Vonschlippe - Art School Journey

[Vonschlippe]

Hey everyone, I'm Vonschlippe, a hobbyist artist from Montreal, Canada.

Today, due to COVID-19 and quarantine, I lost my job as an engineer. This is not too big of a deal, as I can finally give time to several projects I had in my backlog. Learning guitar, working out, and most importantly, giving more attention to my painting.

I've been drawing and doing digital artwork for most of my adult life, but I am frustrated with what I see as stagnation in my results. I am also extremely slow and hesitant when creating artwork, and I tend to get too worked up with the details. I started Marc Brunet's Art School as a program to review my fundamentals, build confidence, learn new things, and from there progress into becoming a better, more prolific artist. That means doing my homework, which I'll post here regularly.

Here are a sample of things I've done in the last 10 years.

Cheers!
Vonschlippe

[Shellac-Belly]

Hey Vonschlippe! Nice to meet you and welcome!

It sounds like we joined art school for the same reasons. Good luck!! I really like your first piece.

[dangras-almeida]

Hey there Vonschlippe,

Welcome to Art School and good luck on your journey! I'm sorry to hear about your job but wishing you the best to achieve your objectives. You are art is already amazing, pretty sure you achieve great heights with the program.

Cheers!

[mau.wamp]

Wow, Vonschlippe!
Those are some really awesome pieces!
Definitely keep us updated. It‘s awesome that you joined the forums, so we can all improve together!

Best,
Mau

[Vonschlippe]

Day 1 of doing assignments!

I'm dumping the first two Photoshop ones right here. It's not because I'm an avid PS user that I can't use extra practice. Pretty happy with the results, especially matching the colors and values, which I think I nailed pretty close

[Vonschlippe]

Adding some basic exercises from Anatomy 1.
It's hard to resist the temptation to add muscles to a figure; the lines from a very built, body-builder-esque body are a crutch to distract from true proportions. Adding detail and noise (muscle lines, clothing, etc.) to cover up for an imperfect understanding of human proportions is something I am guilty of.

Please excuse the rough line quality!

[MattD]

Your first couple of assignments look really good. Those color matching ones took up so much of my time trying to get everything just right. Your proportion assignment looks good too, looking forward to seeing what you put up next.

I've definitely been guilty of adding detail to cover up my bad proportions, I've gotten a lot better at not doing that but sometimes I fall back on that bad habit

[Vonschlippe]

I walked into gesture drawing thinking "this is a warmup exercise for some, how hard can it be?"
THAT WAS HARD AS HELL. It's so difficult to let go of the details and the plans you make when that timer hits. Your lines suck. You fuck up over and over again. Can't erase. You have to really focus on the bare essentials to give your drawing structure and make it "work".

Takeaway from this:
- Working small helps to see the bigger picture and if the proportions are okay; don't zoom in too much
- Keep your ego in check, it's okay to suck
- The gesture drawings that stand out are the ones that have a clear action line and good proportions.

I don't think these are very good, but they're the result of my first session. I intend to keep doing them on the regular, and come back to compare. For the record, the poses are based off pictures from a slideshow, and I kept each pose under a minute (some are closer to 30 seconds).

[Vonschlippe]

And that's it for now, my measured anatomy session went well (now that I can take my time...)

I am lucky to have a graphic tablet with a screen, which means I can set up a model or reference pictures on a separate screen and consult them at will. I am already used to doing this workflow, as I've learned that tracing does not produce results that look "alive" in the way a drawing constructed from observation will. You'd ideally want to exaggerate lines that bring structure and character to your piece. In this case I tried to stay as true as possible to the reference, and I'm very close!

To get this close, i built a rough sketch (pale grey) that I warped and distorted in parts in order to get information to match based on comparing lengths from point to point with a section of my pen. Once this was done, I confirmed other alignments again, and iteratively the sketch got closer to the real proportion of the photo. Finally I just outlined the sketch in black and here we are.

Cheers!

[dangras-almeida]

H.O.L.Y. S.H.I.T.!

These look amazing!!! The measured anatomy it's incredible! 😍
Curious to understand more about your process. So you put the picture in one screen and then would do the measures as Mark showed in the video? Or would you do something else?

Loved the idea to warp any distortions to match the lengths (again, how would you measure them?). And the level of detail of the final piece is amazing.

Congrats!

[Vonschlippe]

Hey! Thanks for the kind words

Exactly as you said, with my wacom set right in front of a screen showing the model. I did my best recreating the proportions based on the head size using my wacom pen as the reference stick, then a lot (a lot!) of back and forth. Using horizontal and vertical measures from point to point, like "nose tip to belly button", and so on, you can review the proportions of the volumes you just drew. You set a target position for the sketch line to be based on your point measure, and you warp the sketch to match. Instead of trying to fix the whole drawing in one go, warp and adjust each section of the drawing as you add them, so you can use them as a solid reference when triangulating other new parts. TL:DR: draw first, then measure, compare, and correct.

It's painstaking, and there are moments where you're gonna want to say "screw it, I'm tracing!" but that's not the skill we're trying to build here!

[Shellac-Belly]

Your figure drawings and proportions are looking pretty good!

There's just one thing I wanted to mention about your proportions though. When doing this kind of measured proportion study, you want the legs to be together in the middle, otherwise the legs will not be the right length. The Vitruvian Man is a great example of what I'm talking about.

I hope this helps and let me if anything was unclear!

[Vonschlippe]

You're right; the way I posed them gives them an extra inch or two of leg length. I think the idea of the exercise is in using "heads" as a proportion unit, which works as a general guideline. I'm glad I did the exercise to refresh my memory as to what lands where on the "head grid", even though they're not textbook proportions! Thank you for the feedback

Here's today's homework. I skipped the 1 point perspective room and jumped right into some 2-point perspective practice. This is a building in my neighborhood, the Atwater Market, a nice art-deco architecture building from the Great Depression. It had some nice lines, plenty of parallels, arches, and cool boxes. Already looking forward to doing some more 3-point perspective after this!

[dangras-almeida]

Wow. Just Wow! The level of detail if this building is f*** awesome! Congrats @nicolas-kudeljan!

[Vonschlippe]

So I've decided to graduate to Term 2 today. Here's my first assignment, a logo using layer styles, smart objects, and the Text tool.

This is something I feel like I could refine over and over, making things line-up more and increasing legibility, but it will do for the purpose of the exercise. It could also do with a bit of hand-retouching (adding smears, cracks, or other little things) to make it look more like the cover of an old book. Perhaps I'll do that on the upcoming box-art assignment.

Also, after doing this, I feel like the chosen text "Art of Vonschlippe" is kinda stupid. It now feels like "to Vonschlippe" is a verb and I've written the guidebook... Oops! It's also very History Channel meets Game of Thrones, and somewhat unoriginal overall, but I tried an earlier version with a less formal font and it felt wrong.

[Vonschlippe]

Today's exercise was Term 2's character design assignment, using the pen tool and gradients.

I am very inexperienced with drawing using strictly vectors and there were many things I would have done differently if I had been allowed the full range of tools. However, during the exercise, vectors became friendlier and I was able to fasten my pace and stop pulling out any more hair off my head. I am now glad to add the pen tool to my arsenal!

After completing a quick sketch, I did a material study and a mottled "crab" texture to get an idea of the look I was going for. That's the egg and brown shape under my final comp.

Hope you like my crabby looking crab

[Vonschlippe]

Two days of work, this one.

Just finished the "Draw a gate and wall in 3 point perspective" assignment from Term 2and I must say I got a bit carried away. I had immense fun, and time just flew by. This is my rendition of the Blackrock Mountain gates from World of Warcraft.

While the lineart is pretty complete, I did not spend nearly as much time on the values and lighting, which means there are some mistakes. I will probably revisit it later in the program and repaint it with more careful attention to value, shadow tracing, and perhaps color.

Hope you like it!

[dangras-almeida]

Since the like button is not working on the forum, here are my likes:

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ 🤣

Amazing work as always!

[stratocastus]

Wow man, that looks great. That's a lot of detail for only two days.

[Vonschlippe]

Thanks to you both!

Yes I spent about 8-10 hours two days in a row. Time flies when you're having fun