Learning to draw

[Rankao]

Seeing what people can do by just keeping working on art inspires me.

[krysjez]

After reading that I went back to page 2 to try and see if there has been visible improvement over the past almost 2 years. It is hard for me to see when just looking through the thread. When I see things that I still quite like, even now, e.g. top right guy on

I feel like there hasn't been any improvement.

So I tried this on a whim. Turns out it is very motivational to redraw your old crap, see that it has indeed gotten less crappy, and then notice how crappy it is in comparison to actual good work.

[in2eternity]

This magic girl with books looks very nice, looking forvard for finished version )))

[kevinsano]

It's really great how much more dynamic the newer sketch is. The tilted shoulders and head really help.

[krysjez]

in2: thanks! It might be a while though, I have to rush out uni scholarship applications like mad now because their deadlines are really close together.
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I'm sick and lying in bed now on the bright side my A level results came back and I did really well!! I actually got a merit for my Theory of Art paper which was completely unexpected
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since my results are out I can also put my art coursework up! And I have, here: http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=238240

please have a look and tell me what you think!

[eyestrain]

I love the jump in skill on that re-draw. It's been a while since i've looked in, good stuff and keep at it!
(and am very flattered you link me in your sig!)

ps- have some soup and lots of water and feel better, ok?

[ANtY93]

Wanna see a continuation of that comic

[gen5]

nice work on the remake!
and hellow fellow sg-rean.

[krysjez]

I'm going to have about two (or more) months of relatively free time from now and I'd like to do the following:

• master studies - portraits probably
• work through some of figure drawing for all it's worth, look at non-head parts of the body especially
• move on to bargue plate 2 lmao
• try to use the oil paints that I have lying around
• do something nice in watercolor, haven't touched it in so long
• draw environments, draw people in environments. aim: be able to draw a fairly convincing figure group in an environment from imagination by the end
• something about perspective??

I get lazy when faced with studies because they do get pretty boring especially anatomy stuff. but with no school and only 4/7 days per week occupied now there's really no excuse this time
Any suggestions for specific things I could do in those categories (especially the last one about perspective) are most welcome!
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2. finally finished this. You can see I totally gave up on the background because I just don't know enough about drawing them yet. But I think here it was actually a pretty good move, because the way the picture was going was far too cluttered. The original (planned) background and value structure that it had would have just made the scene harder to read. Anyway I'm going to leave this as 'finished', no sense in spending more time on it.
3. Does anyone know what this makeup look is called? with intense eyeshadow in a huge block across the whole lid? drew this to get the image out of my head.
4. drew this some time ago actually, a portrait of someone as seen through their webcam, via G+.
5. something for the comic.

That's all for now. my physical sketchbook doesn't really have much of interest nowadays...

[Velocity Kendall]

well done on your exams!

[Samszym]

Thanks for the comment! Cyndaquil rocks

Giood luck with your studies! Which masters do you plan on studying? And for perspective maybe go through Loomis' successful drawing or this. Also here's the perspective tutorials I link everyone to if you haven't seen them part 1 part 2

Happy arting!

[yochanan]

Love the wizard piece, it has a lot of character! And yeah the background looks just fine, more detail and it would just be distracting from the subject I think. Cute comics too, keep up the good work !

[krysjez]

VK thank you!!
Vertical thanks for the links! I don't have Successful Drawing but in FDFWIW there is a section about placing figures correctly in relation to perspective, I'll have a look at that
yoch thanks
==
Spent a few hours painting this yesterday. The original is a bit smaller than A4 size. Trying to get some traditional Chinese painting influences into it. Was pretty fun.
I feel I could have pushed the saturation even more, my watercolor always has a very wishy-washy look to it because I'm afraid to lay down color. Though I only realized after I finished that the arms are of different lengths...

[Lightship69]

I second the well done in the exams matey, good one! where to now is the question?

in the meantime the safety poster is masterful, its funny and cute but also does the safety job as well, that gets an "A" from me, that last one is spankingly good too, there is a simplicity and a sense of peace about it, either that or I am bieng weird again which is easily possible!

all the very best to you matey.

[Velocity Kendall]

that last one is excellent

[Naidy]

Hey, mate. Good to see you still going strong! You going to England too for Uni?

Anways, liking that mage and the girl, also good seeing you take the plunge and doing a bit of a comic. I need to make myself do that too.
Keep up the good work, mate!

[Huntero]

New Art at Last Page

Hi all, I'm sixteen this year (18 now! o_o ) and just joined CA. So I've been drawing for quite a number of years but I've never been good at it. Most of my stuff looks like the attachment. I started off with imitating manga so all the stuff I do has some degree of stylization to it, even my observation drawings.

At the start of this year I began trying to move away from that and now a more realistic look, like what most people here are doing, is starting to appeal to me more.

Edit; thanks asiJa for reminding me about this: But at the same time I'm also afraid of getting stuck and only being able to draw in that way after a while. So I'm going to try interspersing more technical practice with the usual stuff I do.

I've never used photo or life reference for any drawings of people, and of other things probably only 0.5% of the time. The end result is that most of the time I have no clue about what I'm drawing, about the form and the way light works on it and how it interacts with other things. So I realized that I probably need to start doing loads of studies and sketching from observation.

Now if I knew where to start...

Go on!I'm by your side!

[Huntero]

Sushy
Black Spot: My A-level results come out on Friday (!!! - it's either an A or C for my art...nervous as hell) and then I have until June, I think, to respond to offers from the UK - if I meet their conditions. I will only know the results of my applications to the US in April. Anyway uni normally starts around September so I've got half a year left.
Anyway I am applying for scholarships around now and it's so very torturous. First I have to write lots of essays (only written one so far...) and then get the 1000-word things down to 500 words. Darn my natural verbosity...!
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A little progress on that thing. Light's feeling a bit off, as is the leg on stage right.

It seems like there are some Chinese words in the picture!

[krysjez]

Huntero: yeah there are, can't remember why I wrote them though
Naids, lightship, VK: thanks! I'm going to the US for uni got into a really good school (took me a week to accept that it wasn't an administrative error!) which is ridiculously expensive but I think it's gonna be really fun too. Paying off the student loan won't be that fun though meh. It's so much money I don't even know if I can get a loan...!
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1. SP from imagination, one major alignment issue rescued with the Warp tool and a lot of excess hair cut off with Eraser. conclusion: I’m not nearly observant enough normally. the eyes and brows are definitely off; most accurate part is the mouth.
2. comic pg 5

[si3g]

Your wizard painting is pretty awesome, great work. Just the hand on the right looks a bit off. Maybe it would help drawing some references of hands in different perspectives.

[krysjez]

si3g: thanks! And yes, it is very off, haha. That's what I get for rushing into rendering without working out problems first.
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from life:


I am too hesitant with my lines now. Very afraid of getting things wrong. Found myself actually doing fuzzy line for the first try on Hannah (top one) - tried starting with some sort of sight-size block-in - then erased the whole thing and built up from an oval instead.

[krysjez]

Something happened to the colors when I saved - everything got duller. photo study off: http://500px.com/photo/6900823 - photo by marcin sobas

[krysjez]

Oh gosh, I haven't been here in far too long.

Update on my life: I'm going to Yale for uni, and because I'm on a scholarship (Yale is really expensive otherwise) I will be doing a major in computer science, and have to be an engineer for 6 years after I graduate before I am free to change jobs.

Uh, I might also be suffering from mild depression, but I'm not really sure. I keep crying a lot (not in public or in front of family of course), I've been crying almost constantly for...1.5 weeks or something? If it gets worse I will see if I can go back to my old school and talk to the counsellor there.

Update on the art front: I've done far too little art since I last posted; I know I had that to-do list, and ugh well I had a big list of things to do during this pre-uni break, but it's mostly undone. To be honest I've come back to this page a few times but each time I didn't want to post, because I was ashamed of not having done anything I really love drawing, but i just lost my motivation to do anything...it's like I've lost interest in it, but I still like doing it, does that make sense?

But I'm finally back, and now that I think of it posting sort-of regularly around here motivated me to at least have some small updates each time, and I just drew more in general while I was posting actively here, so yeah. I'm back after 2 months And it might help with the depression/crying thing by keeping me occupied.

That got long. tl;dr - hi again guys.

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I obtained the images of my prep work boards for art coursework last year, so here they are. I submitted these around September last year, though the things in them were done over a longer period of time.

They're a little big, sorry.

[krysjez]

new pic. I forgot to do something with the cup…and I should have worked out the pose and perspective first. Didn’t know it would turn into a full picture.

I wanted to try out painting a bokeh-type background, but I didn’t look at references so it became this…;;

[Xeon_OND]

Depression of any sort sucks! Hope it gets well asap.

I'm surprised to read that you're going Yale to study computer science instead of art (I always thought all along when you said you're studying overseas, it's some art school in the states etc.)

Good luck anyway!

[krysjez]

I'm currently going through a very bad sort-of-breakup but it's just incredibly complicated with so many issues involved and I can't draw anything because my body feels weak. Sorry guys.

edit: of july 16th, a breakup. not a bad one by any means, but definitely not the ideal 'both fell out of love' breakup.

[krysjez]

My body's still acting up (going to see the doctor today) but I've started drawing things again, and it feels nice to create again.
Xeon: I was thinking about applying to art school, but I'm too academic for that. As in...I really like art, yeah, but I like learning about all kinds of stuff even more. And I want to try doing research, stuff like that. Art school is too narrow. idk, one idea is to keep working at art and go to art school when I'm older. Or take a summer off and enter an atelier?
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1,2. next 2 pages of comic
3. oil painting. I wasn't really sure what I was doing, and it took really long (a couple months) because I didn't know what to do and I'd just look at it and go 'ugh what the hell am I supposed to now', but things started to get better after I actually forced myself to just paint and follow my instincts. So the actual time spent is about 2 weeks in total haha
4,5. experiments in digital watercolor

[Samszym]

hey, thanks for the comment krysjez! Nice to hear an update, hope you're having a good time at Yale! I hear what you're saying about art school being too narrow, if you don't have an interest to create art about then what's driving you, right? I read about Steven Hillenburg (the dude who made spongebob) liking fish and art as a kid and wondering how he could combine the two. He wound up studying marine biology and then going to calarts to study animation.

keep drawing and experimenting! I'm liking the pokemon comic, gen 2 is my favorite!

[Black Spot]

I hope engineering doesn't suck all the life out of you. Good to see you still working hard even if your heart is breaking.

I like this, except for the glasses as they appear a bit too wrapped around her head.

[krysjez]

Black Spot: My heart sends thanks for your well-wishes and will let you know when it's feeling better, and good point about the glasses. I hadn't noticed that at all. Engineering is also about creating things, so hopefully it overlaps more with art than expected.
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I fly for uni in 4 days. I'm glad to be starting school again.
I wanted to take a Sculpture Basics class sometime in my first year, but as luck would have it, the class time conflicts with my core computer science classes for both Fall and Spring terms of my freshman year. The best I can do is take Painting Basics in Spring 2013, and hope that Sculpture is workable in my second year.
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Did some calligraphy yesterday, about 3 hours of practice first and 30 mins final writing. My focus was broken by lunch and the Olympics in between.

Left: 无畏 - ‘have no fear’. Right: 取舍 - ‘give and take/you can’t have it all’ (something like that. I wrote that one much more beautifully when practicing and got annoyed when the final wasn’t as good, then the irony struck me as quite funny). I picked these two because I need to keep them in mind*, particularly at this stage in my life. I think I’ve made good progress on the first - especially in the last 2 years; the second is easy to understand but so hard to accept ugh.

It’s not great calligraphy or anything but I’m quite pleased with my progress considering I first picked up a brush last December and have only done so about four times since then