Corvana - Art School Journey

Hello! I'm Corvana, and I'm really excited to start this program! I'm turning 37 this year, and I've been trying to teach myself to draw off and on for about ten years now.

I've always wanted to be an artist, but when I was little (roughly 7) an art teacher told me I'd never be good and so I shouldn't try. I believed her because I figured she was an authority on the matter, and just wistfully watched friends draw for the rest of my school career.

Sometime in late 2013 I saw a video where an artist talked about drawing being a skill that you can hone, and that you didn't need to be born with innate talent to be an artist. That sparked a new fire in me to learn!

Of course, teaching myself proved to be incredibly difficult, and that old teacher's voice lingered in the back of my mind. I took so many breaks from art because of it, and so my progress has slid back over and over and over again (which definitely didn't help the self-esteem!).

I moved a couple years ago now, and learned that my new area has a local art college that offers community art classes. They're relatively short, and aim to mostly cover the basics of the course to familiarize the students in the subject and get them started from a good place. But the real treasure they offer is guidance and feedback from a professional. In these classes I gained more experienced, positive, voices to counter my self doubts. Every compliment like a beacon of hope, every gentle correction a balm to my hurt inner child.

And so I find myself now, not where I want to be artistically, but with a positive and excited outlook. Ready to take on a challenge, and fail, and try again, and fail again but differently and less bad, and try again, and again and again.

I'm currently working on a few things so that I can have a nice little record of where I started, and my current figure drawing class has its last session next Tuesday so I'm taking the rest of this week to get all of that done and gathered up.

I'm so excited, I can't wait to learn and fail and succeed with you!

Well, here we go! These are the most recent/my favorite figure and gesture drawings from my community course. Translating from traditional to digital will likely give me a small hiccup while I get used to a tablet again, but that's not unexpected. Hopefully the pen control exercises help that go away more quickly.

This first one was a sequence pose, 3 minutes in total, 20 seconds per pose.

These next two were 2 minute poses.


These were 5 minute poses.

And this last one was a 20 minute pose.

I really like how the last one came out! These were all done on 18"x24" grey toned sketch paper with purple colored pencils.

I've still gotta finish up the digital headshot I'm working on as an assessment of my current level on that front, which I'll hopefully have done in the next day or so!

well, it sure has been a little while! for christmas i was given a portrait bootcamp course, so i've been doing that the past nine weeks now. i didn't do both things because i really didn't want to overwhelm myself, and since the portrait course was all live i prioritized that. but i thought i'd share a couple of my favorites here, since i'd posted them in the discord already.