Marc's sketchbook progress from suckness to (hopefully) success

[mawilson]

Hi everyone. My name is Marc, I'm 25, from the UK, and this is where I'll post attempts to improve my drawing and painting before the Mayan / Aztec / Zombie apocalypse occurs this year.

I've been lurking on here for quite a while, admiring other people's work, consuming digital painting tutorials and finally plucking up the courage to start a sketchbook of my own. The fear of embarrassing myself is outweighed by the will to learn and improve.

I've been learning digitally painting on and off for about a year now, starting with fruit and eventually moving onto painting people from reference photos that I liked, so these are basically studies, more imaginative stuff will be posted soon, hopefully. This place has been an invaluable resource, so any feedback I receive is genuinely appreciated. Thanks.

[mawilson]

I think it's time I got this sketchbook back on track. I've read in other threads that learning to draw with pencil and paper is fundamental, so instead of keep making stuff with my Wacom and not really progressing, I've given it a break to focus my efforts on learning to draw properly.

Below is a drawing I recently did of Clint Eastwood, as I really liked the lighting in the reference photo. Soon I'll post some things from my imagination and Pose Maniac stuff too. As before, any advice and feedback is appreciated.

[Klaustrophil]

Amazing Output! Your Portraits are very good and you have a nice sense for skintones and colors. Keep it up!

[mawilson]

Well, faces are the things I enjoy and find the most interesting to draw, they'll be more of them to come. I like the Pose Maniacs stuff in your sketchbook, nice clean lines, encourages me to practice as mine are still very 'scribbly' at the moment.

[mawilson]

A quick sketchbook update, these are some digital painting images sat on my computer:

1- 3 are human form and value studies from some really nice black and white reference photos I found on the interwebs.

4 is a timed portrait of Beat Takeshi to try and improve my digital painting speed.

5 - 6 are portraits of two of my favourite musicians, John Frusciante in his heroin heyday, and Martin Grech.

7 is a student brief, to represent Sci-Fi on a four page fold-out brochure. The concept was for the first panel to look like someone resting their head in their hands and then as you unfold the brochure it reveals mankind has been taken over.

8-9 are abandoned portraits of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, I wasn't happy with the likeness I was getting compared to the reference photos, but they were helpful digital painting practice.

[twilightmoon777]

Sweet! Your portraits are goooood!! I'm a sucker for traditional though and would love to see more of that. Lets see what else you can do, keep em coming!

[mawilson]

Thanks, yeah, I find traditional drawing more satisfying, especially when you complete an image, but it's also something I feel weakest at, hence there being a lack of it so far. I haven't practiced enough to earn the skill to do what I'd like to be able to do and the lack of an undo button to correct mistakes leaves me with a lot of unfinished images. So I'll definitely be uploading more traditional stuff soon as I want to correct this and need critique and feedback to get me on the path to improving and not sucking. In the mean time, here's a painting I attempted in oils, I'll try and post more soon:

[phatbuddha]

Wow! These are amazing. The portraits are spot on and full of drama. Keep posting the good stuff man.

[mawilson]

These are some recently finished images, like always, any comments / critiques are welcomed.

1. Digitally painted lemons and limes, an old study I decided to finish off the other day.

2. Multi-limbed monster, I really want to learn how to create monsters, so this is the first of many attempts to come.

3. A friend said she'd like Idris Elba for Christmas, lacking the resources to abduct and deliver the real guy I digitally painted her this Christmas card instead.

4. An abandoned portrait, the likeness wasn't there and I accidentally put too much pastel on the paper, meaning I couldn't vary the values very much.

5. Some timed self-portraits.

6. Landscape study, landscapes are another weakness for me so they're something I'm working on.

I'd like to move away from just duplicating photographic references and try to use my imagination more. Hard as I don't really know how to light / colour / perspective(?) my own images, so I'll be reading a lot more tutorials.

[mawilson]

I'm going to do some posemaniacs everyday until I become more familiar with the human form, these are last weeks. Think I'll begin drawing them bigger, it actually feels like my lines started to get worse as the week went on but I'll keep at it and hopefully have a breakthrough. Will post some Loomis studies and other bits later on as well.

[frankfrank]

The hair...THE HAIR!

What I'm trying to say is that the hair looks amazingly well done. As well as the the fruits , the portraits and errythan. Sweet stuff you got here.

[mawilson]

Thanks for the feedback man, just about to check out your sketchbook. I probably subconsciously put more effort into people's hair because I'm envious of people that have it, just had to shear off what little was left of mine recently.

Thought I'd post some of my Loomis studies, they've been so helpful and changed the way I construct heads, but I feel like I was so eager to learn more from him that I rushed through them, shoddily copying his images without actually implementing the techniques in my own images. Think I'll go back and apply his knowledge properly.

I'll split this into two posts as the attachment manager went crazy on me once and lost all the images, can't face putting all the info in for 20+ images again.

[mawilson]

I find these a bit embarrassing as I'm really starting to notice how much I need to work on my lines, but I'm still uploading them as a benchmark to look back on where I started. I love the sketchbooks on here where every image posted is amazing but I really appreciate the one's that go back to around 2008, where their first page looks like the images were drawn by foot, and the last page is like a master, gives me inspiration to keep at it.

[TomC9]

Hey man, really like the images here, especially the multi limbed monster, haha.
Can i ask where/if you've studied?

EDIT: I really like the eye studies on the last post

[mawilson]

Hey, glad you like the monster, they'll be more of them to come.

No, last time I had any formal art lesson was probably making potato prints at school. I've not studied anywhere but sometimes wish I had, instead the internet has become my teacher. Although I've found it can be satisfying to learn things on your own by trial and error, it can also be a slower learning curve without someone more experienced to cast their eye over your stuff and give you direction, which is why I started a sketchbook on here. Just looking at your sketchbook at the moment, good stuff, are you going to study somewhere?