What ImSkeptical learnt this week (Sketchbook)

[ImSkeptical]

Heliux - Thanks man, always cool to hear! Looking forward to see what you get done, make sure to share :D

meat - 1. I mostly do the gestures from http://www.quickposes.com/ and http://artists.pixelovely.com/practice-t...e-drawing/ , but just this week I'm starting to realise that they have some limitations, and i personally need to branch out. They aren't the best for extreme angles and the poses can be pretty generic. I've been trying to do these fighting poses from imagination last few weeks, and I finally realised this week I could solve my problems by looking for more specific reference. But for learning muscle memory of manipulating generalized forms and shapes of the body, a decent generalized mental library of poses, foreshortening, construction... there's heaps of stuff to learn from doing a bunch of gesture studies from those 2 sites. Really got into them again after Alex Negrea reintroduced them to me at the Bali workshop, I think a big problem I had with them before, and that other people seem to have too, is not being specific enough, or being way to rough. 1 minute is really enough time to do something that looks pretty damn complete.

2. I'm pretty sure I did those when Miles Johnston was doing those daily streams, motivating me to start studying in the morning before work. So it was probably 1 to 2 hrs for each. Note I wasn't trying to match colors, I was choosing them formulaiclly, so that might have made it even faster.

3. Thanks!

4. Well, its mainly because I'm not working and my parents seem fine with me hanging around doing my own thing for almost every hour of the day (at least when it became obvious I was serious about it). Also all my friends, who are great friends, are videogame nerds so we just hang out on mumble (voip chatroom) so I don't feel too lonely. I also go out once a week to play streetfighter and boardgames with them, so my social life is pretty set, minus a girlfriend :(

When I was working, I did almost nothing. And you might think I drew at work, but it was a strange job, and I did draw quite a bit, but most days I would be doing all this weird stuff, usually very creative, but not drawing or painting.

So yeah, if you have no work, you aren't too depressed, and you have a bunch of time to dedicate to art, I guess some tricks are

- Yes, use a timer, but if you planned to do a long study then just do a really long study, make that shit look right. I also believe in taking midday naps if you're tired. Plan what you want to work on the next day. Do stuff when you wake up before you eat breakfast and check Facebook (like 30 minutes).

- Balance how much intense learning/study/full concentration you do in a day with more casual stuff you can listen to podcasts and such; I believe you can only do so much of the hard stuff in a day, and spread out over the day, not in a big chunk, use a timer to check you aren't just wussing out though, concentrate for at least 30 minute blocks.

- One of the biggest time wasters is things that can interrupt you not by your choice, so if you have notifications for Facebook and email, or a parent or manager that comes in at random times to check what your doing; try think if you can find solutions for these.

- Think about things you spend time on and consider if you can cut it down or modify your approach, but get the same result. At minimum be very very conscious about how much time its taking; examples are like looking for reference, uploading stuff, how/when you check on Facebook, if you get hungry do you forage or have a planned food, do you have a playlist or do you search for your music, etc.

There are plenty of other efficiency tips, there's a pretty big community out there focused around entrepreneurs and blogs. Tim Ferris who did '4 hr work week' I think is a pretty safe source to start exploring from if you're interested. But like I've said before efficiency can be easily given too much weight. Make sure what your doing is important, and has a good chance of working before you go crazy with efficiency. Those problems are usually way harder and way more important, and you sometimes have to be really inefficient to find solutions for them.



Hmm, got a bit carried away with answering those questions, hope I helped xD.
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So this week was pretty slow. Recovering from the 48 hr jam, seeing friends off going overseas, weddings... bunch of random things. So I mostly did traditional stuff when I could. This was especially because I think its a better place to train memory and imagination stuff, because you can erase and undo and try again till it looks right; you have to actually visualize :p. And yeah, as I mentioned above, in trying to do these fighting poses from imagination, realizing I'm terrible as ever at no ref, so here's to a week of working on improving my drawing.















Super awesome sweet angled photo shots of traditional work to cover up mistakes :p. It was mostly because trying to photo without distortion is pretty damn annoying. Anyway, thanks for reading/looking. Hopefully some more flashy paintings next week!