Ivo S. - Art Journey

[ivomdasilva]

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!

[Kosmonaut]

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

[ivomdasilva]

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.

[ivomdasilva]

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?

[Kosmonaut]

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.

[ivomdasilva]

So I went through your Art Journey and it's really cool to see your evolution on gesture drawing! You definitely put in the work haha.

I have to point out your ribcage circle is wrong in your gesture

This is something I'm only now noticing, thanks! When doing gesture, both the ribcage and the pelvis are afterthoughts to me. That is why in some of the poses you'll see them and in others you wont. I'll try to be more considerate of them when doing gesture from now on!

on the proportions sheet you need to make the female's waist wider

I thought it was wider in the 4th attempt, but I can see that maybe you mean the part of the waist coming from the ribcage?

I hope this helps answer your questions that you had and again sorry its so long.

It's all good! Your advice has been very helpful so far!

[ivomdasilva]

The following are the perspective 1 exercises:

First the 1 point perspective simple cubes:

2 point perspective simple cubes:

And finally the complex shapes with 2 point perspective:

I did a very simple drawing of my room in perspective because it really doesn't have much going on at the moment. I'm thinking I could go back and add some more detail to it or just try and create a new one that looks either a bit more futuristic or primal.

The street with three buildings. I added some figures to the image to see if the proportion and sizes were alright and for the most part I think they are.

Also because I liked this drawing I decided to actually paint it. I was going for a late afternoon/sunset type of feel:

This was not my first time doing perspective exercises. In fact since I start to study art more seriously, I have noticed that I was having a lot of trouble with drawing in perspective and so I decided to focus more of my studies on it. The next step in perspective for me before tacking on perspective 2 is going to be to add more complex shapes and details in 2 point and 1 point perspective.

[Kosmonaut]

This is a lot of practice keep up the good work! I like the painting you did towards the bottom. for adding details I'm sure you already know but you can do it without trying to conform to the perspective and warp it onto what area you want the design afterward so you don't have to do it the hard way. great work overall!

[Kosmonaut]

I can see that maybe you mean the part of the waist coming from the ribcage?

Yes that is what I meant when I pointed that out.

it's really cool to see your evolution on gesture drawing! You definitely put in the work haha.

Thanks that means a lot! I used to do it every day for an hour but that changed to three times a week, and now I'm trying a new schedule of once a week.

When doing gesture, both the ribcage and the pelvis are afterthoughts to me.

It's all good just thought I would point those out for when you get more comfortable with doing 30 sec and 1 min. gesture.

[ivomdasilva]

I'm back with more Nude Figure Drawing today. For the last couple of days I've been gathering some tips and seeing how to improve on this, so here are the results:

I went back to the video regarding Gesture drawing because I felt like I was missing something. I realize it wasn't so much what I was missing, but what I was adding. I stripped back a bit on what goes into my gesture drawing which means, less lines and less shapes.
I also started to randomize the images. Before I always started with a photo where the model was sitting cross legged (as you'll see below) and I think it's a very tricky pose. Randomizing doesn't guarantee a simpler pose, but it felt much better for some reason.

Drawing the body on the grid felt easier last week then this week. I think I started over analyzing where to place the dots and how to connect them. The most trouble I have with this is when drawing the circle on the head. It always seems much bigger than it should be. I've also noticed that the faces tend to be more to the right. This is probably due to the circle problem.

Lastly, the proportion exercise:

So before posting here I was trying to do this type of exercise by measuring with pen and thumb. Not only was that a very hard process when using just an IPad, but the results were also not that great.
Today I decided to implement some tips given here (thanks Kosmonaut!) and I'm happy with the results! I used some line guides to box in the pose, and after that I was able to measure distances between reference points much easier. I still used the pen+thumb method somewhat, but I think this time it came out alright!

[ivomdasilva]

Back again with more proportion drawings.

Each took me about two hours. I'm trying not to use too many guides to measure the distances, however because of that I'm constantly checking if the proportions are ok. I check the proportions by overlapping what I've drawn with the picture I'm using.
I had some trouble finding a good starting point for both drawings, but it became easier from there to draw the rest.

As always feedback is greatly appreciated!

[Kosmonaut]

Use as many guides as you need to build up your observation, and if it's a style choice with the shading then ignore this but I would try to use a smoother/larger brush for doing the shading on the figures so you can build up line and shape confidence. These figures look good though so good job.

[ivomdasilva]

Thanks Kosmo, I'll keep that in mind the next time I do a proportion study.

I wanted to start by sharing a drawing I did on Sunday:

It was a a quick sketch based on reference (2/3 hours). Most of that time was spent on coloring and effects.

I also did a few more 2 point perspective drawings. I tried to introduce more complex shapes and some story to them.

I haven't finished coloring this one so I'm sharing just the line art for now.

I have been doing some of the term 2 photoshop exercises as well:

This is the simple shape with gradients monster exercise. Now in procreate it's not as simple as in photoshop. For those that don't know procreate doesn't have a gradient fill tool like photoshop so to get to the same effect I saw a few tutorials and came up with this pipeline:

1. Using the select tool make a shop, fill it with the base color by dropping it.
2. Then, Alpha Lock that layer.
3. Create a new layer where you'll have your gradient.
4. In this new layer, make a shape with the selection tool, and fill it using the Color Fill option on the select screen (or just drop the color you want)
5. Use the Feather option and choose a feather amount that will fade the color.
   Note: Applying Gaussian Blur/Motion Blur to this layer might also work.
6. After you have your "gradient color" select that layer and apply a clipping mask.

And you are done! Now you can move the shape around and it will only show where the layer below has been colored. This is due to the Alpha lock option we selected previously along with the clipping mask.

If there is a better way to do a gradient in Procreate, please let me know!

I still need to do the text exercise! Which again in Procreate is not so simple, but I've seen a few tutorials and have some ideas on how to do it.

However the smart box art is impossible. There is no such functionality, and seeing as that is the goal of the exercise, I'll skip it.

So I was actually able to complete all the exercises on page 2. These were easier as they only deal with brush control and don't require any special features.

I had done smiliar exercises when I was going through Ctrl+Paint tutorials. They are always a fun challenge. You can go and color pick and correct as long as you want to.

The brush exercise was also the first time I did a procreate brush from scratch and I'm happy with the result. One of the options when creating a brush allows for a hue change with each stroke. Might not be useful but I had to give it a try!

And this is what I've been doing in the last few days.

As always feedback is always appreciated!