Thanks for the welcome! Always an inspiring sign to see other people working on their journey! Also, being able to go to other students' threads and see the progress! You all are amazing!

Here are the Photoshop Assignments done in Krita:

Here are my Term 1 Week 2 Nude Figure Drawing / cylinder breakdown exercises. Please feel free to comment if you have any tips! Thanks!

It's time to check in with my fellow artists! I hope you all had productive / relaxing weeks, as per your intent.

I was working on Term 1 Week 3 and here are some samples of the daily practices.

penControl_10_exercises.png3508x2480 2.12 MB

The Art School exercises were the priority and those other pieces fell behind. But I want to honor those other efforts because they were actually part of my annual plan before I managed to get the Art School course for Xmas. Plus, anything that I learn from either set of practices/goals are going to benefit the others.
So for the next week, I'm shifting gears a little bit and will be working on a comic style illustration, completing a head sculpture, working on lower body anatomy, and the 5 Character Studies. So basically playing catch-up, but I plan on maintaining a set of daily warm-up exercises and probably some figure drawing. But most importantly, I am aiming to take it easy to avoid getting burnt out.

I also want to mention that I spent way too much time looking at pen displays. I think I have determined that the XP Pen Artist Pro 16 Gen2 will fit my available space and has the desired features. That said, I won't be able to get one for a couple months or until I sell off some of my board games and my Xbox. But before I commit to that I am planning on doing as many things as I can with traditional media. I actually did some today and they felt great.

I'll see you in week!
-Jim

Thanks @daceronine !
You know, you gotta use the grindstone to hone the blade...

Comic style is my fall back. I have problems with that process over the course of an entire book, if I'm the sole creator. By the time I get to lettering it, I hate everything about the story, my lineart, my inking choices, and the color choice.

Yet when I go to make a painting, I'm thinking in comic layouts and use the pencil/inks/color step process. I'm trying to make the leap to a painterly style, but those lines are soooo cooozy... lol

Here's a page from the last comic I did back in 2018:

Hey ya'll!
Weekly Check-in Time!
Term 1 Week 3.5
Overall, it was a very busy week and I was not able to complete everything I had hoped. The goal was to finish up the material from Marc's free year-long drawing recommendations for April and May, finish the 5 character art studies, paint on a personal project, and maintain daily pen control and gestures. I was able to keep the daily stuff in place for the most part, complete one character study and do rough layouts of the others, get the general layout down for the personal project, finish my head sculpture, do some color studies, study the foot & lower body, and do a decent set of 2min gestures. For the most part, I used pencil and paper to do most of the work, only using my graphics tablet on occasion - mostly to make sure I wasn't going to suffering from neglecting it.

And now, the photo dump. And man, now that I see it all like this… It was a lot. LOL.

Five Character Lineart Studies - Only completed one, but sketched in some of the others.

01_cohen.png2480x3508 1.31 MB

And lastly, one of the blocked in designs I was trying out for my personal project.

So yes, it was a full week and fairly productive, so I deserved to take a bit of a break on Saturday and Sunday. However, even with taking a week to catch-up, it was just way too much trying to juggle the two learning programs at the same time as I attempted to make some personal artwork. So I am going to put the free program on the back burner and focus on the Art School curriculum, and perhaps get some work in on the personal projects as time permits. Bottom line is that I've got to let go of the 2024 plans I made before receiving Art School for Christmas. Besides, I doubt that the free program covers the same stuff and probably not at the same depth. So I'll pick up with Week 4 now.

Another factor that got thrown into the mix on Friday was the arrival of my new Huion Kamvas Pro 16 (FHD) and the acquisition of Corel Painter 2023 through Humble Bundle. I decided against the XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 Gen 2 due to hobby budget issues, as I also need to upgrade my GPU sometime soon. I think if I ever start making money from my art I will probably need to re-evaluate the display anyway. I like the Kamvas well enough, but there were some challenges that I've already noticed. Most are technical blockers that are too boring to mention here and honestly almost feel like distractions and excuses - which I find annoying. So I may not try to resolve those issues as long as I can still use everything reliably. However, Krita does not like my current setup and becomes unresponsive with brush strokes so I'm working on re-learning Painter (which I haven't really used since Painter 11) and trying to find the tools to match what I have been using in Krita. So that complication has been a little frustrating, as I'd like to keep using Krita because it is on my Android tablet so there would be a sense of platform stability. So there's some adjustment there…

Also, I want to mention that I find analog drawing to be way more satisfying and significantly less frustrating than drawing with either graphics tablet, android tablet, or pen display. It may just be because that's how I learned to draw in the first place or it could be that it has higher resolution, more intuitive interface, and amazing haptic/auditory feedback. So while I am definitely going to use my new device, I have a feeling that I'm still going to have a preference to pencil and ink using traditional media.

Man, what a week...
-Jim