Mr. Sun - Art School Journey

Hello. My name is Mr. Sun. ...well that's a temporary name until I can think of a better web name... but anyway.

I've been drawing for about 3 years now, well more like 9 but before 2020 I was doing fruitless practice, meaning I didn't take the fundamentals seriously, didn't understand their merit and never learned anything the Community College course taught me before I dropped out. Before that I was making terribly drawn caricatures of people at work, probably because making someone laugh was the only way I could feel validated for my lack of skill at that point. It wasn't until 2020 I picked up a book called drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and did the exercises it told me to before I could actually feel like it was possible to learn how to draw. But 3 years later I still find myself struggling, although copying something has become a lot easier than it did 3 years ago. What used to take me 8 hours of erasing and redrawing now only takes 2 hours! But now I want to break free from copying something exactly and try to draw from imagination which I struggle a lot with. So I watched a bunch of Youtube videos and ended finding Marc Brunet's videos and ended up purchasing the Art School. Though admittedly, it's been well over a year since I purchased it. The videos are good and informative, it's just me, I procrastinate a lot and space out a lot so it's been difficult for me to complete. I also didn't feel too comfortable sharing my work with strangers so I didn't make an account until recently... Got too comfortable on Twitter posting to the same handful of followers. But I haven't seen much improvement in the past year so I'm finally stepping out of my comfort zone and participating with this art school community by posting my assignments here.

Well, I did post a drawing here before. I asked for some feedback for my figure drawing and a user named brohawkx gave me a lot of helpful tips. Although I was eager to apply the helpful tips he provided to fix the drawings I posted, I think I want to finish this Art School program and really understand the fundamentals before I continue. After all, I can't drawing from imagination that well because I don't understand how to construct shapes and create guidelines properly still. Most of my drawings have been just copying from reference and trying to copy it as close as possible. I redid all the assignments up until Perspective which is where I last left off and things are starting to finally click a little bit. Also if you are interested to see what type of drawings I've done, I'll add them to an Imgur Gallery at the end of this post after the first batch of assigments.

Term 1 Assignments

Pen Control

Well we can see I don't have the straightest or most circular lines... though pen pressure seems to make sense to me.

Image Adjustments

I don't have Photoshop so I tried to do my best with Clip Studio Paint but it was difficult to get the last girl to match.

Photoshop Assignment

I don't have Photoshop I can't do most of what's being asked here. The Liquify tool doesn't seem to be as good as it is in Photoshop. I did mess with Photoshop a bit when I was in High School and even took a semester of Graphic Design so I do know a little bit when it comes to messing with layers and cloning and stuff so I decided to skip this assignment since I felt like it didn't align with my goals for now.

Nude Figure Drawing 1-3

Action lines, cylinders on photo references, 10 skeletons over photo refernces

Sorry if it looks like a confusing mess. I wanted to try to do all 3 of the first assignements at once.

Nude Figure Drawing 4

5 Skeletons with cylinders as limbs based on photo reference

cylinders from ref.jpg1731x4030 491 KB

I think I hit my limit for uploads per post so I'll cut it off here and continue in the next post. But as promised, here's some of my favorite drawings (and least favorite...) from 2020-2023. There's 48 images in this link so I hope I won't take up much of your time.

https://imgur.com/a/0LFyKrB

Also I did try the 30 Day Learn to Draw Challenge. But I think I rushed it too much and didn't fully understand the assignments given... an bad habit of mine... here's 4 of my drawings from that challenge... I tried to be too funny instead of understanding the challenge... but I do like how these drawings came out and it surprised me that I could draw like that.

https://imgur.com/a/eN9hkAj

Continued

Nude Figure Drawing 5

Proportion Grid

1st attempt, following the video

2nd attempt, trying to follow the video faster

3rd (or 9thish?) from memory

Nude Figure Drawing 6

30 min Gesture Practice

Still not quite getting the hang of it... try to capture the flow, not the contour... tricky... I did 30 sec poses for 30 min. Bought a lot of reference photos, might as well put them to good use

Nude Figure Drawing 7

Full Figure from reference, using measurement tools

I'm not too fond of this assignment. I don't quite get how to use measuring tools accuarately... what I did was cut out her head, duplicated it until her height and then just marked them as well as marking the areas where her body stops. This is probably not the correct way to do it...

Perspective 1 Assignments

1: Convergence lines, vanishing points over street photos

I used the Perspective Ruler tool in CSP. But I wonder if it's not that reliable... Some photos make sense but others I found not quite matching the perspective lines.

2: Draw cubes and sculpted shapes in 1 and 2 point perspective. This was suprisingly fun.

That's all for now. Working on the room assignment now.

Also I just realized this allowed more than 5 images... guess it was the other section that has a limit...