Railgun Rabbit - Art School Journey

Hello, I just joined the art school program. I'm in my thirties and wanted to be an artist when I was younger but I went for a "safer" career path instead.
I'm a writer, translator, and teacher, but recently decided to return to art. I had struggled in the past with sticking to it and had gotten overwhelmed, so I hope the methodical nature of the program will help me improve.
At my age and skill level, I doubt this will turn into a career, but if I manage to one day sell a commission, I'd be pretty thrilled with that. I'll be documenting my progress here and other social media to keep myself accountable.
I'm using Clip Studio Pro and my graphical tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Tab Ultra (maybe S8?).

Figure Drawing with cylinders, my first assignment (that isn't pen control or image manipulation). I think that some of the poses I chose were a little too advanced for me, but I was using poses I already had saved. I might need a pack of reference photos to give myself a better selection.

Oh, that's really helpful! I hadn't been able to get into the discord until now, so I'll need to go take a look at those.

December 29 - Term 1, Week 2
I'm actually really enjoying drawing these, although I find it kind of annoying to import the references and organize them on the canvas. I think my second batch looks a bit better, but I think it's obvious I don't understand the pelvis well. That's not the point of the exercise though, so I'll work on that a bit later. I also finished the Digital production assignments, although I won't upload them. I'm not terribly happy with the results (I don't think CSP is as good at photo manipulation as PS) and I don't want to hassle with stock photo rights.
I do want to get a better understanding of tone, levels, curves, and color balance, but looking ahead, most of term one seems to be line art, so I don't want to get in the weeds with color quite yet.

December 30 and 31st - Term 1, Week 3
The end of the year is a little busy, so I only produced one batch over the two days. I also did a character study, which I'll post in a separate post. I need to do some gesture drawings next, but I haven't has as much time (or maybe efficiency) as I'd like. But it's not really a race.

January 1st - Term 1, Week 3
Decently productive today. Won't share pen control here. Here's my mannequins.
I did work on gestures, with a time-limit of 30 seconds. I'm very terrible at these, but I usually overthink stuff, so I'm using the 30 seconds to try to break that habit. I'm definitely going to try a few different brushes and techniques on these to try to get them looking better.

20250101 - 30s Gesture Practice.jpg4779x3357 1.55 MB

January 5th - Term 1, Week 3
I did more mannequins and some gesture drawings that I didn't include here in the forums, but I posted on Discord. I've done two character studies, the second of which I have posted below. I have a little more work to do in Week 3, since the "daily" activities can eat up most of my drawing time. I've decided to count everything up as a checklist instead of a "daily" activity and start on some of the Week 4 material while polishing off the last bits of Week 3. It was recommended not to skip anything (so I don't plan to), but I think I will alter and adjust some of the activities to incorporate some other strategies.