work and will plague you for a long time. (In general the joints can be weird; for example, the wrist can't actually rotate, it's fixed to the front of one of the bones of your forearm and the entire bone rotates over the other to turn it D: )

The first thing I notice: if that figure looked straight when you were drawing it, you may have the same issue I have; I think it's visual preference or something and the brain compensates for a preference for the right eye by making things smaller on that side, which means things you draw lean to the right. You can counter this by turning the page over and holding it up to the light to see what angle it's actually at, or drawing faint true vertical and horizontal guidelines with a protractor. The permanent solution I found was digital art; I draw sitting on a sofa about five feet from my monitor, which seems to even my eyes out.

Depth is all about perspective, which is also not as hard as it seems it's going to be. If you visualise the torso as just a boxy shape (like the one in the top right), you just make the lines of the figure conform to the shape of that box. With the figure turned to the side, the front line of the torso also moves to the side, so the amount of each side you see becomes uneven. This means the belt follows the side of the torso and the buckle is shifted over.

With things like the shoulder guards and the panels over the thighs, you have to lift them up off the figure to suggest they have thickness; you can see this best with the breastplate, where the line of the figure's chest is next to it, and the shoulder guards being lifted up above where the shoulders are.

(If you don't mind tracking down an old book, the perspective exercises at the start of How to Draw What You See by Rudy de Reyna are ridiculously useful; basically, if you can draw a box in perspective, and you can draw something inside a box, you can draw anything in perspective)

Adding weight to a figure is about creating a path through the joints to carry that weight to the ground. Remember your basic Newtonian physics; to hold something up you have to push up against it with the same force that's pulling down on you. The result is a chain of actions; the elbow lifts the forearm, the shoulder lifts the elbow, the torso carries that weight to the hips which balance it on one or other leg, and the legs tense to create the pushing force against the ground. Really the best way to get a feel for it is to get something heavy and move around with it, feeling the way your body reacts to keep you balanced and how the weight pulls on you.

Watch the way Trojan carries its weight as it walks here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Mcjh4dJ4eQ

You'll notice the entire body of the thing moves as it shifts weight between its legs, and that its feet droop at the front as they're lifted up because they're dead weight; the legs are doing the work. As it drops its leg to the ground it forces the two segments of the foot apart from its own mass and leans into the leg so it can push off that foot to lift one of its other legs.

(The way Drache lifts back up after slamming down on the ground here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxcouDR6Od4 is good too, you can see the way it's pushing down on its feet with its legs to lift its heavy body. Using PS1 games here because the style is simple and you can see what's going on)

I also made his cape flow a little more; unless there's some kind of framework under it, a piece of cloth will be pulled down by its own weight and billow at the bottom (since the bottom carries no weight). Cloth folds are something I'm working on getting the hang of at the moment myself so please don't ask me to explain those :)

Don't be afraid to reference other people's work; find an image like what you're trying to draw that you are happy with, and look at what they've done differently, and why doing it that way works and yours doesn't.

Oh, wow! You really went out of your way to help me out, here! I'm touched. The redline looks great- there's some sort of magic about rough drawings (but not bad ones like mine, haar).

About the arm being too short- that was also a problem of 'depth'. I wanted it to be pointed 'forward' relative to the character and 'toward' the viewer. The hand is in a strange position for that, I guess- along with the rest of the arm in general. And that thing you didn't have a clue about- that was supposed to be some sort of sheath for the blade, concealed behind the cape. I suppose I didn't plan it out well, just sort of had an idea and rolled with it.. extremely quickly, ignoring speed-bumps.

I should definitely use more digital tools, 100% agree. Is there a particular program you'd recommend? I've tried Sai, but barely scratched the surface.

Good points about weight and taking elements from real physics..

Ah, R-Type and Einhänder, fun games. How strange that I'll play with them again, for the purpose of drawing instead. Great examples, thank you.

Ah, foreshortening, I get it. That's a little tricky to do since you have to draw the thickness of the arm changing as it moves away from the viewer, and you have to draw the forearm overlapping the upper arm. And I actually thought that was what it was, I just wasn't certain and didn't think it was important enough to hold off on doing the redline to ask you about it. :)

I use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro, which is a much simpler drawing program focusing on just having you draw naturally with some extra tools rather than doing everything under the sun like Photoshop or Sai; it doesn't even have selectable line thickness for the pencil tool. the slider selects what kind of pencil it is. (I mostly sketch in 6B and move to 2B for fine detail) The main tool is the space bar which is the zoom / pan / rotate tool (you have to turn on rotation in the options). I draw with an Intuous Pro M, which is expensive, but awesome, and I have one of those logitech gaming keypads with all my shortcut keys on it so I don't need to keep leaning over to the keyboard.