Re-learning to draw week… 4… ish.

So I missed two weeks. Almost three. Around the beginning of September I woke up one day feeling pressure in my chest, like I had to burp… except I couldn’t get it out. I spent a week with a ginger stomach and that constant feeling of needing to burp, but any attempts to clear my chest either stalling or threatening to trigger my gag reflex. I had no idea what was going on and was all around miserable and tired all the time.

Finally, with the help of a friend, a fellow writer in the skinsuit/tg community who happens to have some medical expertise helped me identify that I was likely suffering from acid reflux. In retrospect it sounds like an embarassingly mundane affliction to have caused me so much trouble, but I’ve never had experienced it before, and I wasn’t feeling any heartburn which is the primary symptom I associated with acid reflux.

Anyway, once I had an idea of what it was and how to treat it, my anxiety, which had eagerly made everything worse, settled down and along with some antacids and a course of Prilosec finally kicking in, I’ve mostly managed to get things under control now. But I lost about half a month of creative time, thanks to this stupid episode. Hopefully after the Prilosec finishes, the acid doesn’t come back and I can get back to normal, otherwise I’ll need to see a medical professional for a proper consultation/examine, and I still haven’t found a new primary care physician since moving across the state yet. =x

More importantly, I’m finally feeling a bit better the last few days and have gotten some writing done as well as attempting to put pen to my tablet again, though the results have been… mixed.

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I’ve mostly been doodling/sketching which isn’t that different than before, but I’ve been unsatisfied with even my “sketch” style up till this point, trying to emulate other artists who sketch in different ways. Ultimately though I think I’ve found something that at least “feels” better than some of these other attempts.

I usually don’t mind, but don’t go spreading this one around this time, please.

Incidentally, it’s a return to the pencil tool. As a traditional artist for decades, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising to find the tool designed to emulate a pencil the most comfortable for sketching, but here we are.

I almost didn’t get around to drawing a benchmark sketch today but I did it. How does it compare to the last? Hard to say for a number of reasons, but for having taken a semi-involuntary two week hiatus from drawing, I’ll take it.

Re-learning to Draw week 3

I did a decent amount of drawing this week, but no focused studies.

Sensing a theme? I’ve been inspired by “mechabare” recently, or “robot girls being piloted.” This month’s $5 story even featured the concept realized contextually. In terms of drawing quality, I feel like I may have improved a little with these works, though I’m still far from where I want to be. Still, it felt good to finish some sketches and actually feel mostly good about them, at least until I go back to re-scrutinize.

So anyway, since I didn’t do any focused studies, this is this week’s benchmark sketch.

I attempted to give her core a bit of a twist and also ended up making her hips thiccer than before (probably because my warmup sketch was a thicc character). Feet turned out… better than expected, though still in need of dedicated study, and while the general curves are looking decent, wrists and ankles will need some attention. Cassera’s face looks alright at first, but a bit off the longer I look at her. That darned far eye is still tripping me up – I’ve seen a number of guides say to “remember/consider the curvature of the eye and the contours of the face” but never give any real good way of actually applying that. I think I have some other aids for that specifically though I can look into eventually. One thing I tried to keep in mind as well this week that I think I’m decently pleased with was keeping the pose balanced and not… leaning awkwardly. I’m not 100% sure why some of my poses end up off balance (see Amida up at the top of this post) but I think I did at least a better job this time. I still had some difficulty on the torso and core in during the warm up sketch but managed to find the lines I wanted a bit better when came time to do this. I need to save a pallet swatch for her hair color.

On the focused study to do list, I think I’ve re-prioritized hair to the top of the list. I’m not sure how much of it is the coloring/texturing, but the hair I draw feels a bit flat and I have a hard time diversifying hair styles in ways that still feel natural, not to mention, I feel like my overall character design sensibilities (especially in the head area) lean too heavily on specific hairstyle quirks.

But with Crystal Chronicles remaster newly released I can’t say for certain if I’ll get to another focused study before next week.

Re-learning to Draw week 2

I was focused on writing this past week, so I didn’t spend as much time practicing art. In what time I did spend on it, I had the realization that there was one thing I could do that would help me practice better moving forward. I started designing an OC.

Meet… um… “Cassera” ver. 0.2. Tentative name along with a tentative design, but gotta start somewhere. At the moment, the focus was on the hair and face, with a little bit of thought for her figure. I’m still vacillating on whether I want a more milfy/oneesan like design or something more youthful. The former is more to my tastes, but I think the latter may be a bit more versatile. Haven’t even given any thought to clothes yet.

I’ve contemplated an avatar/mascot for a while now but never sit down and actually started development so this was a good time for the other benefits an OC affords. Having a ‘default’ character of sorts should help me with iterative practice – when I want to practice drawing heads, or anatomy or poses, having to decide on a character design for the practice model contributes to decision paralysis and makes it harder to resolve to actually practice. My hope is that with an established OC, I can skip some of that decision making and get on with the drawing. Additionally having a consistent character design will help me practice for consistency as well.

Aside from that I took a quick look at a foot reference to try refining her feet for today’s pic, but it was hardly a substitute for a proper foot study. I don’t think I’ll be able to recreate them consistently till I do that.

Anyway, here’re a few additional designs from ver. 0.1

The hair structure on the left (her right) proved too awkward to keep and I opted to simplify it. I may simplify things further still since I want it to be easier to draw quickly from any angle, and I’m not sure it’s quite there yet.

Re-Learning to Draw week 1

This past week, I tried to focus on heads. Looking through my archive, my heads are far from my weakest area, but I don’t feel confident in all of them and my ability to render them for any case and pose, especially with sharp angles.

Up until very recently, I’d drawn heads as a full circle or oval and filled in from there rather than letting the circle represent the skull’s cranium and then adding the jaw onto that. It was a method that originated from the perhaps now infamous Katy Coope “How to Draw Manga” book that I learned from back in middle school. Trying to visualize and draw the head from the skull circle and then adding the jaw has been a challenge – I’m not comfortable gauging how big to make that initial circle with respect to how big I want the head as a whole to be, and the circle’s bottom creates a distracting curve that I keep wanting to use as a guide for something but it doesn’t actually correlate to anything useful. Working on the head also showed me that my understanding of the neck at both the base of the skull and the collar is also incomplete.

After going over some youtube tutorials though, I worked on, and will continue to work on using and adapting a drawing philosophy for heads that will better help my understanding. To practice, I attempted to work backwards from some reference pictures. From the finished drawing, I attempted to draw back in the guide lines, the original circle of the cranium, and used the existing curves to start building muscle memory for the curves of the cheeks and chin. Once I had the guides derived from others’ finished pieces, I hid the originals and drew my own heads using those guides.

Ended up doing some expression practice along the way and I feel decent about the results. I think there’s at least a little improvement and that’s what I was hoping for.

I don’t have the mastery that I was hoping for yet, but it’s only been a week. I’ll have to keep working on it. A skull specific study may also help, especially at sharper angles.

So that led to today. While my focus was on heads, I ended up looking over other tutorials, such as inking/lineart and brief forays into general anatomy and posing. I’m cheating a little by having inked my benchmark girl for today’s draw, and I made the pose perhaps a little more natural. The question will be if I can reproduce this quality again next week – that’s one of the big ongoing struggles – consistency. I think I did pretty well with her today, but will I do at least as good next week? Just have to keep at it.

Feet continue to be an enigma to me, sadly. Also still high on the urgency/priority list is hips, and core-limb joints (shoulders, pelvis, etc). I think they ended up okay here, but this is a simple pose and angle, and my understanding breaks down distressingly quickly when both of those start to vary.

Re-Learning to Draw

While my childhood as an “honors student” featured a wealth of encouragement, it was also rife with the condemnation of failure. In retrospect, it undermined the whole “you can do whatever you want in life” message when said sentiment was always underscored with the subtext of “… if you’re successful and profitable enough to live off of it.” If the Internet’s “Honors Kid Memes” are any indication, I wasn’t alone in this upbringing and it’s something of a source of regret for me.

I’ve enjoyed art and creative expression from a young age, basically as far back as I can remember. But I also remember, early on, discarding the idea of becoming an artist or writer as a career. My impressionable mind was pretty easily convinced that the lack of job security made pursuing sciences, something else I enjoyed the novelty of, was a more lucrative path. My degree in Material Science is collecting dust however – because I was not true to my passions, even as far into my education as college. I let myself avoid taking the risk of pursuing a passion in favor of a safer bet, and worse, the safe path dead ended.

Anyway, the point being, I wish I had studied art more seriously at… well virtually every part of my education compared to what actually happened. I relegated it as a hobby and cruised by on organically developed skills; skills that I’m finding more and more have been built awkwardly on a shaky foundation. Fortunately, it’s never too late to restart.

I’m not happy with my art. My understanding of anatomy especially is… tenuous at best, and it’s recently led to frustrations in composing that has actually been making drawing un-fun, and that’s defeating the point of creating. My lineart’s sloppy and inconsistent. Colors are amateur, and shading is only partially informed guesswork. The process just doesn’t feel that good anymore, as my awareness of my shortcomings sharpens without my skills improving to fill in the gap.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve failed to really take action to fix anything. So with the start of this blog series, I hope to force that to change. I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a bit overwhelmed when I think about all the things that I need to work on, things made harder by having to potentially unlearn bad foundations. That overwhelmed feeling has thwarted me more often than I’d like to admit in the past. Writing this is, in its own way, an attempt to push past that.

There are a wealth of educational, instructional materials online, both formal and informal. From Andrew Loomis’s references to youtube videos, I’m planning to try using a combination of references and studies for understanding, tracing for muscle memory, and tutorials to pull things together to try to redevelop my abilities. If I don’t feel like that’s helping, I’ll consider trying something like Skillshare or other online courses.

To start, I wanted to try drawing something simple to serve as a basis for comparison.

I didn’t spend a long time on this because I didn’t think it was worth it – my goal is to build a better understanding on an intuitive/instinctive level, so anything I have to labor over to get right is something that needs more development. Also, I’m focusing first on anatomy because it’s the most important foundation as well as what’s currently the greatest source of stress and dissatisfaction that’s standing between me and enjoying drawing right now. Lineart quality, coloring, shading can all come later.

And This is a quick list of things I’ve pinpointed as areas to work on, just based on this sketch alone.

My tentative goal for focused study is to start at the top and work my way down. I’ll try to take whatever I’ve learned in the past week and redraw this girl every Thursday, at minimum (if not more frequently), until I’ve finally produced a version that I can feel satisfied with, anatomically.