Powerful.pineapple's preposterous pre-portfolio preparations

[powerful.pineapple]

Hi, guys. I'm a bad artist. Honestly. I feel pretty weird posting this in conceptart.org since the worst of you is a hundred times better than me. I don't like to talk about it, but I grew up drawing anime without really focusing on the important stuff like perspective and shading and when I went to art school the reality of this plus other personal stuff made me take a break. Not from just art school, but from art, period. This was scary. This lasted about two or three years and in early 2011 I kicked myself back into it because life without drawing was crap. My skills were pretty bad by then, because I had entered the workforce/worked on my career/relationships/waffles instead, but I don't really know how to give up.

If you don't want to read that wall of text, I'll get to the point in this sentence: I want to apply to the Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark this year and learn me some 2d animation. It's been my dream all my life. I have less than 3 months to put together a portfolio. I'm bad with these because of the aforementioned head-to-brick-wall anime fixation, which has caused me to be rejected from several schools and not win many contests. Anyway, this is why I'm here: because I want to become good at stuff I'm not, and this sketchbook will be chronicling my journey through some drawing instruction books my helpful friend now studying at Gobelins recommended, like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, Dynamic Anatomy by Burne Hogarth, etc.

I want to do this right. Now, for the first sketches!

[WRappiii]

I can sympathize with your story as a lot the time I spent drawing earlier in life was spent on drawing in an anime-ish style, which did me no favors.
But if you've got a dream and a shit load of perseverance, you can make it happen!
It's cool that you seem to have such a passion for drawing too...

About your drawings... the first shows that you've got some basic skills that just need some cultivating, so get on it! the second one has nice movement.

good luck!

[TFsean]

Hey there pineapple. The point is you have turned it around and youre going to work hard for it now Practice and motivation get you where you need to go, looking forward to seeing your progress. You can do a lot in 3 months

Everytime you draw be trying to make it better, the quality of your line, the gesture etc. Your first guy isnt half bad and the girl is nice, proportions are there too

Good luck man

[powerful.pineapple]

Thanks for the incredibly kind words. I'm uploading a couple more things, the first being a mistake-filled photo ref sketch in marker, the second a graphite sketch. I'm going to try to keep this thing updated every other day.

I have been doing anatomy gesture sketches, the short ones, and pure/modified contour drawings but i don't think they warrant posting. To be honest, while doing pure contour drawing according to Betty Edwards's book, I realized why I never applied myself when I took classes in this as a kid--they are boring. Well, I'm just going to have to deal with it.

edit: more images. people here put lots of images in one post, sorry I didn't know. The last picture of the girl is personal stuff of a character of mine with a million anatomy errors probably. I marker/sketched the donut piece with my pitt artist pens and I like it.

[powerful.pineapple]

I haven't been scanning and posting my exercise sketches and gesture drawings, but I'm doing them.

[Pixeltuner]

contact! good start, keep pushing and show studies

[powerful.pineapple]

I already submitted my portfolio to TAW and I'm not going to show what I sent here. Honestly, i'd rather they reject me than have people tell me after the fact "oh you should have fixed this leg" but, I'm going to display the "storytelling" part of the portfolio which was supposed to be 5 pages/panels. I have a background in comics so I decided to send an excerpt of a story I have in the works.

It might be funny to look at...

Backstory: Tenku is on a nice daytime date after clubbing all night. His friends have invited him to Test Drive for some hologram-background, wicked car driving fun.

Page 1



Page 2



Page 3



Page 4



Page 5



edit: SPELLING ERROR IN THE LAST WORD BALLOON


FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

[powerful.pineapple]

okay, everyone, animation workshop rejected me so I'm posting my portfolio.

http://eaalex.daportfolio.com/

I tried my best but it was very rushed. If I still feel like applying next year I will. Glad I have journalism and Script Frenzy to take my mind off this.

Movement:













Drama/Acting (expressing emotion):

[powerful.pineapple]

Portfolio continued

Perspective:









Life drawing:

[powerful.pineapple]

portfolio continued


This is the last part, freestyle. I already posted the story portion a bit further up.



















Comments are appreciated, thanks.

[powerful.pineapple]

I would post my studies but...they're....bad...I've been doing life drawings, posemaniacs studies, and studies from dynamic anatomy and re-reading parts of Drawing on the Right side of the Brain (great book!) that I didn't get. For now I need anatomy crits on this, if anyone feels like it, thanks a lot.

[Zelrik]

Not bad, keep it up!

For the last life studies, you need to check the proportions, the upper body of the adults look too big, the character on the right has one leg longer than the other. The kid's arms look way to short, if his hands are above his head... they should be drawn ABOVE it. The character on the left looks like it has no structure, try to paint over this study with where you think the joints are, I think that would help you understand your mistakes.

I could try to send you a 'corrected' version of it but I am not an expert either so I ll wait a bit to see if a more skilled person can help you.

[powerful.pineapple]

I know I'm not ready to learn digital painting and still have to improve my anatomy skills and other fundamentals but I did it anyway

[zombifried]

I know I'm not ready to learn digital painting and still have to improve my anatomy skills and other fundamentals but I did it anyway

You did, and I think you should. Practice is key. I think you should be practicing a bit of everything.
As far as anatomy,it may sound cliche around here, but I don't think you can go wrong with Loomis or Bridgman:Especially Bridgman, because of the way he breaks down the process, and concentrates on building/construction of the forms.
Draw yourself (mostly because it's convenient) often. Draw your whole body, not just your face.
All of your sketches represent progress, even bad ones, because you're learning from your mistakes. Sketching is a way to work out the problems within a drawing. Don't be afraid to make mistakes.
Hope you can get something from all that rambling!
~zombifried

[Duplicitious]

heyy as long as you're willing to work at it, you can definitely become one of those hundred times better artists

great start with everything! i'll give you some advice that people gave me, less drawing more observing. Basically, instead of trying to make small unsure lines (chicken scratch), really observe what you're trying to draw, when a shape/form pops out at you let it sink in and quickly capture that in a line. Go slow and really try and observe!

It's good that you're trying out color but consider learning your values/form in black and white before tackling color as it's all a necessary base

gesture drawings from youtube videos will really help with getting a lot of basics down like anatomy, form, space, perspective so try that out

keep it up!

[powerful.pineapple]

thank you everyone for your kind words. I'm posting some studies, finally, and some recent work. Some studies are from life, some are from posemaniacs, and some I copied from Burne Hogarth's book.







The life sketches are the smallest ones. People tend to walk over to me and try to talk to me and tell me my drawing is gorgeous no matter how basic or unintelligible it is because I am an attractive woman. I get shy to draw people in public because of this, and because people have super powers of noticing when they're being drawn.


I redrew this entire page of my comic and I'm just putting it here as a benchmark.




I also have been copying from styles I like a lot (I don't like my current style), which was in my Animwork.dk rejection feedback. Just posting the copies here. I'm really bad at folds so I'll copy a lot of those in addition to looking at life subjects.

[powerful.pineapple]

I'm doing character ref sheets. One is supposed to be naked for anatomy reference by character. This guy is supposed to have strong legs but a wimpy upper body.

[powerful.pineapple]

I may actually be getting somewhere, or at least not staying in the same place. Example. This is "digital art" then:

this is "digital art" now:

It's not much, but it's something, at least in anatomy and shading understanding...