Musignis - My Art School Journey

musignis 2024-02-23 03:20:57 UTC #1

Hello everyone. Just call me Musignis (grammatically incorrect Latin for "fire rat"). I'm a newbie who'd like to become a professional digital illustrator/webcomic artist, developing an art style influenced by '90s anime/manga.

Before I began the Art School I already taught myself with a couple of e-books, not to mention following a few free lessons here and there on YT (including some videos from Marc) for a couple of months.

I realized however that I can only go so far (not a lot) with free lessons and I feel confused and lost self-educating myself (even with books), and thus decided to begin my journey here at the Art School. I look forward to making progress (even if it's slow) with you all!

BTW, I use Clip Studio Paint Pro 2.0, and my drawing tablet is Veikk S640, though I plan to replace it with a Wacom tablet sometime in the future.

musignis 2024-02-23 03:23:03 UTC #2

TERM 1, Week 1 Assignments
Because of external circumstances I had to spend more than 7 days to do these.

Pen Control: I repeated this every day (except Saturday, Sunday, or holidays) for an hour - and I still feel I didn't get this completely right.

Image Adjustment: I already had brief experience using GIMP for stuff like color balancing, but not on CSP. 1-3 are very easy, but 4 is definitely the hardest.

mitsuki-youko 2024-02-23 03:32:21 UTC #3

Heyos! welcome to the forums! fire rat sounds so cool XD

glad to see another future webcomic artist on here

daceronine 2024-02-23 06:57:45 UTC #4

Heyo! Welcome! Also a huge anime/manga fan from the 90s, also working to do some webcomic manga stuff and ALSO using CSP 2.0! Always glad to see someone joining in this journey.

Bests of luck!

patrycja.lerch 2024-02-23 09:47:33 UTC #5

Welcome to the forums!

Rodo 2024-02-24 03:59:12 UTC #6

Welcome aboard!!

Pattu_w 2024-02-24 22:33:31 UTC #7

Welcome to the forums! Good work on those!

Hey, progress it's progress don't matter the speed, you got this!

musignis 2024-03-06 05:48:37 UTC #8

TERM 1, Week 2, Combining Images Assignment
Managed to finish this one first, so I decided to submit it now.

As for Selections/Liquify/Healstamp and Figure Drawing assignments 1-3, unfortunately I couldn't start yet due to lack of time - once again life gets in the way.

daceronine 2024-03-06 20:35:34 UTC #9

I feel ya, life tends o do that. Any pace is fine though.
The brick castle fits in well, but the japanese style castle kinda feels out of place there, especially since the angle doesn't match the other castle, or the lighting. Still, the point was to get the hang of editing, cutting, pasting and fusing in, and it seems that was well done.

musignis 2024-03-21 01:57:52 UTC #10

TERM 1, Week 2, Selections/Liquify/Heal/Stamp Assignment
Finally, I found the time to do this one.
This is surprisingly much easier and faster than I expected (except for the apples - had to redo that a few times).

musignis 2024-05-08 02:19:09 UTC #11

TERM 1, Week 3, Daily Nude Figure Drawing assignments 1-3

Hopefully I won't take yet another 2 weeks to finish gesture drawing exercises...

musignis 2024-05-24 02:23:16 UTC #12

TERM 1, Week 3, Daily Gesture Drawing (30-sec) assignment

This is surprisingly much tougher than I expected - in the end this still took me 2 weeks and clearly I still didn't take my best shot.

Gordon003 2024-05-24 09:21:28 UTC #13

Don't worry about it. Always happen to us when we see our most recent work and instantly point out mistakes and knew we should have done.

Rather than worry about not giving your best shot, you can reframe it as you tried it and the next time will be better. Hope that helps

Gesture drawing wise, I think you have the right idea (get the line of action) but I can see you drawing multiple sub-line (small line) to represent a bigger line. Just embrace your expressiveness and draw long flowing line.

musignis 2024-05-25 05:44:47 UTC #14

Hey, thanks! Clearly I was worried (too much I'd say) about the results to the point that I forgot to - and I'm paraphrasing - trust the process and take baby steps along the way. So yeah, I'll keep this in mind.

musignis 2024-06-03 03:56:30 UTC #15

After over a week of hiatus (house got real noisy = I don't have time to practice/study), I'm back, trying to do the lineart assignments (where you copy 5 characters)... and I got stuck for the first time.

Mainly because I have no idea how to do it without succumbing to the temptation to trace - there's no point to tracing if you don't follow it with a non-traced copy, to paraphrase Marc in his recent video about tracing - and the impression I got looking at other students' portfolio is that they don't draw "over" the original illustrations. So, yeah.

It may well be that I'm just being too hard on myself again... (can't afford to go too easy either, though!)

musignis 2024-06-30 00:56:40 UTC #16

Bad news: decided to skip lineart copying because I don't feel confident enough - got stressed/distracted by the details. I'll give it a try later in week 7 (if I can, anyways).

Good news?

TERM 1, WEEK 4, Daily Nude Figure assignments 5 and 6 (1 minute)

Four months just to get to week 4... wow. Just wow.

Anyways, proportion grid drawing is surprisingly much easier than I thought - I didn't get it right the first time, but overtime I felt more confident, able to add more details.

That being said, doing 1-minute gesture drawing made me realize that the drawing tablet (which doesn't have a graphics display) I have simply isn't as good as one that does have a display (or at least that's the impression I get) - it's very likely I'll take another hiatus until I can buy a new tablet, and when I do I might redo some of the assignments to see how I'd perform.

mitsuki-youko 2024-06-30 20:12:52 UTC #17

noice! keep up the good work!

musignis 2024-08-13 01:23:11 UTC #18

Finally got myself a Wacom graphics tablet, and after redoing previous assignments, I'm pleased to report it's much better than the old Veikk tablet I used before - I don't need to constantly look up to my monitor any longer now. Anyways! On to...

TERM 1, WEEK 4, Pen Control Practice (exercises 1-5) + Pespective 1 assignments 1 & 2 (don't mind the typos regarding 1/2-point perspectives)
I had to redo assignment 1 because while I was re-checking the results yesterday, I found that I missed some convergence lines. I probably should've done exercises 6-10 of the top 10 daily exercises as well, but again, I'm not confident in my skills yet - exercise 5 is as far as I can do at the moment.

JimSt 2024-08-13 05:03:07 UTC #19

Good to see you are still working!
Unsolicited Advice: For copying/studying other people's work, you might want to try using a grid. On a layer above the image, draw out a grid of squares. Save a copy of that file, then add a solid white layer and hide the image. That way you have an image the same size as the original with identical grids on both. Then you go square by square and copy what you see. I learned that in art class back in high school and has been helpful when I'm trying to replicate something.

musignis 2024-08-26 02:12:17 UTC #20

TERM 1, WEEK 5, Nude Figure assignments 4 and 7 + Perspective 1 assignment 2 (simple structures)

Used measurement tools for both nude figure assignments. #4 is easy, but #7... although I was eventually able to match the figures with the references, I still haven't fully understood how to use 'em (especially measuring relationships and important lines - accidentally deleted the layer containing the halfway point, and I only realized AFTER I closed the file, whoops; at least negative spaces are easier to use). If you guys know how a simpler way to do this, please let me know (or at least provide an explanation to help me understand better)

Tried drawing a cylinder in 2-point perspective but it didn't go so well.