JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[JyonnyNovice]

@Hypnagogic Thanks my friend! Happy to know I'm going about it the right way. Definitely I need to do more planning and measuring when I draw. I'll look up that video on measuring.

@ShinOkami Thanks for the encouragement! I kinda thought that if I just kept drawing portraits I'd get better - and I have felt benefit, my line work is much better, but because I wasn't thinking too much about them I don't think my portrait drawing skills improved much. Gonna take your advice and try that out when I get back to studying heads / portraits. Thanks : )



In December I started studying human anatomy, I learned the skeleton from all views and the muscles, where they connect and what shape they were for the torso / back / neck and upper arms. About 6 weeks ago my momentum was interrupted and I haven't returned to it. Since I really want to draw characters from imagination I decided to get back to it. I've put my portrait / head studies on hold for a while until I've got further in studying the body and I'm working through Loomis's 'Figure Drawing for all it's Worth'.

Here's what I've done so far:








It really tires me out drawing these; I need to concentrate so hard that after I've finished a couple of full body drawings I am worn out! It feels really great though, as I know it will get easier the more I draw them and the more familiar I become with the proportions. In fact already my speed is increasing and it's not taxing me as much, after just a week.



Because the anatomy study is so intense I've started to study some fun drawing, just to unwind where I don't need to think about where to place lines and can just have fun creating; currently flicking through a PDF on Hello Kitty style 'Kawaii' drawings.

Practice




Then played around with a couple in photoshop:

This one I kept my original linework, used a 'threshold' adjustment layer and then a 'median' noise filter to smooth out the lines (not 100% happy with the result but it was better than what levels / curves gave me). For the colours I just googled 'cute colour palette' and picked a set that had a fleshy tone in it - colour theory is something I'll study later.


And this one, since it was a scrappy sketch on a bit of old paper I tried to redo the linework digitally. It wasn't very fun, it took a lot of messing about with layers and the result doesn't look that great - I think I'll stick to doing my lines on paper for now.