What ImSkeptical learnt this week (Sketchbook)

[ImSkeptical]

Ursula - Thanks :D. Planning hurts the brain, wish it wasn't so important xD. Good point with making my own ref for merlin, i might do that while adding more colorful elements that Dan suggested.

JakeB - Thanks man, but looking at your sketchbook you seem to be doing way more then me :(, i feel so lazy xD.

Dracken - Thanks. For the schedule, i'm probably going to change it, but its just keeping in mind all those things people say are good for learning. Like making sure to revise stuff, doing something over several days/weeks and not just once or twice, forcing me to write notes and try and memorise them, forcing me to not just do studies :D. I would go into more detail, but like i said im planning on changing it because i just got an ipad, and want to do lots of plein air paintings now :D!

florentK - Thank you! Congratulations to you too :D.


So like i mentioned i got an ipad! I got a used 3, because it was cheap, with the new models out. Looking at art on it is spectacular, especially with the cghub app, it totally shows you all the artists. All of them. I did waste maybe a day playing around with it, but now i got it setup so i can paint this hot Australian summer. Its very hot :(. Other than that, a little bit less work this week because of me being lazy, and my friends finishing exams so some partying. I get my one day of break okay, this stuff is hard xD. Here's the things!



For the ref for these portraits, it's Kimbra on youtube, some nice hd live performances.





The cleanup for Dan's mentoring. I want to apply Dan's crit before i post Merlin on DA though.


Thats this week. I did a little ipad stuff but haven't bothered working out how to post what i do on it yet, but that shouldn't be an issue. Hopefully I'll have all kinds of cool lighting around the house and backyard painted for next week! Thanks for looking/reading!

[Fei Ou]

I just looked at your stuff from beginning to end. Fan-frickin-tastic. I can't wait til I'm completely free to do studies and paintings for about 5-6 months straight all day every day after this semester is over and done with.

[JonHop]

Awesome stuff, took a look back at your older stuff to and you've made great improvements! Plus you're merlin's really original, good job. Keep it up dude!

[ImSkeptical]

Fei Ou - Thanks man, i wish i started the sketchbook at the start of the year when i started doing art, that way when my harddrive died i would still have it all. It motivates me too xD. Still got a long way to go though...

Jon Hop - Thanks too! Means alot :D

Bit of a strange week, glad i managed to get Dan's mentoring done. Thinking harder about how to arrange my schedule, thinking of including way more memory stuff and less spaced, because i think alot of the schedule was just an excuse for me to be a bit lazy. Gotta force that memory and imagination! Well at least i do xD. So here's the week.





30 sec Gestures/Anatomy. I hadn't done gestures in ages so wanted to try it out again. My 30 sec ones almost match my 2 min ones ages ago :D. Reminds me i want to check the gestures to ref see any common mistakes. Might be a good idea?



Final week on schedule for this kind of clothing. Clouds next 3 weeks?



Wanted to draw one again because had been a long time. I should probably mention the tanks i draw are usually drawn from flat ortho's from a book. Perspective did not get easier. Need to practice hard surface way more.



Following tutorial/process by Shaddy Safadi that was posted on the forum during the week. Really enjoyed it. Tried to keep the brushstrokes 'fresh', but i'm pretty sure i failed on the whole. Well, gotta get that first failure out of the way. And the rest of those failures...




Dan's mentoring stuff.

I also started practicing caligraphy instead of doing lines/curves drills in the morning. Nice change of pace. Right now just tracing templates, i forgot to upload it, will show next week. Oh and the ipad stuff i need to remember that too. Though i didn't manage to make time to do plein air stuff. Hopefully next week.

See you guys next week, thanks for reading/lookin.

[ImSkeptical]

Not that much this week. Got linked randomly to Kim Jung Gi again which made me pick up the pen again and do some traditional. As always, never really bothered to upload those, but if anyone really wants it ill always be happy to.

Here's the things.



Anatomy stuffs. Some Bahmas, who i had never read before, but not too different from any of the other anatomy peoples. Maybe I'm missing something? Please tell me if i am. Did revision on what i had done the last few weeks, 1 copy, one rotate, one memory.



Decided to do hair next few weeks. Seemed more fun than clouds. And i get to draw more girls.



Attempts at copying Kim Jung Gi's style, some from him most from photos. I think its good that I'm learning to consciously deviate from the photo in a specific way. Too bad i was working from one of those gesture programs so didn't bother saving the ref.



What i managed to get done for Dan's thing. Got a bunch of helpful tips on what to get done by a couple people, excited to push it to be the best so far.

That's this week! Next week, someone dies....

[atrenr]

look at all this hard work, mmmmm~

[ImSkeptical]

Thanks atrenr, hope i can keep it up!

So even less this week. Not only is it because more traditional, but i also have a real excuse this time. I'll post the stuff first.



anat.



Moar hair. Found the best site for fashion and hair btw, at least there is some words that go along with the pictures that relate. http://www.fashionising.com/blogs
I was, and will probably always be, a science/theory person first xD.




'Finished' Dan's thing. Probably will go back to it as i think i can push it further. I submitted it a day late because i got days mixed up and missed the crit, so i was deservedly subjected to Dan being angry at things i was angry at myself about a week before :(. The 2 art pieces by alex and jiao in the ref are my 'target' pieces. If you arn't familiar with the idea, i find its pretty much necessary. Otherwise you just quit early, and wonder why it feels bad. Now you can see by direct comparison how bad it is!

So, reason why not as much this week. I was watching a TED video about some of the lesser know achievements of scientist Richard Feynman (my favorite scientist. Scientists are like Pokemon in that you must have a favorite), and a related video was 'learning using the Feynman technique'. Several links later I was deep into studying 'meta-learning'. I mentioned before how in creating a schedule, i just thought about those things i picked up doing psychology and playing Starcraft and Streetfighter. Well, i found there are resources with information about self learning, efficient learning, science based motivational/schedualing tips, and all the rest of that jazz. I actually kinda avoided the self-help kinda community because its hard work finding the good from the bad. A lot of it gets associated with scams and psudoscientific ideas like the secret and whatnot, so i ignorantly just put the whole thing in a box. But i found one with many ideas i can agree with, and I find that from one good link you can find many great links. http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/archives/ There it is if you're interested. He has more than enough free information on the kinds of things i picked up learning psychology and competitive video games.

So after a bunch of reading for half the week, I'm rethinking some of my approaches to learning to do art. Most of it involves forcing myself to do more creative work with no distractions or even music in 45 minute intervals. Which i was avoiding/ doing really inefficiently when i wasn't, just browsing the net and listening to audiobooks when the going got tough. More scheduled exercise too, good for the brain. Afew other things, but i doubt anyone reads these walls of text and i want to sleep now.

So that's this week, looking forward to a much more informed learning approach in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading/lookin!

[ImSkeptical]

Quick late small update. I blame Christmas, even though that mostly a lie.







Tidying up Dan's mentoring stuff still not done yet but will hopefully look good in 2 weeks. Also started working on a personal project to take over when finished, will show in soon if i get something show-able done, would like to keep this one to myself for a bit. Doing more study traditional, will show in February for other personal project. That one will just be a write up of my first year doing art. Yes i have changed my schedule drastically. Project based focused learning ftw.

See ya's next week, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

[ImSkeptical]

Heyo, nothing much this week. If you have an ipad get this https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gimjeong...?mt=8&ls=1 if you like sick drawings (its kim jung gi). Can't think of much else to say this time, its late and i want to sleep so i can enjoy new year partying tomorrow. Oh i'm going to the cdw adelaide workshop. If anyone else is going we should hi five and enjoy meeting 2 of my heroes Jamie Jones and Aaron Beck. And if your not going, yes you should be jealous.

Studies





Dan's Mentoring things




Cya in the new year! :D.

[mindwrack]

amazing improvement here, i like how you plan your work, it really looks like it pays off. one thing i would like to see is you bring your character work and environment work together, but otherwise keep it up! :)

[Heavenwill]

Great stuff in there, focus and motivation,
I love that you make me want to go back to the drawing board.
Keep up the good work :p

[ImSkeptical]

Thanks mindwrack! It better be paying off, thinking is such a pain otherwise, so much effort... xD. And i'm totally planning to in my next personal piece, i'm uploading the sketch. Your sketchbook has some nice painterly stuff, i added you on da, hope we can be friends :D.

Thanks Heavenwill, you're churning out the stuff too. Nice to see so many new daggers getting it done!

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Here's the week




So excited for the Adelaide workshop, 2 weeks away! Started picking up z-brush again as to not waste the learning from Ben Mauro and Bryan Wynia. As I've found with everything ever, learning something the 2nd time is always easier :D. So much fun this time around, need to dedicate more time to it. Maybe if i can manage sculpting hard surface stuff, i'll study mechanical doodads to build a library i can kitbash with. This week i just tried to do a head and then see how much anatomy i could remember. The answer is i can remember all the anatomy! Except for feet and lower arms. So other than that, now i just need to learn construction, proportion, gesture, simplified/designed forms, perspecitve, lighting...

Oh hair is like the funnest thing ever in zbrush. You feel like a hairdresser masking locks and combing it round and trimming them. Too bad painting hair is also fun, and atm, looks way better and is way less time consuming



More looper studies. These are horrible, i can't think of the excuse right now but i'm sure i had one.





My next personal piece. Just fanart of an anime I'm currently watching. Slice of life is usually considered a waste of animation potential, but this one defiantly gets away with it because its set on future mars terraformed into Venice.

That's all my digital! Will show traditional after workshop, going to be a huge dump. For next week, I had the privilege of getting a 30 minute crit from Dan on my Morgane, and there is no way i'm going to waste that. Even if he did make the mistake of critting the older verson :(, at least 80% of it still applies, and the last 20% I didn't push as much as he did. So hopefully in the next 2 weeks, i get the 4 characters and the fanart done before the workshop!

Thanks for reading/looking, cya next week.

[Egbu]

really love the lighting in those character designs :D

[Heavenwill]

Wow wow wow great work going on here, keep sending those beauties

[Jaik]

Argh!!! You're going to the Adelaide workshop? SOOOO JEALOUS.. I didnt have the money to go this year.. ;___;

You are really solidly improving, I'm very impressed. Good job :)

[ImSkeptical]

Thanks Miles!

Thanks Heavenmill, you keep churning out those sketches too. So many and so good :D

Sad not to be able to meet ya in Adelaide Jaik :( . I have the good luck of parents loaning me money for this one. To me, talent is having parents that give you food and board and let you do whatever you want for 10 hours a day :D.

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I'm really hoping to get stuff done before i leave for the workshop, but its going to be tight. Will need to update this sketchbook a little early too, so even more pressure. Here's to insane productivity next few days. If i do update it will be the last update for 3 weeks! I somehow managed to update every week for 8 months or something close. However long since my harddrive died, that week i didn't post anything. But on the 8th of Feb, planning to do a massive update. I also plan to have a big writeup about my first year of art and post it on teamliquid, the competitive starcraft community i used to frequent. I wonder if i should post it here to or just link it?

Here's this week



Tehmeh's edges and color blow me away. They have a kind of simplicity i wanted to see if i could study. And at minimum, i got 2 ideas, restricting value ranges and to not try to fix drawing errors you notice while painting, and to instead just follow your initial construction. It may have been okay before, but not if i want crisp brushwork. Just another reason to get my lax drawing skills up to par.



Progress on the fanart. I need to fix all these perspective issues that arose when warping some things trying to get some dynamism to the comp.



So I was really happy all week with what i had done with Dan's crit, untill i watched the most recent video, in which he commented that i didn't listen :(. Maybe it was me just trying to be too smart, like thinking i could fix the back arm by orientating the body a bit better, and putting the fur trim on the legs instead of the main dress. Given i couldn't see the problem very well in the first place, i probably should've trusted more experienced eyes until i get better at anatomy. But the hat still is probably looking wrong? I did push it way down, but i guess not enough either. I half want to just let it go, but that also means i gave up, which is the last thing i want to ever do. Somthing for me to worry about i guess :(.





This got me down too, same mistake i made in 3 out of 4 characters. The crit i got in the first video should've fixed this :(. Well today i got a piece of paper and wrote down the title mistakes, then wrote down 'long straight rectangles'. Hopefully this will never happen again. Clearly I need to stop only concentrating in improving my rendering and really focus on drawing and design.

Bad start to the week, but at least i'm extremely conscious of the mistake now. Its stuck up on the wall next to me. Hopefully next week, and all the rest of the weeks, it never happens again. Thanks for reading/looking.

[Heavenwill]

I don't want to repeat myself but.. going back to the drawing board

[ImSkeptical]

Heavenwill - Thanks buddy, but i've seen what you've been doin. You've been trucking like no end. I am definitely jelly.

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Hell's yeah 1 year! Lets go next year! This time I have goals too, death line goals you might call them...

First is finally get paid for something
Next is move out

That's pretty much it :D. Simple goals but I think one of them will keep me busy xD.


So I've been thinking what I want to do with this sketchbook. I really enjoy typing a lot of stuff, but sometimes I feel I can't suggest to someone, 'read through my sketchbook on this random forum for what i think written in a strange tone'. I am being influenced to move the words to a blog setting by http://stapletonkearns.blogspot.com.br/ , his blog is like stupidly amazing for the illustrative knowledge. So why not streaming and audio/youtube you say? Well its pretty much i'm just embarrassed to do this with my parents walking in and out. Thus the goals :D. Also words are underrated these days, skipping through a video and having to listen and watch through a part is pretty inefficient sometimes compared to what some words could do. Unfortunately, words have so many issues, but ill talk about that later.

But yeah, there's also the matter i don't want to just post the same words with the same pictures here and on the blog. But I enjoyed the process of reviewing what I did over the week in a casual manner, I think it really helped in planning for the weeks and thinking about things deeply.

So the plan right now is to probably cut like my 'intro' and 'outro', and just chat with any of you guys who wanna and also comment on whatever I decide to post. Then on my blog, i'll try be a little more cohesive of like ideas and theories I'm thinking about and playing with. We'll see how it goes, it sounds a little too ambitious and ambiguous to work out.

Other than that, as a last horah to the depth in text to this sketchbook, i present some of the notes and accompanying sketches to the workshop i went too! Exclusive and uncropped :D. Well except for some of the first ones, i was sharing the sketches and didn't think about it. Hopefully this becomes a secret present to the readers of this sketchbook. None of the notes probably make any sense, but here they are. Hope you enjoy them.

















Some of them didn't want to rotate properly, so you're gonna have to drag them into Photoshop and do magic on them. But that just makes the information more secret/important right??? xD.

Here's some random robots


Random sketches of cool art on cghub to try out new brush handling and sketch workflow (none of the designs are mine)


Anatomy


Trying supersculpy again. WIP, doing Asaro head (Google planes of the head .org?).


Here's the changes I'm making to my Aria fanart when I realized at the workshop I didn't know shit about composition


Here's the rest of Dan's amazing class



Trying out suggestion by Khang Le to use photo manipulation/ matte painting to learn photo realism better. Though the first i just did a study out of habit xD.





As for the traditional stuff I promised, you can look on my blog or this post on another forum where I tell a little bit of a life story (Teamliquid Post). Hopefully you will enjoy it if you've played games/a competitive sport before.

Thanks as always for reading/lookin. Be back weekly again, and hopefully with less words.

[Flo]

hey sceptical,

those notes are great, although i haven't read them all and certainly didn't understand them all. ^^
your studies look great and your motivation is up as far as i can tell. maybe sometimes it would help if you start out with only 3 values and block in the shapes (if you don't already do that). some of your edges seem a bit blurry here and there. other than that, your lines are pretty sweet. will have a look soon again.

cheers,
flo

[vatteh]

Great job with the studies. I also found it interesting how you write down notes in your sketchbook. I'm just starting to learn the benefit of taking mental notes while I study, and actually writing them down would probably be even better.
For your studies, I would recommend is that you do some memory studies to complement these studies afterwards. You basically try to redraw the scene from memory and see how much you can remember. I'ts surprising how much you can actually forget and this pinpoints things you tend to subconsciously ignore in your studies. Hope that helps.