Nosnibor - Art School Journey

[JimSt]

I do all my drawings looking directly at the tablet screen without having it extended onto my larger monitor screen.

I also have a tendency to "lock" into my pen display. When I'm doing studies and gesture drawing, I have reference on my other screen, but not anything related to my drawing app. Though now that I think about it, I'll give it a go as it seems like a good chunk of my pen display has UI elements I don't interact with often... hmmm...

I am still enjoying the process of gesture drawing and would like to take it further and improve a lot more. If anyone has any resources that they think could help me - maybe some more intermediate or advanced tips - even though im still a beginner lol - I would appreciate it a lot.

First, anytime I take a break from or there is a break from doing daily gestures in the weekly assignments, I forget everything I learned from the last set of sessions I did and I have to relearn. It takes a couple sessions to regain, if I do at all! LOL It's weird and terrible...
Second, one thing you might want to do with all of your works is to look at line weight and how that can be used to define a hint of shadow or weight in your lineart. You do have a variety of line weights, but it could be improved by having it help define the form a bit more. In your head studies (which are great btw!), there's a style to use a heavy outline which fights against the line weight difference that you have in place making your drawings appear flat. Try to make the lines at the top of the head (or the form turning towards the light) have a lighter/finer line and the form turning away from the light (going into shadow) have a thicker width. I use a 20px brush with pressure set to control size, but not opacity. I think you could even just go over the top lines with a 10% opacity eraser to lighten them and see what I mean.
Third, as you progress through the course, you will do lots of gesture. Look at these as an opportunity to revisit all the other topics that you want to brush up on. I tend to make a session about a specific thing. For example, I noticed that your last set of gestures tend to have smaller heads, so maybe with your next set really focus on nailing proportions before noodling on the silhouette. I've been working on trying to incorporate things like facial features once I make a pass over the figure.
Also, I would avoid references that have the figure in extreme perspective or in weird non-normal poses, unless you are intentionally wanting to study that.

Overall, you've got some great studies. There's some great gesture work and the head studies are very good. You've clearly put in a lot of work and it is paying off.

[Nosnibor]

I don't know for sure. Do you have a Wacom One pen tablet or pen display tablet?

I have the Wacom One Pen Display tablet : )

Thank you for the videos they were very helpful. I have been trying to implement what they talk about in them.

The only critique I can think of is adding some more detail to the hair.

I definitely agree with you there, I have been doing some hair studies which I will probably post soon. My issue with drawing hair is that I have no idea what I am doing to be honest. Even after watching Marc's videos and a view other ones on youtube I struggle to break down peoples hair into linework. Something that I need to keep practicing I guess as I have never really done it but if you or anyone as any vidoes/resources that helped them out with drawing hair I would greatly aprpeciate it : )

Thank you for the critique and compliments it is motivating having other people help me out along the way.

[Nosnibor]

First, anytime I take a break from or there is a break from doing daily gestures in the weekly assignments, I forget everything I learned from the last set of sessions I did and I have to relearn. It takes a couple sessions to regain, if I do at all! LOL It's weird and terrible...

Yeah I definitely feel this, even if I havent stopped doing gesture drawings but if I have focused on doing 5 min gesture for a while then I come back to 2min or 1min etc I feel lost and takes me a second to get back in the swing of it.

Second, one thing you might want to do with all of your works is to look at line weight and how that can be used to define a hint of shadow or weight in your lineart. You do have a variety of line weights, but it could be improved by having it help define the form a bit more. In your head studies (which are great btw!), there's a style to use a heavy outline which fights against the line weight difference that you have in place making your drawings appear flat. Try to make the lines at the top of the head (or the form turning towards the light) have a lighter/finer line and the form turning away from the light (going into shadow) have a thicker width. I use a 20px brush with pressure set to control size, but not opacity. I think you could even just go over the top lines with a 10% opacity eraser to lighten them and see what I mean.

This sound like a really good tip thank you, I will do my best to implement it in my future studies. I struggle with applying line weight intentionally with a purpose in my work.

Third, as you progress through the course, you will do lots of gesture. Look at these as an opportunity to revisit all the other topics that you want to brush up on. I tend to make a session about a specific thing

I also really like the idea you hav ementioned about each session being about a specific thing rather than trying to improve everything at once. I will definitely implement it going forward.

I have been trying to improve my proportions in gesture as I do make all the heads really small, even when I focused on it i still ended up making it too small haha. But I will implement what you have said and try to nail the proportions before developing the gestures further

Overall, you've got some great studies. There's some great gesture work and the head studies are very good. You've clearly put in a lot of work and it is paying off.

Thank you : )

[Nosnibor]

Term 2 - Block 5

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So this took me a while again as I went away on holiday with family and when I was gone I was very busy and unable to draw which broke my drawing streak. I had drawn for 197 days in a row and was annoyed that I let the streak break as I really wanted to get 365 - but I dont want to obsess over the number as I want to keep living my life etc. Not sure why I am yapping about this but anyway I am keeping the streak going and just subtracting the holiday days I missed off of it so I am at 210 days in a row drawing now.

Below you can see the tasks I ticked off for this block:

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[Nosnibor]

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Hair practice

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Since starting this cource I have really struggled with hair. I have watched Sinix designs video on drawing hair and a couple of Marc's - in particular this one:

I am not sure I learned a whole lot from this batch of studies if I am being honest and I am not super happy with the studies I have made. I am going to keep at it though. I think I mainly struggle with understanding hairstyles and breaking them down into simple shapes so that I can represent them on the page.

Additionally a lot of the hair I draw looks quite flat.

Critique is definitely appreciated. If anyone has any good resources on drawing or painting hair, I would greatly value them.

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Base Sheet

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This is a base sheet of bald heads I drew (just 3 heads copy pasted at different angles) which I used for all my hair studies.

Big Sheet

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Here are all the hair studies I did. I would say 60% are from reference and 40% are from imagination. Maybe a higher % were from reference idk. But here they are:

Individual Sheets

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This sheet is different from the rest, i tried to draw over reference picture to breakdown peoples hair into simpler shapes, didnt feel like I learned a whole lot from this unfortunately:

[Nosnibor]

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Gesture drawing - 1 min

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Here is another batch of 60 second gesture drawings. I am still struggling with proportions but trudging along. I can see a lot of the heads are still way too small but I am going to try be a lot more deligent with it going forward and I am going to make proportion the focus of a lot of my study sessions going forward - following the advice @JimSt and @gregorya provided above : )

Once again, any critique to help me push my work further is greatly apprecaited : )

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Big Sheet

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Individual Sheets

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[Nosnibor]

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Perspective 2 assignment 3: Using 4-point perspective

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My intention was to only do one copy of Marc's 4 point perspective person however I did the first one at like 1:30am and completely forgot everything so I did another one. All 4 point drawings were done using a grid for guidance.

I tried to add clothes onto the figure at the end which look incredibly flat, I have not attempted to draw any clothes for months and months so that is not too suprising but it has made me look forward to clothes studies again in Term 3.

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Studies

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Adding a simple background/environment

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I always have a grand idea in my head but in reality when it comes to adding fine little details around the place I find it quite tedious and end up just haphazardly wacking them down. Overally didnt spend too much time on this though so I dont mind it. However looking at this now I am fairly sure I did the background in 5 point perspecitve and not 4 point.

[Nosnibor]

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Portrait study

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My girlfriend has been watching a lot of Dexter in the background when I am in the corner working or drawing etc so I thought I would try to draw him for my portrait study. I think it looks like him which is nice lol. Although I really dont like my rendering/painting (I am very bad at rendering). I have a general idea on how to shade features (eyes, nose, ears, mouth) but when it comes to the rest of the face i get pretty lost (especailly the hair).

The main things I struggle with are:

• Rendering hair
  I cant picture the form at all and to be honest I randomly just whacked values down

• Values
  I have a bad understanding of lighting and values

• Lips/Mouth
  I feel like I have no idea what I am doing when it comes to the lips. Not much to be said here other than I need to just keep practicing

• Shading technique
  I have heard people talk about hard and soft edges when shading but I dont really get how/where to apply it so I need to look into this more

Moving past from all the negatives I think this is decent and I definitely would not have been able to do this when I first started the course.

[phiahart]

Your portraite work is very solid! Also really like your line work, its very smooth.

[gregorya]

I have the Wacom One Pen Display tablet

I see. I just have a pen tablet without a display.

I have been doing some hair studies, which I will probably post soon. My issue with drawing hair is that I have no idea what I am doing, to be honest. Even after watching Marc's videos and a view other ones on YouTube, I struggle to break down people's hair into linework.

From what I can gather, you can divide the sections into separate chunks. Here's a video I found from Pikat:

I didn't watch it yet, but it might help.

Nice work on the gesture drawings. I also like the 4-point perspective person. The environment is pretty good as well.

I like the portrait study of Dexter. There's another video from Proko for drawing here:

That might help. Mark also has a few videos about hair.

[JimSt]

Your hair studies are good and I think I could benefit from doing something similar. I'm not great at making hair. I love the block mohawk! So fun!

Your Dexter is recognizable. I don't watch the show, but can see the resemblance based off what i recall of the ads and stuff.
Your awareness of what you need to work on is an important skill - actually probably the most important skill, because that's going to be what guides your studies after you finish this program.
I think most of those things are tackled further in the course, except for the mouth and lips. Marc covers that in the Anatomy 1 video @ 1:36:50 in the section labeled "Nose." So you might want to spend some time there reviewing, if you feel that way about the mouth. (Honestly, I could benefit from revisiting it myself...)

And I think it's super important to be able to see your own progress. It means what you are doing is working! Keep it up!

[Nosnibor]

Thanks! The block mohawk was me getting frustrated at not being able to draw natural flowy hair haha.

I appreciate the help/critique, it is always motivating : )

[Nosnibor]

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Term2 - Block 6

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This is the final block of Term 2 and now that it is done I can move on to Term 3 : )
Exciting stuff as I am nearly back to where I got to before I restarted the course. Feeling like I am in a stronger position than last time as I have been following the complete study guide.

Anyway, here are the completed tasks from this block:

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[Nosnibor]

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Primitive drawings (all 3 exercises)

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I feel like my understanding of form and perspective is slowly improving. I quite enjoyed completing this assignment.

Each sheet I completed is split down the middle. The top half being Exercise 1 - Spatial Awareness and the bottom half being Exercise 2 - Form manipulation. And to top it off, Exercise 3 - Carving (the pink linework) was done on both halves afterwards.

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Big Sheet

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Individual Sheets

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[Nosnibor]

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Draw or paint a fantasy creature/monster portrait from imagination

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So I initially misread this task as just "draw a fantasy creature" not a portait so the first sheet is just some random creature doodles, I dont really know what any of them are to be honest:

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This is the fantasy portrait from imagination. I am not sure how I feel about it and I have never really tried drawing something like this before but it was fun to try and mess with some anatomy to create interesting features

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[Nosnibor]

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Hair Studies

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This was a task not included in the block of study I was doing but I wanted to do it before tackling my next portrait study. I drew other reference photos practicing breaking down hair and values. I watched the videos @gregorya linked above and they helped although I definitely still struggle with this.

In pikat's video she talks about getting keeping the overall shape in mind and getting down the "big shadow shapes" first and implying texture by refining shadow shapes.

This image below is from her video tutorial when she is speaking about big shadow shapes.

Hearing all this makes sense but when I look at reference photos to practice doing this myself I am slightly stuck and am thinking "I have no idea where the big shadow shapes are at all and I dont know how to break this down". I definitely need to study values more to get better at this.

Anyway here are the studies, there were a couple more but I deleted them by accident somehow (facial features were quickly traced as I was focused only on the hair for this task):

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[Nosnibor]

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Draw or paint a portrait

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I feel like my understanding of hair has improved a little bit but it definitely still feels like one of my weakest points

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[Nosnibor]

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Gesture drawing 1-5mins

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All my gesture drawings were done in 30 minute blocks : )

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Big Sheet

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Individual Sheets - 60 second studies

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Individual Sheets - 2 minute studies

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Individual Sheets - 5 minute studies

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[gregorya]

Nice work. I got stuck on the 4-point perspective, so I'm working on that. Nice work on the shapes. Carving them looks cool.

So I initially misread this task as just "draw a fantasy creature," not a portrait, so the first sheet is just some random creature doodles, I don't really know what any of them are, to be honest:

Those creature drawings are interesting. Some of these look like Yokai.
The portrait from imagination looks interesting. Something about the ears looks off to me.

I watched the videos @gregorya linked above and they helped although I definitely still struggle with this.

In Pikat's video, she talks about keeping the overall shape in mind and getting down the "big shadow shapes" first and implying texture by refining shadow shapes.

Glad the video helped. I still have some trouble with hair. But it helps. Nice work with the hair shapes. I think you should work more on the lighting.

I feel like my understanding of hair has improved a little bit, but it definitely still feels like one of my weakest points

JimSt sent me a video on hair on my blog.

These gesture drawings look good.

[Nosnibor]

Those creature drawings are interesting. Some of these look like Yokai.The portrait from imagination looks interesting. Something about the ears looks off to me.

Thanks : ) ! I didnt really have an inspiration for them to be honest they were more just random doodles. I agree with you about the ears too.

JimSt sent me a video on hair on my blog.

Thank you for the link, it is a helpful video but I find it very difficult to represent hair as ribbons and end up falling to random scribbles and hoping that it looks like hair. I definitely need to practice this ribbon method more to get more out of it. I appreciate the help.

These gesture drawings look good.

Thanks again! If you have any advice or resources on how I can improve and take my gesture drawing further I would very much appreciate it. I know there are some anatomy classes in the later terms so I am looking forward to those and hoping they will bring a bit extra to my gestures.