Hi everybody! I'm Vellu, or usually welou online, and I'll start journaling my art journey here. I've got next to no experience in drawing (digitally or otherwise) so really starting from the basics here. From "is this how I should be holding the pen?" - basics. My progress is fairly slow, as the time I can put into this is limited. Updates here most likely won't be very frequent, but any feedback and pointers are much appreciated.

I'm gonna ramble on a bit, feel free to jump to the next post where I'll start posting some drawings from the assignments.

I've thought about drawing every now and then and occasionally I've tried to follow a tutorial or two, but I feel I need a little bit more in terms of structure, which is where the Art School comes in.

A little bit about my background. I'm a web developer, mostly focusing on frontend things and occasionally on my own time I dabble in some iOS app development. I'm 38 btw, living in northern Finland. I find programming to be quite creative, but it's creative in a highly technical way and it's often very focused on problem-solving. I also play guitar and enjoy photography, but I guess I approach both of those two from a technical perspective as well. With guitar I don't compose the music, I just try to replicate a song. Photography is accessible to me since I don't have to create the scene itself, I only need to find a way to capture it.

In terms of art goals, I'm hoping that the course will give my brain a different kind of exercise and that I'd be able to improve my overall creativity and put it into use in other areas of my life and work. When it comes to actual drawing skills, I'm not sure what to expect. I'd like to be able to draw characters (full and portrait) and landscapes (post-apocalyptic, futuristic, nature taking over the world after we humans have destroyed ourselves, that sort of stuff), but I feel I should scale back my expectations a bit. Let's set a rough goal of "can draw characters and portraits" and "can paint landscapes" and see how things go.

On the tech side of things I have a 2018 iPad Pro 11", the pencil and Procreate, so I'm going with those for this course.

I don't have any past drawings to share, but when it comes to digital art overall, I can accomplish some goals I set for myself. As long as I can approach the challenge in a technical way. An example is when I recently recreated an abstact macOS wallpaper for reasons.

You can find me online at welou.net. I'm also documenting my art journey on Instagram at @welou.draws.

To kick things off I'll post some of the stuff I've been working on so far on Term 1. I started with the Art School during the first week of January.

Cylinders

This is maybe the baseline where I'm starting from. Before beginning the actual course I was trying to get familiar with the iPad and the pencil by drawing some type of cylinders.

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After starting the course, right off the bat the first obstacle has been drawing parallel lines and ellipses.

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I've been alternating between plain cylinders and the skeletons and at some point tried to start deforming the cylinders a bit and adding some shading.

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Here's the second attempt at shading:

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I learned that adding shading makes the process go much slower and right now that's maybe not the best use of my time.

Here's where I'm currently at with just plain cylinders:

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Skeletons

Not much to say about these cylinder skeletons. Here's a quick sampling from first to latest.

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So far everything has been drawn on top of a reference image. I tried to draw a few from reference, but the end result was way off compared to the reference. So I think I'll try that again next. There will be some stuff about measurements later in term 1, which will probably help me get a better grasp of that.

I feel the main issue with my skeletons is that they don't feel very three-dimensional. For that reason I've been alternating between drawing skeletons and drawing just plain cylinders (to improve how I draw the cylinders themselves). I'll also try to pay attention to what kind of reference images I pick.

Proportions

This post completes the initial upload of the exercises. Here's my first attempt at the proportions exercise:

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Here's the latest:

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So far I've done a few, each one following the class and using the grid. On each one I've picked up some more details I missed or got wrong on the earlier tries.

Observations:

• I tend to gravitate towards a clean-ish look, but that might steal focus away from the actual proportions and for me it makes the exercise take longer (although right now any kind of drawing counts as an exercise in lines and using the pen ). I might aim for more of a rougher sketch as I continue.
• I also find it difficult to draw without zooming in, and on some attempts that led to symmetry and size issues, I suppose due to losing perspective of the overall picture. I could try a few where I keep the entire paper in view and this might go nicely with the sketching approach.

Next goal: Try to get faster at this and complete a few more, then try from memory.