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Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

i got an apple pencil when i got an ipad pro a couple of years ago for like sheet music and practice stuff and decided to dust it off to work on learning how to art. i drew video game characters and cars and stuff when i was a kid but was never any good, took art my senior year of high school but that was a bunch of craft projects and i took every opportunity i could to bail on assignments except for doing a piece with stippling, weirdly enough.

every night for the past four days i've sat down and worked on art stuff for about an hour to 90m. currently i'm:
- working on drawing more confident lines and getting to sketching/perspective on drawabox
- doing some gesture drawing learning at proko (i am very bad at this)
- 30m of just loving around/doing a small piece

the last couple of nights of loving around i've been drawing simple pokemon like voltorb or diglett and then painting them using a watercolor-style brush in procreate to see how close i can get to the 90s pokemon art style. here's tonight's diglett:



and here's the least heinous pose from the gesture drawing session. feel like i'm flailing a bit doing this but every time i do it i feel like i capture more of the pose so it's headed the right direction, i suppose.



Shinmera posted:

Chapter 4 Page 8 (Chapter Gap)

also just wanted to say i'm enjoying this comic a lot

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Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 5

- did ghosted planes at drawabox. line confidence is improving.
- some art friends pointed me toward line of action for practicing gesture drawing, so i did a session there. i think this is starting to bear fruit, i feel like i'm getting a pose which is recognizable and captures the motion of the figure more often now.
- i had an absolutely terrible attempt at painting jigglypuff in a unique pose, then i decided to dial it back a bit and really invest like an hour into a still life of a pear. messed around with shadow color and really blending to get the feel of the values right.

learned from the mistakes and successes, so as always, i am happy. here is the pear.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Arc Hammer posted:

How do you find the pro and pencil combo? I've been looking at the Pro for a few weeks and debating cost and functionality. How accurate is the pencil to what you want it to do?

i am in no way an experienced digital artist so grain of salt, but it's very classically apple in that it does the thing, it does it well, and it does it in the way you'd expect with no fuss. the screen looks nice and i've never been frustrated using the pencil in procreate due to a hardware thing.

all my serious artist friends with a decade+ of experience are on cintiq and ipad pro combos at this point, and they pretty much all think if they gave up one it'd be the cintiq because the ipad pro form factor is so convenient it's a gamechanger.

i pretty quickly found i wanted some kind of stand for the ipad so i got a sketchboard 2. locking the ipad at a 20 degree angle with two little legs on my desk like the mid-sized huions or wacoms is huge in terms of ergonomics and helps me draw better, more comfortably. now that i have one i can not imagine life without it. https://www.amazon.com/SKETCHBOARD-PRO-Black-11-inch-4th-5th/dp/B0CPTMM3JS

art friends also said i should get a screen protector with a paper-like texture and recommended some that aren't 45 dollars from paperlike. i ordered a magnetic one because i am a disaster at applying screen protectors and i'm going to give it a spin.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 6

if yesterday was fruit, today was beans

- draw a box today was learning to draw ellipses. probably did, idk, 50, and three were really good. this number will go up with practice.
- figure drawing i worked on learning to draw the torso bean at proko, and then i did a figure drawing session where i only drew a bunch of beans in 45 second intervals. i feel like i get a good bean and then i try drawing the centerline and it all falls apart. the way i've been approaching the proko stuff is i watch the first video explaining the concept, try it myself, flounder miserably, then go back and watch him do the assignments to see what i'm doing wrong to apply, and i'll do that with him drawing torso beans.
- tried a still art of a coffee cup, was a failure - perspective was wonky and then i realized i was painting on the same layer as the lineart so i just spent like 5m roughing in some kind of shadows to say i completed an art piece today.

one of the things i like about learning art is even the failures are engaging and you feel like you learn things from completing an attempt at trying something and missing the mark. i'm finding myself thinking about my experience learning guitar a lot while doing this - one of the things that can be frustrating about music is trying to play things just past your skill level and doing technical work can feel like a frustrating grind. in art, even the failures are relaxing, and i've been doing a good job coming away from them with actionable things i can work on. it's nice.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Sitting Here posted:

Thank you for sharing your progress and thoughts! Very cool and encouraging

it is my hope that one day i'll be posting on like day 1000 and my day 6 struggles will feel quaint

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 7:
- continued ellipse drawing practice, i felt like i was doing worse than i did last time then i actually looked back and more of them were correct. negative feelings are not to be trusted.
- 10m gesture drawing session where i did more gestures better than usual. this is trending upward and i feel like i'm getting better at observing what the form is doing. very happy about that.
- a whole bunch of practice drawing torsos as beans and then seeing how proko did the same torso. this helped me understand what i was missing with him drawing on the center line and i got better at this. still room for improvement but i'm happy with the jump.
- i had been thinking about the really rich burgundy and gold mix of an apple all day for some reason so i decided to paint one and try to capture that. i absolutely got there on the color mix and implying the texture of the apple but the reference photo had a specular highlight on it and i have zero idea how to do that. i attempted it and it looked bad so i decided not to bother. lol



Shinmera posted:

Glad to hear! Best of luck on your art journey. You'll definitely think your past struggles are quaint after a thousand pieces.

thank you for the inspiring words, i love the painterly look of the background in onesie 1000.

Southern Cassowary fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 28, 2024

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Flambeau posted:

Used white crayon for the lettering, couldn't see that the 'layered' Vs were so far apart haha...

I'm drawn to geometric scenes but am scared to commit. I feel like they'll only work if I'm very precise, and I know that I lack both fundamental knowlege and certain technical skills. So I just go super loose instead.

We picked a perfect night to catch a game at the new soccer stadium.



i love the color in the sky, your dmv stuff was also great. be fearless, friend.

day 8:
- i had a mental breakthrough on ellipse drawing practice that made me get a feel for doing them down. not consistent yet but we're trending upward. happy about this.
- did a 30m gesture drawing session where they threw me a foreshortened guy driving a spike into a stump and i actually managed to capture the pose legibly. i am very happy about this. eyeballing love life drawing because they teach how to do gesture and figure drawing a little more systematically than proko does and i think that'll work better with how i approach things, but rn i'm getting results just yoloing and putting the time in with proko's videos.
- more proko torso beans, these are getting better but they're still really sketchy. need to work on that.
- decided to try more still life watercolor fruit but without lineart, blocking in a high tone. really like how this turned out, it really came together when i painted in the shadow at the bottom in a way i didn't expect.

honestly i was kind of in a poo poo mood as i was doing this and felt frustrated, like i was spinning my wheels. as i'm typing this out i realize it was a very successful day of practice. i almost said fruitful. lmao

Southern Cassowary fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Apr 29, 2024

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 9

- more ellipse drawing practice, more improvement there. i do the last ellipse drawing homework for draw a box tomorrow, then we start drawing boxes - first about six sheets of drawing boxes in perspective, rotating them, etc, and then we just draw 250 boxes. i absolutely love dumb challenge stuff like this to get better so i'm looking forward to leveling up on perspective some, as i need it.
- i did the first day of love life drawing's fresh eyes 10 day course for figure drawing stuff. on day one they break down 2d poses into a series of shapes designed to teach body observation. i really liked this - it got me to notice the angle of the pelvis, orientation of the ribcage, collarbones, angle of the legs and arms, etc. i struggled the most with placing the arms, but at the end of even one day of this i was seeing results in my observation skills. i drew the shapes afterward also.
- the above took about an hour and a half, so i took a break, then came back to do my piece for the day later. an art friend said to draw articuno and do ribbons for the tail. i did a pose from imagination because i am a crazy person - it didn't turn out great but, for like, drawing for a week it's a good sight better than it would have been before i started and i can see the issues in perspective with it. right now i'm trusting the process and assuming that the wide variety of work draw a box does with constructive sketching in perspective will help a lot with this.




e: articuno was bothering me and i couldn't sleep so i tried shifting stuff around to see if the perspective could make more sense and it totally does. v messy cause i was sketching on the lineart layer and did shadows on a diff layer which looks bad but the experiment worked, i think


Southern Cassowary fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Apr 30, 2024

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 10

- drew funnels for draw a box
- day 2 of love life drawing
- attempted a sphere in pencil

today was a struggle day. i know about, idk, 20% of days are struggles from music - sometimes you just don't have it and have to put the time in anyway. took me five minutes to figure out how to draw an ellipse and my gestures were worse at capturing the pose. i've been playing with doing a sphere in pencil in procreate and i burned out one of those and wasn't happy with it but i did the thing today.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Shinmera posted:



Chapter 5 Page 8

was excited to see four pages today. love the ducks


these are so cool, are you working on a game?

day 11:
- drew boxes in 2 point perspective at drawabox.
- worked on gesture from the side at love life drawing
- looked up a video on simple head construction from marc brunet and took a crack at that

i split this into sections as i was worn out after doing like ten boxes in perspective. felt really good in the second half, boxes and gesture were flowing. decided to take a crack at starting to learn head construction and it's pretty jank but it's a start.

Southern Cassowary fucked around with this message at 12:18 on May 2, 2024

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Plant MONSTER. posted:

I am not! I'm told I should be making one, though. I can do all the assets like music and graphics but I haven't dabbled with any engines.

you should, these are cool. very shin megami tensei or castlevania.

day 12:
- did 1 point perspective on freehand boxes, then checked my work afterwards. i could generally tell when a box was pretty close or when it was off before checking it and my straight lines are getting better. generally happy about this.
- more gesture/anatomy/observation at love life drawing from side poses. this is getting results from hammering it daily and i'm starting to get better at seeing the motion of the muscles in the arms. happy about that.
- decided to try a master study on ANIME FACES as i would like to draw anime fanart at some point. had a friend rec me some artist who does arknights fanart (i barely know what arknights is tbh) and then went to town on copies - traced over it, did a copy without tracing, fixed the untraced copy with the reference as an underlay, fixed the untraced copy without the reference as an underlay, then i repeated that process after drawing it without the reference (so, totally blind).

i am entirely sold on this process because my big takeaway from the first copy i did was how i messed up the cheek and on the blind, no-reference copy i got the cheek basically right. the youtube video i got this process from recommends doing this three times in a row so i'm going to do this again with this art the next two days.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023


hell yeah old yugioh. all your pixel art stuff has been really cool

day 13 was basically a repeat of day 12 - did three rough one point perspective studies, love life drawing, and continued my master study on the anime head. all of these things improved.

love life drawing has been using a movable 2d model of the body from the front and side as a way of teaching observation, and they took the training wheels off today, saying draw the body without the model but using the shapes. here's what it looks like.



still sketchy, but i've gotten way, way better at seeing poses and proportions in the past 5 days of doing this. they start mannequinization and making the shapes look more 3d tomorrow.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Day 14

both drawabox and love life drawing introduced involved concepts today in rotating boxes in perspective and doing foreshortening on limbs. i did about half of both but it took about an hour and a half and i was feeling fried.

might go back and do the last master study on the anime head before i rest. working on pacing myself - i know how to do that with music but i kind of dove head first into doing two art ideas at the same time (constructive sketching and figure drawing) and it's kind of a lot to tackle at once.


Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

Plant MONSTER. posted:

I know this is just an exercise but this is pretty, lol

lol, ty. it's from here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/rotatedboxes

day 15:
- finished the rotated boxes exercise
- did foreshortening with cylinders. struggled with this until the last pose where i got a betterish foreshortened leg which i was happy about.
- did the third day of anime face blind copy master study. here's the before and after of the part where you draw it from memory without reference - definitely good results, struggled with some things. going to do this again on a piece of art with less crazy hair and a more normal angle to see if i can get it closer.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

DemihumanResources posted:

Thanks for posting this. After running across it years ago I had been actively looking for it again

two weeks of doing drawabox has done a lot for my line confidence. getting close to the titular box drawing challenge.

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

cool kids inc. posted:

Found this thread after searching to see if anyone else is doing drawabox and want to emphasize how true this is.

I actually finished my last bit of prebox homework this morning and will be submitting my work for analysis (and I can already tell I've improved my visual eye because I can see areas for improvement where I didn't even know where to start before).

Just wanted to give you a shout-out for doing it and posting it here, gives me a bit of a morale boost to see other folks knocking out these beginning steps.

i haven't been submitting because i've been doing everything in procreate, but i'm still really happy with the results from it so far. i wanna finish and get to the point where i'm constructing decent vehicles and animals and stuff before i wholeheartedly sign off on it, though.

Gnossiennes posted:

sorry for the longpost, but here's a backlog of drawings from while i was on vacation:

i love the landscape as well as your abstract work.

Cephas posted:

it's great seeing your practice! i've also been trying to brush up on my fundamentals some more. I wish my drawabox rotated boxes looked as nice as yours lol

lately i've been doing hair in the style of ghibli concept art/storyboards. it's really simple because you don't have to close most of the shapes, you just indicate the flow of the hair with lines and fill it in with tone.

thanks! i'm going to have to steal the ghibli storyboard idea for future master studies - i was trying to think of a way to keep doing anime studies while doing something less involved and that's a really great idea.

day 16:
- i decided to split draw a box's 2 organic perspective study sheets into three days, so i did the first third of that. it didn't really click how to rotate the box until about the second half of the second study i did, so i think the next two days will look better than the first (which kind of just has some nice looking boxes not rotating much, lol)
- i had intended on doing some gestural work at love life drawing while working on their ribcage/pelvis/foreshortened limbs idea, but i kind of got into a groove with a couple of poses and ended up spending more time on them instead because i was having fun. here's the last thing i worked on - think it's a step up for my figure drawing. did this at the expense of starting another master study, but i think there's value in sticking with something if you're feeling yourself to cement gains.

Southern Cassowary fucked around with this message at 09:53 on May 7, 2024

Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 17

struggle day

- organic perspective, rotated boxes, looks better than last time
- more figure drawing, looks worse than last time. hands, ugh (the classic artist lament)
- i started a master study and was fried so i bailed early. still did the important stuff and got an hour and change of seat time so i'm happy.

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Southern Cassowary
Jan 3, 2023

day 18

- finished organic perspective. tomorrow, we enter box hell.
- did more figure drawing, working on twisting poses.
- i contemplated another master study but really wasn't feeling it, wanted to do more figure drawing stuff, so i cleaned up a couple more poses.

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