Hi everyone! My name is Ivo and I've been studying art for the past few months after being burned out from programming and software development in general.

I started by studying art from some sub reddits, which eventually led me to ctrlPaint videos which then led to me finding about Marcs art videos on youtube. I recently started Art School, finishing Term 1 last week (at least the videos).

I'm using procreate on the ipad and for the most part I have been able to follow the classes. I did however have some trouble with the photoshop editing exercises (as you'll see) and with the proportions exercise.

Starting with the photoshop photo editing exercises:

For the next set of exercises I tried to count the number of tries until I got it right or quit.
I spent a few hours trying to get the colors right in that last image before I eventually quit and moved on to another subject. Using Procreates tools to adjust the levels, brightness, etc. was not easy. Maybe it was just me but I felt like I was spending a lot of time messing with the values and not getting closer to what it was supposed to be.

The next exercise was combining images. I combined some buildings to create some sort of village on the left, and I combined two castle to create one on the right. To better blend those images with the background, I tried to make use of fog, snow, some grass and parts of the sky. I also had to correct the colors and the brightness levels of both images.

After that we have the distortion exercises. I think these came out pretty good with the exception of the alien. Much like the color/levels correct exercise from before I tried for a few hours before moving on.

And that is all for photo editing exercises. I think so far it's the subject where I can see photoshop being an actual necessity. Regarding photo editing itself, I see its uses and how it can help us artists to add an extra touch to our art to make it more interesting

Ill be posting the rest of term 1 exercises, I just need to edit some of them before posting.

Im excited to get your feedback on what to improve and I wanted to end this post with a few questions:

  • How do you know when to move to term 2?
  • For those using procreate did you have the same or similar difficulties?
  • As you start moving forward to other terms, what exercises do you keep doing? For example the gesture drawing exercises are labeled as daily practice but those are the only ones I found so far with that label.

Thanks again everyone, and see ya soon!

Welcome to the forums! so for your questions

  • You can move on to term 2 when you think your ready to move on and you feel like you understand the material enough to move on. There isn't really an exact indicator of when to move on and the same thing goes for the videos in each term. You also don;t have to go in order either you can go to a specific video that you want to learn first and completely skip the other videos its just that going in order from term 1 builds up your understanding of basic fundamentals so that the later terms build up in difficulty but they are easier to learn and understand
  • I don't use procreate so I can't offer my input on this one
  • for daily exercises I am on term 2 and almost ready to get to term 3 but I practice Gesture every week and same thing goes for figures but I want to try to dedicate a month to do those by themselves because they take so long. daily exercises can be things that you do until they become easy as well like the skeletons I did that for 4 days and then once it felt too easy I stopped doing them and moved on to the next exercise so its mainly about what your understanding of that exercise is, while I would argue the man take away is that gesture and figure drawing are the main things you take from term 1 and practice all through out your life to improve in those skills if you want to focus on characters

Sorry for this being so long but hope this helps and answers most of your questions

I really appreciate your feedback Kosmonaut!
Regarding your first point, I thought about that as well, how I should move on when I feel like I'm ready, I just wasn't sure how to tell when that is. But since there are different subjects per term, I think I might start moving forward in some where I feel like I have a good understanding as you said.

Gesture and proportions are for sure a week point for me (as you'll see in the post below). So those are exercises I'll keep doing for sure.
The difficulty I have with gesture I think really comes down to the time you have to complete them.
With proportion I can't seem to get the hang of it. Do you have any tips for that? I'm drawing on a tablet with the reference in the same canvas where I'm drawing. I tried measuring the lengths with the tip of the pencil and thumb like Marc showed in the video, but marking those distances in the drawing is very tough.

Here are the Nude Drawing exercises:

I cant show the exercise of finding the action line, joints and cylinders because most of my references are NSFW.

But here is the male/female body drawn in a grid. For the 1st and 2nd attempts I had to rewatch the video and pausing it to make sure I was doing it right. For the 3rd and 4th attempt I did most of it without having to compare it to previous attempts. I had a bit of difficulty placing the female waist but in the end it came out alright.

With gesture drawing, I think I can see some improvement from the first day to the fourth day. There is a bit more detail in those last ones.
1st Day:

4th Day:

Proportion exercise:

And lastly, the proportion exercise. This is where I have the most difficulty. I'm drawing with the reference in the same canvas. I measured the lengths with the tip of the pencil and thumb like Marc showed in the video, but marking those distances in the drawing is very tough. I start by marking the head length through the whole figure, then I look for points of interest in the figure and try to measure the length with the tip of the pencil+thumb technique and make a point/mark in the drawing. The last part is where I have a hard time. The points I make are always off.

Any tips for when drawing with proportions?

We all move at our own pace so move on whenever your ready to go to the next subject and you feel like you understand the previous topic good enough like you said. for your question about gesture it depends on a couple of things like milage and the amount of time you have. Gesture is meant to capture the energy of the pose while loosely focusing on good proportions but not too much detail. I started out doing gesture for 30 seconds and all I had time to do was a skeleton with a pelvis and ribcage circle but now that I have been doing gesture for a little over two months consistently I have worked my way up for 30 sec to 1 min and then to where I am now at 2 minutes. two minutes gives me enough time to get mostly everything down and still focus on proportions to make sure they are correct, but I only can notice proportions in my gesture because I have done it some much before so it's mostly about doing it a lot and analyzing and noticing things as you do it more which help spot mistakes. Proportions are also a struggle for most artist in general so no worries there.
- tl:dr gesture is something you do a lot imo to notice and get better with proportions and it depends on how long you do each pose. If it helps you can go to my page and look at my earlier post of doing 30 second and 1 minute gesture compared to my 2 minute getsure now(my page is Retro if that helps)

  • You also don't have to worry about posting nudity here either nudity is perfectly fine since your studying from it so post those skeleton exercises!

  • for your post below I have to point out your ribcage circle is wrong in your gesture thing of it more as an egg shape or look up an actual ribcage and that should be close to how the shape should look. Your getsure in of itself is very expressive and you have good line confidence so keep up the good work there but If you want to try a longer then feel free to try 2 min. but don't get to caught up in the details. better proportions come with time but yours look pretty good for the most part. on the proportions sheet you need to make the female's waist wider that's the main thing that sticks out to me. and finally measurement you don't have to use the holding the pen at an arms-length technique all you have to do since your doing it digitally is make a line on a new layer and move that line around to check for measurement/angle relationships when you are measuring. and like I said above proportions comes with the more you do it so at first it will take a lot longer and look bad but if you actively study and analyze the reference and the measurements it becomes much easier and faster the more you do it. I haven't done a lot of figure drawings but the point still stands imo.
    I hope this helps answer your questions that you had and again sorry its so long.