100 Days – 68
Tag: drawing
100 Days – 19
A new phase of the battle begins!
Tackling the environmental problem on many fronts!
So I‘m working through Scott Robertson‘s „How to draw“ as my core activity for the next weeks. But whenever I‘m shy of a subject, it‘s something from Corvus.
Here‘s an example page, how the earliest exercises in Robertson‘s book look and what I might draw for many pages to come. That‘s not the most spectacular visuals, so I‘ll not share every single one of those unless I‘ve made some big progress. View precision training like that as daily medicine and while these lines are very wonky…I have actually even done worse in the past. And I‘ll keep training and improving.
Then I had the brilliant idea to check the internet for floor map tutorials (I need those!) and remembered that I have „A Pattern Language“ by Christopher Alexander et al. This book about architectural problem solving caused Will Wright to invent The Sims, so it can‘t be a bad thing to read it. I‘ll be working through both, too.
The core takeaway is, that drawing a lot is good and necessary, but that you constantly have to expand your knowledge how things work, too…otherwise you stagnate. I stagnated quite some time despite drawing „a lot“, just not the right things.
Hopefully I‘ll still produce enough visual fallout for you to enjoy here.
I thought about a smaller task to start out with and decided to make Grimm‘s parcel in the kitchen garden, with a focus on Killie‘s shack. While I thought about a cute little greenhouse first, I tried out and fell in love with the idea of an improvised tent of black cloth. That is more mysterious in my opinion and also a great way to stress how out of place Grimm‘s experiment is. The parcel‘s clearly aren‘t meant for that – plus IF there are greenhouses, nobody likes Grimm enough to give him one.
Research is such an important part of art and writing. It just seems so meek because it‘s often invisible.
Other than that, two landscape studies with recoloring. Never did something like this before and it was a lot of fun. I‘m really really taking this serious. Environments need to become an easily accessible part of my toolkit.
See you tomorrow!
100 Days – 10
More Explorations
Hello, you all! The past time intervall was WILD. I am having massive sleep problems this week, so you‘ll see good and weak art in this post. The art naturally got weaker the longer I am awake.
I started off with making a first exploration into the world of candlelight to add this to my repertoire. These works are part study part free exploration. Magister Grimm, the antagonist of my comic, makes a first appearance on the piece to the left. I really like how evil he looks. Asmund on the right is always a pleasure to draw.
Lines VS shapes reloaded
I had problems with my linework not fitting the rather impressionistic coloration and tried to reduce it. Then I learned that impressionism hardly works on faces, at least if you want them precise. What I went with was this sort of bastardized way. And then of course I had an understandable fit of panic whether all gains from yesterday were undone as I suddenly struggled again with the lines or no lines question.
I should be happy. This whole thing challenged me well and made me think. Yes, outlines can absolutely get into the way of coloration. That is, when you try to mix styles that don‘t like mixing. Impressionist painting has no outlines for a reason. Traditional comic and manga art has outlines for different, practical reasons. Both ways of working have different goals and strengths. Yesterday I noticed how fast I could work if I relied on black lines and threw a quick coloration on them. Today I revelled in the beauty of colors and mood while playing with brushtrokes. But I would probably go crazy or need forever to draw a whole comic in this style, especially with the faces. So in the end, exploring to paint helps not only my drawings but in comicmaking.
And here have some of the better weak pieces. I made several attempts to get a panel done with Corvus and Asmund holding a candle, but each failed, even a wholly different alternative version. This is also when I realized that I probably should go and do something different (or better: find sleep) instead of obsessing over it.
Color shift VS value change
The Asmund to the right is a fascinating first experiment to use color shift instead of value change. I read that for angles up to 40° it may be enough to shift colors to indicate a shifting plane. And only when drawing I understood what this means and what potential that has. Also this Asmund is a goodbye to my classical color schemes from my time when I drew with copics. This…doesn‘t work. Hello to a future with using more references until I have a feeling for coloring skin.
Measurement
What else happened: I got fed up with how Corvus and Asmund look different every day that I‘m drawing them. I‘m actually terrible at measuring angles and proportions, therefore I‘m terrible at likeness and had no clue that this was what laughed in my face every day since forever.
To do
Tomorrow I‘ll tackle this, as well as some tonal value exercises from my notes on Alla Prima over the next days.
Also again, sleep deprivation is really really bad for you. Your body is stressed out by it and you cannot rely on your focus and performance, which might stress you out even more. Be nice to your body, sleep well, eat well, make breaks, exercise. Art is very very important to me, but it may not consume me.
See you tomorrow!
Art report 01
First of all a short update on Sculpt January – it’s coming along nicely. On some days I struggle more, but I’m very happy that I’m pushing through. The stress of having to deliver daily turned out to be beneficial for me. I’m in Blender daily. On some days also watching new tutorials, learning new tricks. My sculpting went from zero, never did that to well…nobody is complaining. But I’m definitely becoming faster with it and also with setting up scenes and building characters for my shots. And this again influences my 2D work (at least I hope so). I will keep an eye on that.
This blog is still very young, so I have not yet quite figured out how exactly go about things, how often to update, how much materials to show. With very few exceptions I’m drawing daily and having small learning experiences…daily. Finding a weekly “best of” to present it clean to you seems hard (at least from today’s point of view), so let’s discover how we fare with (almost) daily drawing updates.
Today I kind of exploded and drew my way through a magazine with clothes in simple figure drawings. Random paper, a random pink ball-pen and tons of figures. I really think I learned a thing or two about leg posture and gaining mileage, but I’ll know for sure when I repeat the exercise and most important do something with it as in make some finished work. Here today’s haul:
Stats: 235 figures on 6 pages in approx. 3 hours
