Anyways, I ordered some proper drawing materials and a drawing board that has a perfectly parallel ruler on it, so I can make perfect horizontals. So now I won't be messing up my perspective drafts and will actually go faster now. I'll make a post about them when I get them, and it will be full speed ahead in the battle of perspective.
Finally figured out how to make the gouache even out smoothly across the paper, although it's not that bright. Had too put some paint down near the shadow edges then move the watercolor brush in circles to smooth it out. Although it's not that bright, but layering paint made it look uneven, so I'll see if I can make that better.
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| Acryllic Designer Gouache (liquitex brand) w/ waterbrush pen on tanned sketchbook paper, inked with pigment liner and copic greyscale markers. |
The war on perspective is getting difficult, so I decided that I will now flex pick 2-4 videos a day depending on how much time I have already spent on the first two videos. The diagram in the second photo took almost an hour to setup, you can't see a lot of the soft lines with this camera shot but it took a lot of erasing, measuring, guessing, etc. And that was all covered in 1 video, not even finished with it yet...
Also, I moved on to week 5 of the VisCom class, and that's what the first photo is. I have to do 3 pages of organic forms and 3 pages of plants/leaves for homework by next week. The top right I did well on the edges, but not as well on reflected light in the shadows like the bottom right blob, gonna work on those in the next page.
More boring perspective, who could've guessed. Although I will say, I'm starting to see how ellipses can be useful in rendering objects in "perfect" 3D space. I can see it being used on a handheld telescope you see those sailors and pirates use in movies. Or looking down on a spear causing intense 3 point perspective, stuff along those lines. Don't see much use though in figure drawing or portraiture... but for compositions and structure building it seems pretty useful. I don't want to draw any more circles though, send help.
This is to show some progress on developing muscle memory for milipen sketching. I do a sheet every day and this is the progress, the top photo is today and bottom photo was 3 days ago, takes about 30 minutes to do a sheet. Every day I come back to this exercise it feels like my arm is doing the work and I'm just watching it do it's thing.
I ended up working on it a bit more, it's a miracle. Better start working on her face though shes starting to give alien vibes. I spend roughly an hour a day on this file so it's gonna take a week or two to finish this.
Back to the drawing grind it is, VisCom has been fun lately but perspective is still as dry as sand. Got a lot of drawing done today, around 6-7 hours. Even went back and fixed up a face drawing I made that was really terrible. I made it recently too but I guess I was just having a bad art day or just stupid tired, or both (not unlikely).
The first image are some VisCom exercises from the book "Rapid Viz". It's a fairly old book, published around the 1990's, but was recommended by Peter Han to an audience of a livestream. I wasn't a part of it though, I was catching the recorded version on youtube. Anyways, I checked the book out online and a free preview had a couple of the exercises on it, and that's what the first photo of the post is about. Something crazy about the book though, just as I was about to skip an exercise from the book, the author literally put a message in at the end of the exercise saying "If you are tempted to skip this exercise, don't!"
If an author can catch me thinking about skipping an exercise right when I'm thinking about it, you bet your ass I'm going to do it.
And I'm glad I did, it was the hardest exercise yet, even though he said it was just for fun. Which in turn really made myself think, "Why am I making the fun things difficult?" Which verbalized a lot with some of my recent struggles with art. This book made me challenge my thinking so much into the first chapter that I'm really hyped about reading the rest of it, so I'm going to try and find a copy around the internet tomorrow. There's no kindle version, but I prefer reading books from paper anyways.
Below is a sticky note with my new studying schedule, to prevent this post from taking an hour to read I'll explain why I revised it tomorrow.
A quick character sketch which may or may not turn into a character from Elden Ring, even though it looks like my sameface syndrome.
Today was a good day for me, woke up rested, had a good workout, couldn't ask for more. But everything really came together when I landed that killing blow on Melania. It took around 70 tries in 2 days to kill her, but it was well worth the effort, it was a euphoric feeling. She was definitely the hardest boss in the game.
As of this post, this blog now has a placeholder ban.
I will no longer be able to make a post just to fill in later. Placeholders already sound dumb to do in sketch-a-day blog, and I wholeheartedly agree, but the main reason I was doing it was because most of the time I was too lazy to get the picture uploaded to the blog. I do want to make something clear though, whenever I made a placeholder post I, 90% of the time, always had something made for that day already. So it wasn't a "I'll do the art later" post, it was a "I'm too lazy to post the art" post. Not that it makes it any better, but just thought I'd make that clear.
Glad that's dealt with. The piling guilt of the placeholders were starting to get to me, anyways, next up is monthly goals.
As of this post, every month is required to have a "art goal" by the end of the first week and every week must have at least one post related to this art goal.
I am criminally bad at staying to my art goals, this isn't breaking news to anyone, but we're going to see a change in that hopefully. I said in a previous post around the end of February that I would focus on working on clean line-art drawing with hair being a subject of focus. It is more than halfway into March and there is not one post with any of that. I can't change the past but mauling over my laziness won't do anything better, just going to forgive myself and move on.
And that's it, those are the changes. Only two changes but they will definitely have a noticeable impact on the quality of the blog even at a glance.
Also, this gesture drawing was based on a video lecture by Michael Mattesi's FORCE class, which is a course I've been studying for the past two days.
I know, I know, I've been mia. I've got a lot of explaining to do so here goes. I'll split this into two halves, the first being excuses and the second being redemption for my next post tomorrow.
When I missed my first day (March 10th) out of the total nine missed my sleep schedule was beyond ruined. I don't remember what exactly caused it, but I have a good feeling it was something related to LoL (gross) or Elden Ring (don't regret it tbh). But recently I have stopped playing League and I will be taking a break from it for a good while. I'm still playing Elden Ring but I have slowed down a lot on it as I'm nearing the end of the game and PvP has become stale with these cringe bleed builds and bleed weapon arts.
Anyways, that's why my sleep schedule was messed up. It was so bad I was waking up at 3AM and falling asleep at 5 or 6 PM regularly. Half the time I wouldn't even remember how I fell asleep, didn't get under the covers, or even brush my teeth, just passed out on the bed. You could say I was kinda down bad, and also this led to me passing out before I could even think about posting on the blog. Waking up and seeing that I missed a day also left me feeling pretty guilty, so at this point, I was in fact, down bad.
So that's why I was mia... and because of all this I've been thinking about how to redeem myself for the missed days, because makeups alone won't cover it, but I have a few ideas in mind, and I think tomorrow will be a real turning point for the blog.
Also, this is a 30 minute head sketch from imagination. Kinda inspired from Blade Mistress Morgana, but not referenced at all.
I've been doing a ton of modeling and rigging in Blender recently but haven't really been drawing much. I average about 35 hours a ...
