I'm back. It's been about three months now and I deeply regret letting that time that I could have been practicing slip by.
Sometime after I recorded my last update here back in December 2023, some traumatic life stuff started happening. My life is in disarray right now, but I'm working toward finding healing and solutions. During this time, I either had no time for art or was just too depressed to pick up my pen. Every once in a while, I worked on practicing my basic fundamentals, but I haven't gotten much farther than that.
I'm ready to return and keep working towards my dreams, but I have a couple issues to resolve:
1) During this harsh time, my self-discipline was destroyed. There are days where I actually do have time to do art, but I choose not to. I'm not sure why I do this, or how to revitalize my self-discipline. Today I just found out that Marc offers ARTSchool + Feedback, which is something I think I really want to get once a spot opens up for me. Since I'm going to be struggling with self-discipline and trying to get myself to do art, I know having a teacher to report back to will hold me accountable and responsible for getting art practice done everyday--and I know that I'll enjoy practicing art more when I have a weekly purpose to achieve. While I'm waiting for a spot to open up, I'm going to try to re-learn self-discipline and practice art more, but does anyone have any suggestions or tips in regards to living in a more disciplined manner?
2) I don't remember where I am in regard to the ARTSchool weekly schedule (I remember someone saying something about I didn't have to follow it exactly, but personally, I like following checklists), but before I figure that out, I really feel like I should practice my fundamentals again before I practice something crazy like the human head. Major problem though: my fundamental skills suck. Maybe I didn't practice them enough back in Term 1? I wish I had caught that sooner, but, oh well...
So far when practicing drawing the sphere, I'm doing...all right. I figured out a trick to draw the 3D sphere's Z-axis/vertical lines correctly, but I haven't figured out how to draw the horizontal rings. Best I can do is guess where they are, but it ends up making the whole sphere look wrong. My main struggle right now is figuring out how to extrude a sphere. My first tackle to this problem was to create some reference pictures of an extruded sphere and practice on that. Here's how I did that in Blender...
Sorry about my poor lighting. I had to create multiple reference photos and I was not going to wait hours for these to finish rendering.
So I tried tracing over these, drawing from reference, and then I drew them from imagination. Well, that flopped immediately. I gave up on this approach pretty quickly.
Some days later, while I was on my break at work, I was trying to draw spheres again in my sketchbook, and somehow I accidentally stumbled on a trick to draw the 3D spheres vertical rings correctly (or at least, I hope this is correct. It looked accurate to me)...
*Ignore the perspective grid. I was trying to extrude the sphere and it didn't work out.
It's hard to see how I figured this out, so I'll probably have to record my steps another day, but after learning this and watching a video (can't remember the name of it) on YouTube by "pikat," I realized that in order to draw anything in correct perspective to make it look 3D, there's some rules and tricks to follow. For example, you can't just practice drawing the basic cube by just drawing a box--or it'll look like a flat isometric drawing. You have to use perspective lines and convergence points and all these other rules in order to be able to draw a 3D cube in any shape, angle, size, place, etc.
Now we all know the rules for drawing a cube in perspective: this line converges to this point and that line converges to that point and yada yada yada... So what's the rule or "trick" for extruding spheres? Is there a grid or line in supposed to follow? Because I'm not seeing it. For example, when I try to extrude the face of this sphere in the next following picture, I don't know how to extrude it STRAIGHT from the originating face of the sphere. Whenever I practice this, I end up with an extrusion that looks...angled...and not correctly aligned.
Also, I'm sorry this is a long post. I should have gotten straight to my question, but the reason I wanted to write all this is to get feedback on everything I've learned. Is everything that I've said I've learned correct? Is there anything I'm wrong about that I need to fix before I proceed?
Happy New Year, by the way, everyone! And thanks in advance for the help!
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