Kektet - Art School Journey

Hello everyone,
I've been interested in concept art and illustration for as long as I can recall. I've been spending every spare moment I have lately to try to improve my art. I'll be posting whenever I have a collection of practice for critique. For starters, here are a bunch of value studies and sketches from about the last two weeks of practice. I haven't started any assignments yet (I am also in university right now) but I figured it would be good to share what I have and get some feedback.

A few more bits and bobs of practice:

Hi WeirdOwl!
Thank you for your kind words and for the link as well, I'll check it out.
The smaller thumbnails have better value reads because I figured out how the value scale shrinks as stuff recedes into the background. I was originally confused about lighter colors in the foreground until I watched one of Marc's videos where he explained that the foreground has the widest value range, and it shrinks from there.

I had a little time today to devote to playing around. I went back into the tree house idea and reworked the values and composition. I feel like its stronger now, but there's still so much room to improve. Had a blast though!

For comparison, the original:

Cheers, lovelies!

Managed to get some head frame practice in. After about 50 heads I'm sort of starting to get the 2/3 ellipse ratio naturally, but it is still difficult. The downward facing 3/4 angle gave me a lot of grief, so I'm going to need to check the vid again and focus on that 'til I get it.

Updated with some silhouettes for fun. They are all kinds of messed up, but I'm trying to balance the rigorous, tedious stuff with some exploratory fun things. I'll be doing more silhouettes as well, because I feel like they can teach a lot about form language and getting a solid read.

Thank you! I needed to break up the monotony of drawing heads and torsos, and more heads and torsos... so I wanted to see how many different silhouettes I could bop out from one pose. It was a really fun exploration of breaking out the form and form language. I will likely take one or two of these and turn them into lineart, etc, to slowly evolve a pipeline.

Cheers!

Update on silhouettes: took one and attempted to render it out. Got about a third of the way sorted but I need to get some sleep... class tomorrow.

Cheers, lovelies!

Hey, thank you!
Yep, all of the silhouettes were drawn with a brush/lasso tool. Sometimes its easier to visualize volumes when massing in blocks with the lasso, so I use it a lot!

Further attempts at rendering. Good grief the human face is hard. Need to spend way more time with reference. Much work to be done to get this piece somewhere nice.

Heheh, yeah I did but funny you should mention that cuz I'm changing it back! The neckline in the silhouette is proportional, but when I filled it in to render I messed it up. So ima erase the head section entirely and start over, keeping the original neckline and head proportion