Guillermo - Art Journey

Its been around a month since I started the program and I realized its about time I started my journey thread, social anxiety be damned, so here we go.

Earlier this year through a lot of emotions I will not get into for the sake of time and your generous patience and attention, I decided to go back 10 years and finally get into drawing officially, eventually moving to digital, the course was a good excuse to finally get a tablet, I got one of the basic ones without the screen and since I can do some basic gestures after months of practice I figured, how hard can it be?

the answer is very, my pencil skill isn't the best but drawing while looking somewhere else is not easy, this little page here is about the best I can do, also has some of the many exercises I do almost daily

Diagonals are my best lines for some reason, up and down is pain, side to side is a decent motion, I heard Mark say up and down is the easiest and I have complaints.

I played a lot of osu! for a week and it helped with the coordination and knowing where I have to move my hand, but it does not help with accuracy or line confidence, however, I do have this little indie gem called "spell casting - meowgically enhanced edition" which is a game where you trace shapes and have to memorize them later for little tests, its adorable and deceptively difficult, it even makes you prioritize speed which greatly helped my line confidence.

I sat through the photoshop class which was kind of painful since I've already had a few lectures during my student days on the topic, I've edited some memes and pictures using inferior software, and since I'm using krita the tools and shortcuts are not the same and I already adjust color sliders for my monster hunter armor pigments and I did a few of the exercises so when it comes to the later classes I'll let my hubris be the end of me.

The real tough spot I'm on is doing figure drawing on the tablet, I can do lines and wide ellipses kind of well if I'm not aiming somewhere specific and I can't trace if my life depended on it, so it ends up looking like this

That's been my first month so far, I intended to at the very least watch every video in term 1 just so I can make all the assignments a daily routine but learning the digital pen is taking all of my efforts right now, I started to practice on pencil+paper just so I don't get stuck on one thing and stop all of my progress, I did draw this streamer fanart once upon a time, its been a while, I should do that again.

Well I'll be back next month thank you all once again for your patience and all feedback and anything else, really exited to move forward no matter how hard it gets, this is my last lifeline, after all.

At the start of the month Marc posted a video with a 30-day art challenge, I waited until I was done to update my journey so here is the whole page with the results, the skull on day 30 is what I consider my first official drawing on digital.

I haven't done a lot of perspective drawings but I do get the idea, I'm ready to move on to term 2 where I'll focus a lot more on the perspective assignments, I have done figure drawing every day for a good chunk of the past month, I've done these on paper and pencil since I am more comfortable with that medium

30 seconds

60 seconds

To end this month's update, I had to backtrack a lot when I was attempting the photoshop 2 assignments and found out that krita is still on the early stages of vector images, I love the program but I had to switch to photoshop and its a lot smoother, took a while to go over the lessons again and get used to it but I shouldn't have any problems relating to software from now on.

here are my results, I don't think I fully understand how to use the smudge tool but it worked a lot better when using the brush Marc made, I'm practicing blending colors on the daily so hopefully things work out

I think that's all the big milestones for this month, I think I'm ready to move on since I think I understand the concepts in term 1, even though I'm not super confident about it, figure drawing was intimidating and I do it every day now, 'till next time!

Another month down, this one was a bit slow as I fell into a bit of a block/depressive state for a good couple of weeks, I'm ready to go on but before that, last thing I did was start the Draw a Box program which someone on the discord had pinned, the program is free and if anyone is interested I can't recommend it enough, as it goes a little more in depth on the fundamentals and some unspoken things that artists kind of forget or don't really do because they've been doing art for a long time, and I know that because no one talked about "ghosting" and it was sort of a new concept to me, even if very simple

here's the site for whom it may concern
https://drawabox.com/

and here's my homework for the first "lesson" to see what you'd be getting into
https://imgur.com/a/OrsvI4G

I'll be coming back to Mark's program after finishing this since the draw a box lessons are specifically made to strengthen one's fundamentals and getting checked every step of the way, its also not a complete program and its perfect for a fledgling like me trying to make sense of the most basic concepts.

Here's a doodle I done did, I'll be back next month with hopefully, more progress

Quick edit, forgot to mention that I've been doing warmups and strict practice every day for so long, I found it very hard to draw just for the fun of it, always remember to take a whole day if need be, to split study and casual doodling evenly, we should be doing this for the love of art at the end of the day after all.

New year new uh... Whatever last year was, it felt both short and long as I'm still thinking its 2021.

I did the 250 box challenge on draw a box and I'm still waiting on that to be reviewed, can't blame them since I'm on that poor track and not a patron or anything and there are LOTS of submissions every day, so while that's being processed I went looking for art books again.

I forget what the circumstances for this find where but I found this book by another Mark called "you can draw in 30 days" here is a link to the online pdf library I got it from, there are tons of other books there in pdf form, I wish I had known about this earlier

https://www.pdfdrive.com/you-can-draw-in-30-days-the-fun-easy-way-to-learn-to-draw-in-one-month-or-less-e157350838.html

The book has a similar structure to our Marc's 30-day drawing challenge and it goes a little bit more in depth and has some more examples for those of us who need a bit more guidance, I can do scrolls now thanks to this book, still struggling with shading though.

I don't think I did much of note this month other than trying to get some more practice on fundamentals, the end of the book I'm going through does end with drawing the human face so I will use that as a jumping off point to go back to ART school and anatomy 1, I'll be back next month and I'll leave with some doodles I posted on my socials, apologies for the quality since I took pictures with my phone and didn't scan them.

Happy New Year!