Day-to-Day Doings of a Jester

Heyo! This looks like an awful lot of fun and easy way to procrastinate on the stuff I should actually be working on, and also some motivation to get back into improving my art!

I'm Jake, a casual software engineering student and Java web developer who likes to pursue creative endeavours. Last year my hard drive broke, costing me all my old digital art, and so instead of crying (read: after crying) I decided to scrap my old way of art in favour of a more painterly style. For reference, this is what my art used to look like:

(The WIP I had just finished outlining before the break)

As much as I liked the style, and it was improving, I wanted to do more than what feels like a rather western web comic.

And so I jumped on the Cubebrush bandwagon! My friend showed me a video of a style he wanted to learn, which just so happened to be Marc Brunet's Sci-Fi girl head painted on top of a 3D model. I clicked around, admired the art, and watched a few tutorials. The information clicked with me in ways no others have, and I've been hooked since.

I began with eyes, because I wanted to learn how to paint people. I was always terrible with anatomy and people, so I've been squaring off against it as my artistic opponent, and where better to start than a face? Faces sell.

I tried at first in SAI, but immediately switched to Photoshop to completely move away from my old style and habits

Once I felt comfortable with painting eyes, I moved onto lips (because I hate noses).

I then tried noses. It sucked and I hated it. I still don't like noses. Unlike the other tutorials of facial features Marc did, I still didn't understand how to break down a nose. I took what little I could do and tried to take a plunge: I did a full front view face, with hair and stuff, using one of Marc's tutorial images as reference. I learned about doing ears and hair while working on this, as a sort of "I have to do it anyway ¯(ツ)/¯" situation. It went really well, but I can't duplicate the results without reference, because there's components I still don't understand.

And so back to the drawing board, I began trying to learn heads, human anatomy in general, and how to pose skeletons. This really helped me understand bodies more, though it still lacks specifics (especially in the fine features of a skull's structure).

It was at this time that I started branching away from Marc's teachings. His stuff on skeletons was fantastic, but I needed some focus on heads and how to draw them. My solution was to google the crap out of head drawings, find one that clicked, trace it, freehand it with reference, then freehand it with no reference! It worked, and now I'm really happy with my ability to draw general head shapes from various angles and poses (still gotta work on back view, but I'll get there).

And then I stopped doing art for a couple months. Really busy with recreational sports and my work, and I really didn't want to learn how to paint noses. But I had to learn noses, so I tried Marc's lesson again, still couldn't get it, and moved on to google and real life. I think I freaked out my family, friends, and various strangers on the subway as I stared soullessly at their noses. I scrolled through pages of images of people's noses, then pages of people's drawings of noses, and eventually I had an "aha!" moment. "Noses aren't just some trapezoid, or a point! They're an amalgamation of a cylinder, two smaller cylinders, a rectangular prism, three spheres, a slope of 1/(2-x)^2, and an abstract visualization of fear!"

Viola! I cracked the da Vinci code! I've since been practicing noses, eyes, and mouths in my notebooks during the more boring parts of my lectures (because I'm now currently back at university, trying to finish my degree), to mostly successful results, and am grinning like a fool. I still hate noses.

So this is where my journey has led me to. I've been terribly busy these past two weeks, and only managed to reattempt an eye digitally (since I hadn't in months). Hopefully after tomorrow passes, and the few projects I have due then with it, I can return to my art and begin learning cheek bones.

With this I'll boldly move forward, through my fear and my self-doubt, to accomplish what I set out to do in the very beginning! To replicate Mar--To find a new style I like, that's comfortable to me and is in line with my dreams of painting as a kid, instead of my shortcut, minimalist, vector-like works of old.

Hopefully you'll join me for this emotional kiddy ride, and who knows? Maybe you'll see something you like, or some steps you haven't thought of, and learn with me!

Happy Thursday,
Jester

Finally beginning to work on drawing a male head! This weekend has been rather hectic, but I'm somehow managed to squeeze in some time for art. I'm really excited to share my progress, because I think so far things are going well! Been a lot of fixing proportions and staring at people's heads on google. Still gotta do hair, clean up the ears, the neck, the chin(?), and then start thinking about highlights...

Any tips are greatly appreciated!

I had a day of not really enjoying anatomy, so I stepped back to breathe a little and messed around with textured brushes. This is honestly the first painting I've finished in maybe 4 years.

Busy busy weeks, but I managed to fill a canvas with Notan & thumbnails! They were a whole ton of fun to make, and I want to thank @brianhermelijn for getting me onto this.

I saw a cute doodle that I wanted to paint over. I'll be sending my painted version to her tomorrow (when it's not an ungodly hour in the morning). One thing led to another and time disappeared while I worked on it.

Original doodle:

(Image for quick reference)

My edition:

I tried to match the painting style to the cartoon style, then textured it to keep it to the feel of the original pencil sketch.

Just messing around, trying to find something I'd like to draw for this week's amateur contest.

Expanded on the flower idea (for the weekly amateur contest), and ended up with a full image. Though I prefer the very binary stile of the original, I can at least set this one as a desktop background.

Mini dump of my notebook practice during lectures. Gotta pass the time somehow...

The project workload is now too extreme for me to find time for digital art now. Here's another dump of how I fill my English lectures.