Hello everyone, My name is Edwin
I've known what I've wanted to do since I was 10, which is create and tell stories. Didn’t matter if it was through writing, animation, comics, it’s what I want to do and I wanna do it all. Unfortunately, life as it does, happens, I had a long bout with depression due to increasingly frequent problems outside my control. Because of this I found myself not doing the things I loved the most as often, due to lack of drive and ambition, stuck in a cycle of dead-end jobs. I sought help though, reached out to old friends and made some new ones along the way.
Now I find myself 26, happily newly married with a newborn but with no true attempt at my life's dream. So better now than never, right?
Academically I have 2 years of college under my belt but been at odds to go back, due to expenses and my prior experience and distaste for organized education. I'm a fast learner though and plan to treat this as serious as I treated University. I got this course to help brush up on my techniques (especially people) as well as discover new ones being that I a still a novice when it comes to digital art. I will not promise I will post my progress to often I will try to keep engaged with all of you.
My Favorite things to draw are Monsters, Animal and Landscapes.

And just because I saw others doing it these are 2 pictures from by college portfolio that I got awards for

Congrats on the new baby! Wishing you the best on your journey

happy to know you are coming back to arts! It be an amazing road to see your progress! wishing you the best of luck!

Welcome to art school! Congrats on the newborn! Know that its never to late to chase your dreams. You are in good company! Don't sweat your timeline I am cough significantly older and it seems like you got it figured out way before me! I look forward to seeing your progress!

Thank you , I truly appciacte the feedback and replies. Im a bit shy when comes to the internet i'm glad this community is so helpful and encouraging.

8 months later

Hello Art school community, apologies for the prolonged hiatus. A lot of moving , traveling and replacing pc equipment this from said moving and traveling. So long story short , Life keeps you busy :joy: My last post was back in May and I CAN'T BELIEVE how fast time has flew by.

One of my things that broke was my pen display so this exercise was nice chance for giving my new one a test run. Honestly, the circles gave me alot of trouble might have to practice with this more often to get used to my screen.

This next one is my one point perspective assignment. I used the doorway for dining room to my kitchen because I thought it had a good angle for depth past the horizon line to make the peice more interesting. I made it a fantasy hobbit hole inspired retired adventurer look. I meant to take more picture of the process of drawing just to be seen but I kinda got lost in drawing it.
Outline and planning


Finished Draft

These next few images are just a few things I've been working on recently that'd id like to share. I've been absent for the forums but I've been trying to keep a regular flow of projects and sketches on my own time.
This is a piece that I've started but stopped working on about 2 weeks back. I might come back to it but I think I might start it over. I love the color and the textures of the main subjects but there's something about the their positioning and the size of the overall peice im unhappy with. I feel I'm too far in to change those things now and might go back to try at it again.

This is a water color painting of a Dragon slug I started. Water color is a medium I'm not too familiar with using myself but i have always appreciated its aesthetic and how other artist use it to its fullest . It captures subtlety and depth of color so much differently than other mediums I use ,so I decide to try and learn. I it is quite a process :sweat_smile: I feel like a cave man painting with it because I'm so heavy handed and I'm used to added white not just using the color of the canvas. Ive been reading a book about and watching some videos but if anyone has any advice, I'm all ears.

My next post will be sooner than last :grin: and i'll be diving into term 2.
Also I Just wanted to mention it since i dont reply to post often. Its been cool signing in every once in awhile these last couple months and seeing others progess in honing thier and all the new commers to the community. Helps keep me motivated.
Just wanted to say to whoever reads this keep going and keep doing your best.

Welcome back to the forums!, Don't let past events put you down, Life drives us all in the gutter at times, glad to see you're back though and so far you're doing really good, I love that 1 point perspective assignment, so many intricate details, keep it up!.

1 month later

Hello forum community , back again with another post. I'm neck deep into term 2 and have watched everything except the perspective 2 video. I've been taking my time diving and studying different head anatomy , shading techniques as well the usual sketching and gesture.
Unfortunatly I've spent a lot of time away from my desk this last couple of weeks ,so all i have to share is some of my sketchbook. Practically filled a sketch book with random bodies and shapes.
Here are a few random pages tho




I dont plan to be on the move again anytime soon and have a better working schedule than before. I'll have some digital sketches and assignment to share next time I post. I've had a lot more time to myself during the day as well and have made it my personally goal to post at least roughly once a week.
till next time

13 days later

Hello everyone ! Back again with some drawings, I've been able to work on my pen display on and off for about an hour to 2 hours a day for the last week and a half. I feel I have improved on my line quality and accuracy but not on my speed. I just kinda get lost in the details when I draw from reference, just a habit I feel I need to be aware of.

Honestly, these heads took me the longest time, mostly because its hard for me to assemble the facial features together with correct proportions. In which case I'd start them over the next day. The Middle Face was my first attempt, I tired from imagination. I kept it on the canvas to figure out my mistakes because it looked right, but..off. I used a custom brush I made i krita, and didnt like the values that it would give me, it would come out too dark. I gotta play around with the brush maker more.

So for lefty and righty, I stuck to some reliable mediums for me as well as used references. They look better, but I feel like I'm going to practice faces and features along with my daily gestures in my sketch book. I really want to nail facial features. I want to exaggerate, like the nose and eyes. My ears need help too :sob:

Next post soon to come, probably more faces, and some 3-point perspective assignments.

Hi, do you mind if you can show the reference image for the left and right faces?

I believed that you may have incorrectly positioned the facial features as the the middle of the sphere represent the brow, not the eye. Thus, it may looks like the character looks so compressed. Just checking, thx.

Yo, looking good overall, what gordon says is exactly what I am noticing, feature placement is off. Rendering and detailing is looking good.

It definitely took me a few tries before getting these things right. Things that I feel help the most is measuring height and width first (essentially boxing in), locating the midline and tilt, finding the glabella “keystone”, and drawing the contour of the midline to get a good idea of the proportions of the the features. Sideways proportions is a little more intuition for me as I really don’t have a systematic approach for that, so once I get overall proportions I start to measure reference points to get those but knowing skull anatomy and finding orbits / cygomatic arches helps a lot

Cheers!

Sure thing, they are screenshot of random people i found on tiktok. They had very angular chins/cheek shape so i thought it'd be good practice for stucture.Thank you @snakker and @Gordon003 I'll keep those tips in mind as I practice.

12 days later

Hey, everyone
Got into the office today after being sick a couple days and decided to draw a figure from memory , to test all my knowledge for the human form. Came ok I think

Hello ,everyone
These are son gestures and drawings i did thoughout the day today.
I spent much of my time today making custom brushes to better represent what strokes i like. After watching the demo I also was messing with vanishing points to deform shapes to better wrap my head around 3 point perspective, so far so good.

Also did a quick face sketch, I been trying to simplify the stucture of the faces I practices even more as to 1. not get lost in the details and 2. help with facial structure.