Johann - Art School Journey

Hello everyone !

My name is Johann, I am French and 37 years old. I work as a professional video game translator and have always been fascinated by mangas, illustrations, concept arts, etc. I recently joined Art School in order to improve faster. My end goal is to be able to produce professional looking illustrations and create my own manga... but it is not always easy to find the time (or motication) to practise. Thanks to the Art School community and Marc sensei, I hope I will be able to progress faster and create impressive art for everyone to enjoy

Here are some of my Anatomy term 1 exercices.
- I usually find that being able to place the pelvis makes or breaks the pose.
- I feel quite comfortable with the chest and limbs, but sometimes realized that some of them were wrong anyway, and had to remake them.
- I tend to draw the head at the end of the pose, it felt weird at first, but after a while, I realized that once everything is there, it makes things much easier.

I tried to find interesting poses, I hope these are not too suggestive

I worked a lot more over the past few months, but for the sake of clarity, I will wait for feedback about this particular assignement first. Advice and critics are welcome.

Here is my photobash assignement. It probably would take more time to produce something more "professionnal", but I think the end result could fool someone who does know much about Photoshop.
On the + side:

(+) The castle looks like one set, even though they are 2 different castles
(+) The girl kinda looks like she is part of the picture, maybe she should be darker. Her shadow looks good though lol.
(-) When I cut out the castle, I should have kept part of the ground to make it look like it is not right in the water, but I was too lazy to start over.
(-) The added shadow on the right part of the castle is probably too dark.

That was fun. My dream is to be able to be a good mangaka/illustrator, so I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I see the interest. I might try another photobash when I have more time.

Here are some cubes and 1 point perspective room practises (my kitchen and a SF bedroom). I had never learnt the actual rules of perspective before, but since I have been fiddling around for quite some time, it felt quite natural really quickly. I think everything is "correct" and does not break the laws of physics, but feel free to tell me if I am wrong.

At some point, I will need to learn to do all this in Photoshop. This SF bedroom would look quite cool with proper lineart and some light, but it feels really slow compared to pen and paper at the moment. I still use a screenless Wacom Intuos, so it feels like I am drawing with my left hand T_T

Comments and feedback is more than welcome !

Exercice CUBES 2p.jpg3840x2160 238 KB

Cubes 2pp.jpeg3507x2550 1.05 MB

SF room.jpeg3507x2550 1.29 MB

Kitchen 1pp.jpeg3507x2550 1.31 MB

Drawing them seperetaly felt quite easy, I had the feeling I was following a recipe. So I tried to stack them up. Overlapping convergence lines made it quite difficult to draw balanced cubes, but it was more time-consuming than anything else. I think I will dive into the term 2 assignments soon. I would like to remake the Sci-Fi room in Photoshop with more details and light too, I feel like I could get a much polished end result. I just need to find the time (and the courage when I have time - what a lazy bastard).

Thanks ! One of my friends just lent me a screen drawing tablet, so I will polish some of them and try figure drawing with it too. Really excited about it, because it feels really hard with the Intuos compared to pen & paper. I just need to finish my work first T_T

Hello everyone. I am quite busy drawing/painting these days, so I need to find some time to post. I assume this is a good problem to have

Anyway, one of my friends lent me his screen tablet Huion Kamvas 16. As I said, I am really not comfortable figure drawing with my Intuos (because no screen and shitty eye/coordination), so I was really eager to try the screen tablet. As expected, things are much smoother. However, this made me realize that using a pen tablet is much closer to painting than drawing. I like SOME of my figure drawings with pen and paper, but never managed to get a satsfying result with a pen tablet. I realized this is beacause I try to draw the way I would with a pen. After a lot of die and retry, I now understand that I need to set up my brush if I want to do that.

What are YOUR settings when you do figure drawing ? Here is what I got with a 5 pixels brush and sensitivity ON for everything. I might remove opacity sensitivity in the near future.

First two are 30 second poses. I find 2 of them are pretty sharp (will we agree on that ? ). It makes me realize that sharp angles for clear defined shapes really give a nice feel.

3 and 4 of 1mn gesture. They are more accurate and complete, but lack the expressiveness of the sharp 30s ones.

Last two are 5 minutes. I added the reference for "beautiful slender model" as it made me realize that when polishing, the devil is in the details. I placed everything by eye and did not check features all together. In the end, everything is too far apart, or too short, or too something. I guess this is why I find men much easier to draw, so many muscles and landmarks to place that you can't have HUGE fails.

Tell me what you think. Any constructive criticism is welcome.