Natalie - Art School Journey

[Lightning_Flower]

Hello! My name is Natalie. I recently started my journey in ART School and I'm very excited to become a better--or rather hopefully, a successful artist! I've been a traditional graphite artist since middle school and I have lots of experience in this kind of work. Last year, my father gifted me with my first drawing tablet: the XP Pen Artist 24 Pro. Now, with the power of digital art in my hand, I want to become a professional artist!

I am currently in Term 1 and I am working on all of the assignments related to figure drawing. I plan to post my progress here and ask many questions I will soon have. Guidance and feedback will be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for supporting me on my journey, and special thanks to Marc Brunet for ART School!

[andysawesomemovies]

Hey Natalie! Pleased to meet you!

[patrycja.lerch]

Welcome Natalie!

[Lightning_Flower]

Well...I've come to a problem at this time. My next assignment is titled "Study (copy) 5 characters from professional artists/shows/games you like (lineart only)" and I am already having trouble with this one. I don't think I should move forward to the "perspective" part of this term until I can do this assignment correctly.

I drew at least two characters so far, but they were completely out of proportion and I drew them a lot bigger than my reference image (I completely discarded those projects out of frustration). When I started art for the first time many years back, I always managed to draw my subjects too large and out of proportion, so this is a reoccurring issue that has always followed me around. Here is what I'm working on currently for this assignment...

Credits to Nintendo for this render and character.
Before this class, especially during the year when I first started art, I would normally just pick a place to start drawing (like the head, for example) and draw the character from there. Then I would end up using the whole paper to draw the upper half of the character because I would draw the head way too big...and I would have to be stuck with it for the rest of the drawing. Now for the first time, I'm working in Photoshop and I can have the reference character perfectly side-by-side with my drawing. I should have been able to draw in proportion better than I ever used to...but I was wrong. Now here is my third try at copying a character--Agent 8 from "Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion." As you can see, I am drawing too close to the perimeter of the box, and even going outside of it completely!

I came back to this video again...and I'm still not understanding how Marc Brunet does this so perfectly and in proportion (there was an explanation for his drawing of the left foot being outside of his box). Measuring heads doesn't seem to help me as I'm not really sure what to do with that information. He uses simple circles to mark where the joints should go. I tried doing that but ended up placing them all the wrong places possible.

Is there a solution to this? Or is this one of those things that I have to practice and fail at over and over again until I can get it right? If it is just a matter of practice, I will practice a full figure line art drawing from a reference every day until I feel comfortable enough to move on with the rest of the term, but that could take a long while...

Thanks in advance for the help!

[Lightning_Flower]

Thank you!

[Lightning_Flower]

Thank you for the welcome!

[mitsuki-youko]

eyy welcome to the forums!

[patrycja.lerch]

Take your time to understand it. You will get better at measuring after a while. Sometimes your eyes can deceive you so it's good to measure it. You can draw heads over the ref to have all the measurements and then draw next to it.

He uses simple circles to mark where the joints should go. I tried doing that but ended up placing them all the wrong places possible

That's what the heads are for. Should the knee be at 5 heads or maybe 4,5. It also goes for putting things horizontally

You will get the hang of it.

[Pattu_w]

Welcome to the forums!

still not understanding how Marc Brunet does this so perfectly and in proportion (there was an explanation for his drawing of the left foot being outside of his box). Measuring heads doesn't seem to help me as I'm not really sure what to do with that information.

The thing with the measure is that is not a rule, it's more like a general guideline for you check your drawing against. On the beginning or eyes deceive us a lot, so those are just to help us see what is really there.

Think i went a bit overboard here, but i made a step by step of how i usually approach those kind of studies (measure and copy studies). Hope it helps.

[Lightning_Flower]

I will take my time then! Thank you for your answer!

[Lightning_Flower]

Thanks for the welcome!
Wow, you made this whole step-by-step process for me?! Thank you so much! I'm gonna start practicing now!

[Lightning_Flower]

OK, since my last update on drawing characters, I kept practicing on this assignment as much as I could. Today, I tried drawing a new character entirely and...

I think I did a little better than before. : )

Looking at this drawing as a whole, I see a lot of mistakes: Josha's legs are too close together, her left arm and baggy sleeve are still drawn out of proportion, etc. For now, I'm gonna have to give myself grace when it comes to drawing hands, but everything else can be drawn better and I can improve from this, I think.

Again, thanks for the help! I'm gonna continue with the rest of the term now, but I'll keep practicing this as well!

[snakker]

Welcome and nice goong, you are doing great

Cheers

[Lightning_Flower]

Starting this assignment on perspective! I've kept my messy layer hidden. I'm going to add a lot more curves and organic shapes another day to balance out all these straight lines and pointy edges.

[Lightning_Flower]

I've come far along. I'm now on Week 6 of ART School--although I am going back and practicing a few previous assignments. I have now run into another issue with copying a project from other artists.

I am ready to start the last assignment in this Week, but I'm not sure how to do it...

I first decided to search ArtStation for professional drawings of environments, and I found a pretty one here by Adam Brown. I will add a link to this at the end.
Once I imported the drawing into Photoshop, I immediately didn't know how I was going to copy something of this incredible size.

I first tried plotting some convergence lines and...now I have points where the lines meet in all kinds of places. When I look at this artwork by itself, everything makes sense, and nothing seems to be out of place or drawn incorrectly, but according to the lines that I drew over the artwork, there is no one-point or two-point perspective going on in this.

This is the second time I've been assigned to copy other artists' work and not knowing how to do it. Is there something I'm missing from the video lectures that I am watching?

Artwork by Adam Brown featured here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rAb0ge

[mitsuki-youko]

imo i'd start with the curvy stuff first. you have a grid there to work off of.

In high school i learned to divide a drawing into many small grids and then try to replicate each grid individually while keeping an eye on the overall shape.

if the grids you have now are too much to tackle try making the grids smaller and working off that

I do see that the hw says lineart only so this technique will make it easier

Something like this - but don't be too focused in on each grid individually - do that at first yes, but once you work on a box, look at the overall image. is there something in box C1 that should have been in box c2? and so on.

hope that helps!

btw click on the pic to zoom in i realized i drew the black line on the wrong layer so its merged with the grid LOL was gonna change it to red but oh well u get the idea i hope

[catsforsnacks]

No, I don't think you're missing anything. You're actually pointing out flaws that the artist probably had not noticed.
Their perspective is off. If you dissect work from artists of any skill level you will most likely find something that is a little off (except maybe Scott Robertson, I'm convinced he is a robot haha.) As long as things look "good enough" most people wouldn't notice. As you improve and get a better eye, you'll start noticing these flaws in professional's work.

The horizon line here is right along the middle pier, given that we cannot se the top or bottom portion of the planks. As you pointed out, no lines converge on the horizon, and some even seem like they may never converge at all - good eye!

Sometimes when I look at work from amazing artists the idea of getting as good as them can become daunting. If you can find flaws in their work though, it makes them seem more human, and that maybe the task isn't as impossible as the voice in your head is telling you.

I think analyzing before copying is good practice. If you find weird discrepancies like this the forum can always discuss them - critiques are good! I also agree with @mitsuki-youko about the grid method. Just be careful in obsessing over getting it perfect. This assignment is more about trying to understand an artist's decisions rather than creating a photocopy (which I have mistakenly done before.) Another method is to have an invisible copy of the landscape under your drawing and make it visible every now and then to check what needs fixing.

Ok I'm done now - Keep up the good work!

[Lightning_Flower]

Thank you, @mitsuki-youko and @catsforsnacks for your guidance! I will start practicing and working through this assignment for the next few days! Later I will also complete and post my original drawing of a one-point perspective environment (Perspective 1 Assignment 3)!

[Lightning_Flower]

My original file containing my first point perspective drawing went missing. Not exactly sure how that happened, but I decided to just move on instead of starting over. Hopefully that won't impact my growing skills...?
I'm now working on an original second point perspective drawing, but I ran into some 3D issues.

To avoid making things appear bigger or closer than they appear, I've pushed my vanishing points outside of my canvas, which I think ended up working. This project is near completion, but I wanted to take a small step further and add some shapes that have extrusion. Instead of having a flat door on my main building, I wanted to extrude part of the wall towards the interior of the building to make a hallway-like entryway. I was also going to add a staircase leading up to the entrance, but after about four or five times attempting to make a staircase, I couldn't figure out how to correctly draw it. In addition, I wanted to add a pedestrian signal on my post (roughly drawn in green), but it looks...wrong.

I fired up Blender and remade one of these problems and tried to see where the edges were going and what the angles were and all that, but it didn't really help, unless I did it wrong in Blender too.

Any solution to this? I appreciate the help.

[Lightning_Flower]

Making progress!

And here is one of my works for Digital Production Assignment A.

Now I will be working on that box cover assignment!