15

Today should be a start of master studies week so I'll make sure to get some of those in here as well. Had a MA thesis seminar today, it was nice to see friends after a while but it sure doesn't feel like work is starting. Have to get in the mindset and get some stuff done.

I felt like doing this old thing when I saw someone post something similar

I kind of liked the silhouette of it but I didn't work on it more than my minimum amount, I think it's school work that's messing with me. It needs a lot of work to be satisfying still, like the arm and hand should be a little less stiff and some minor edits that might make all the difference... But mainly the arm is throwing me off a little.

But I didn't use reference and it felt kind of good to tackle such an angle on my own. I'll definitely try to make it more complete even if I don't go for a full on painting with it.

I'm just trying to use more interesting angles and poses. I guess I feel more confident the more I draw, like I could actually slowly start applying the things I've admired about other artists.

13-14

Time for another beautiful day

Why am I so tired all the time, always... It's worse right now than ever before. I need to sacrifice my headache-free life for a while and lessen my caffeine intake. I know it's all cool beanz to stay up and drink a lot of coffee because we're all adults and awesome but it's really tiring, and you're much likelier to burn out if you don't take care of yourself. I've been feeling much less motivated lately and I blame that on the caffeine. Well... too much of it, anyway.

And I forgot to post yesterday. I've been on a quest of watching all the X-Men movies and I watched The Last Stand last night and fell asleep right after, damn! Today my lectures started as well.

Also I was playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (close to finishing it, I'm in the DLC part now), and I had that same canvas open on photoshop and I returned to it like this:

Did the devil take over my PC?

Oddly enough it took just one ctrl shift Z to fix it, guess it was one continuous line, maybe had to do with the controller I was using? It was terrifying, though, I thought I had ruined it at first...

I kind of want to paint Gabriel from Lords of Shadow... Probably one of my favorite parts of the game is the big concept art gallery you can unlock for xp points and I'm constantly putting the points there as I advance, really inspiring stuff there, I wish it would name the artists there too to look up later. Also I'm sitting at 40k points anyway since you're better off spamming basic attacks there than buying fancy combos... shame!

I'll still keep sketching and working on it, but I'll post any advancements tomorrow, I don't want to forget to update again!

12

Today was a bad day in terms of practice, I'm having some eye problems and I can't look at the screen for very long before my eyes start tearing up and hurt. I might need a check up, feels bad man...

I only got to work on the Mountain just a little more today. I'm not sure why I gave him glow-y red eyes, I just kind of liked that idea... I'm off to bed to rest my peepers.

11

I decided to take the "x week" out of the whole equation, I thought it would give me more structure for the month but it's much nicer to do a little bit of everything or what I think I need/want.

I wasn't able to finish it yet... At first I found it cool to have Clegane's scary decomposing zombie face out but I decided that maybe I'll save that for a future version. I realized also now looking at it that the sword needs a sheath! Silly me.

Enviroments week (day 10)

I started the morning off at 7 with some coffee, sketching and re-watching One Punch Man on the side. So I was just taking a big gulp during the intro of the first episode and didn't think there was anything wrong with the subtitles until...

Seems like someone had directly "translated" the Japanese into English and I nearly ruined my clothes and tablet as coffee burst out of my mouth. You done got me with that one, got me good...

Some stuff from today

(you may recognize that fly lady from the second episode of OPM :P)

I also need to paint stuff that I want to, too. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do the "theme of the week" but I started this challenge only to keep the pencil moving, no matter what it is necessarily creating. I need to be mindful of that, I don't want to get frustrated and drop it, since I've already been there many times before, I haven't thought of dropping this one though. It's as if... my study streak is inspiring me to keep up, the first week is always the hardest and it seems like I've climbed that hill. 

But I'm also happy about this blog as well as Crimson Daggers. Those are the only two places I post persistently now (in CD every other day mostly, though, I like posting many things at once).

It's just me and my journey. Well, in CD it's also the journeys of a lot of wonderful people. Not about likes or the prettiest pictures, but who has made the most progress. I like that, it's a healthy place to grow! I'm trying not to express my gripe with facebook. I realized if Draw or Die would move somewhere else I'd probably leave facebook for good. *sigh*

I'm getting too salty, I'm sorry, I just got rekt on hearthstone ladder by aggro because I wanted to play fun decks. WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF?

It's time for sleep instead. I'll try to paint something fun tomorrow. Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Good night!

Environments week (day 9)

I'm still sick... ever had those days where you want to google arm anatomy and all of a sudden you're on wikipedia, reading about space shuttle accidents... how the hell did I get there? Now I'm not even sure whether my anatomy is correct, bloody hell

I'll try and correct it all tomorrow with fresh eyes. 

I'll feel better tomorrow, I have to ;-;

Environments week (day 8)

So technically I was supposed to start environments week today but I've been feeling just a little bit sick today and it's kind of hard to concentrate or sit in front of the computer for a long time, so I did some anatomy and channeled my inner Bob Ross with some easier environments so I can just turn my brain off for a while and smear the canvas left and right.

I think I'll have more success tomorrow... but I made it a point to keep practicing consistent, even if it's just light stuff or doodles, habit is the key!

I'll still do anatomy as much as I can because it's so vast and devoting just a week for that seems laughable...

Last day of anatomy week

So today I decided not to actually do silhouettes again but try and actually paint something, so I got an idea of Sonya with a treasure goblin. I'm not close to finishing it yet, I'm pretty unhappy with how it looks so far, today is the kind of "nothing goes right" day. I might scrap the idea and start over, the more I paint the more my messy process annoys me... but I guess realizing that is also great since it enables change? I hope...

Anatomy week (day 6) thumbnails and silhouettes

Some silhouette sketching and practicing, I don't have too much to say, I'm pretty tired since I've been studying a lot today, gonna go take a well-deserved shower.

Anatomy week (day 5)

I spent most of my time on a study of a sculpture of Saint Philip, I did some figure sketches and finished just now, it's 9 minutes to midnight so I guess I made it this time! Have to browse Loomis tomorrow or something that will help me structure figures better, as in, I tend to draw in lines what I see from reference, meanwhile for drawing heads I draw the circle and the chin attached to it and sort of use that "formula" to map out the rest. These kinds of lines that I do can be very wrong and it's a lot of trial and error before it looks somewhat right... But that's for tomorrow! 

Anatomy week (day 4) - some random heads

I didn't do quite as well today as I had hoped to, but if I keep that pen busy it's not really failure.

J.

Anatomy week (day 3) - muscles!

So day 3 has come and passed (technically 4th again), not much to say here, been looking at muscles and most of my time I spent on the skeleton. I guess it's good to do muscles over skeleton because it's sort of self-correcting, like I made the pelvis a little too wide for an average man so I when I put muscles on top of it it just looked very strange. Easy to correct the bigger mistakes like that.

Better keep this PG-13, lol

J.

Anatomy week (day 2) - bones II

Today was kind of a chill day. I did work on anatomy today for my minimum amount of time but I didn't quite work on stuff as in-depth as I wanted. I guess there's always tomorrow! I finished my own little skelly

There's still some stuff I need to correct on it, like the ribs and perhaps the length of the arms, I just need some fresh eyes. 

I mostly did a portrait today of a friend of mine

I'm not sure about the chromatic aberration but it doesn't look awful I guess, I just mess around with that kind of stuff when I can get away with it, I usually leave the channels alone, though.

I've reserved more in-depth bone analysis for tomorrow that was supposed to be "dressing" my little skelly in some muscles. Gotta make sure I do enough of both. Muscle weekend! Drawing, though, not actually exercising my own... *sadness*

Good night!

J.

Anatomy week (day 1) bones (skull)

So it feels a little weird to start a week in the middle of it but I want to get 30 days of 4 different learning weeks done this month, so why the heck not. It's technically already the 2nd but I've made it a point to document my stuff here.

I tried tracing over models' faces to find the parts under the skin and muscles. It's a good practice for the hand to get used to drawing the structure of the skull in different angles.

I whipped up a little skeleton I might as well put my knowledge onto :P

Skulls with noses are super weird

I imagine it's not necessary to know all the names at any point but I had it as an excuse to work on the skull a little longer.

Since I've been waking up lately at 8 am or earlier it's probably a good idea to go to bed. I worked on anatomy around 4 hours longer than I intended. I have to be careful about overdoing it and managing my time a little better.

J.

31.08.2016

I did have some plans to actually paint instead of doodle but those noble plans were thwarted by a migraine. I still spent a good several hours on this stuff (since I dropped some ideas I was working on) listening to podcasts. Starting from tomorrow I'll focus at least 2 hours on anatomy every day.

I'll go sleep now. Happy upcoming September.

J.

Summer 2016

So I'm actually caught up after this post, as today is the last day of August! I'll start my Master's thesis in the coming school year, so I've implemented a little calendar to keep me practicing every day, even if I have a lot of work. 

The purpose of this blog is a bit of an archive of my progress, I used facebook for that so far but... after taking a break from it for a week I've realized aside from the Draw or Die group it's not really great for creativity. But I won't go on a tangent here. Enjoy!

I also tried 3D modelling... Terrifying

Two studies of Horley's Deathwing art, it's dang good

My entry for the Lichman challenge, they haven't judged it yet ;-;

There might be some .psd files containing more sketches that I've never converted to .pngs and can't really preview without opening, and titled them "Untitled-1" because I'm an idiot, but if I find some stuff I'll edit the posts!

But for now I guess... let the art habit begin!