01-15-2021, 03:06 AM
Hi guys! Reaching out for advice, opinions and thoughts from you daggers!
About every 6 months or so, I assess just wtf I'm doing with my time, look at where I want to be and realise I need to be doing things differently to get there.
I spend a few days with a couple of whiteboards figuring out what I want my art to look like, dividing up all the skills I need to get it there, exercises to practice them all, then try and fit it all into the available hours I have. The longer I spend on it, the more detailed the plans and steps, the more I have to cull, and the more complex the ‘action’ part of it becomes.
When I do finally put it into action... I realise after a while that idk wtf I'm doing, I don't know how to really practice this skill and have given myself tasks that aren't as beneficial as they could be. My plans were needlessly complex and missed out the most crucial aspects and usually end up unmanageable time-wise.
The time stuff is fixable, just be realistic and don't underestimate the time stuff takes or over estimate the time I have available. I’m getting better at that. The other stuff however... I'm really struggling!
For someone who has a grasp on the fundamentals. By no means mastered them, but has enough understanding to benefit more from studying pro artwork directly, rather than going through drawabox or Hampton anatomy again, what are some ways to get the most out your practice time?
The goal is very specific this time. ‘Be able to produce comic art like Karl Kerschl in Gotham Academy’ (here’s a reference so this isn’t just a huge wall of text!)
My current plans are looking something like this:
Schedule in a ‘weaknesses’ slot, maybe one hour per day where I dip into stuff on my list of identified weaknesses. Currently it has stuff like ‘facial expressions’, ‘lower legs’, ‘keeping stuff on model’. I don’t hammer these endlessly, just do an hour study on one then move it to the bottom of the list.
‘Developing a process for getting the most out of studies’: Just studying the comics above would only make me a poor imitation of those artists, so the list of artists/art parents that I want to be influenced by has been gathered. Paintings, drawings, layouts, character designs etc. Big ol’ folders full of reference. Now what XD?
Definitely some element of studying, making notes and then applying to my own work is required. As I delve into plans on how to enact this, it all gets muddy and overly complex. Do quick studies and then quick character drawings of my own? Redraw their characters in different poses? Use photo reference for the poses or draw from imagination? With painting studies do them quick then a long one of my own? Long then quick one of my own? Analyse the painting style but apply it in a different type of environment? Try and paint the same environment from memory? The list goes on and on, all seem like useful and valuable exercises, and I end up trying to schedule them all in, or end up with pages of exercises to choose from that’s so big I get overwhelmed and resort to just doing the quickest, easiest ones to set up (2 min gestures from photos… again…).
Then when I do get stuck into it, I start to doubt that what I am doing is really useful, since it was only my own amateur artist brain that thought this up, no teacher or pro said to do it in this specific way and based on past experience of my brain, it tends to make things unnecessarily complex. Sometimes I think a case study type approach would be better… like pick an IP and study the hell out of it, and produce an artwork in that style. Again it feels super useful, but then I worry I am neglecting some character skills if I am focusing on finished illustrations as the final goal.
It all becomes overwhelming and I fall back on doing the same inefficient studies, or pushing ahead with my work knowing it’s not improving cause I’m not learning anything new.
How do you guys study from pro’s? Is there a simple, foolproof method like a ‘Do this, then do this’ type of approach - that won’t cover everything - but will get a lot of it covered, so I can free myself up from thinking about [i]what[/i] I am going to do, and just get on and do stuff, churning out those studies and drawings/paintings and making those sick gains!
I thought about some kind of mentorship or consulting session with some kind of pro artist, but my notes and plans are so long and complicated and my thoughts so unformulated I don’t think I’d be able to provide them with the right info to get the right advice back, and don’t want to just dump pages of disconnected notes on anyone >.<
Yeah! That’ll do for now. Really interested to hear any responses! Guess this was a kind of rant/blog post more than a question, but I appreciate anyone who gets through it all, and hopefully the responses can help other people in similar positions!
About every 6 months or so, I assess just wtf I'm doing with my time, look at where I want to be and realise I need to be doing things differently to get there.
I spend a few days with a couple of whiteboards figuring out what I want my art to look like, dividing up all the skills I need to get it there, exercises to practice them all, then try and fit it all into the available hours I have. The longer I spend on it, the more detailed the plans and steps, the more I have to cull, and the more complex the ‘action’ part of it becomes.
When I do finally put it into action... I realise after a while that idk wtf I'm doing, I don't know how to really practice this skill and have given myself tasks that aren't as beneficial as they could be. My plans were needlessly complex and missed out the most crucial aspects and usually end up unmanageable time-wise.
The time stuff is fixable, just be realistic and don't underestimate the time stuff takes or over estimate the time I have available. I’m getting better at that. The other stuff however... I'm really struggling!
For someone who has a grasp on the fundamentals. By no means mastered them, but has enough understanding to benefit more from studying pro artwork directly, rather than going through drawabox or Hampton anatomy again, what are some ways to get the most out your practice time?
The goal is very specific this time. ‘Be able to produce comic art like Karl Kerschl in Gotham Academy’ (here’s a reference so this isn’t just a huge wall of text!)
My current plans are looking something like this:
Schedule in a ‘weaknesses’ slot, maybe one hour per day where I dip into stuff on my list of identified weaknesses. Currently it has stuff like ‘facial expressions’, ‘lower legs’, ‘keeping stuff on model’. I don’t hammer these endlessly, just do an hour study on one then move it to the bottom of the list.
‘Developing a process for getting the most out of studies’: Just studying the comics above would only make me a poor imitation of those artists, so the list of artists/art parents that I want to be influenced by has been gathered. Paintings, drawings, layouts, character designs etc. Big ol’ folders full of reference. Now what XD?
Definitely some element of studying, making notes and then applying to my own work is required. As I delve into plans on how to enact this, it all gets muddy and overly complex. Do quick studies and then quick character drawings of my own? Redraw their characters in different poses? Use photo reference for the poses or draw from imagination? With painting studies do them quick then a long one of my own? Long then quick one of my own? Analyse the painting style but apply it in a different type of environment? Try and paint the same environment from memory? The list goes on and on, all seem like useful and valuable exercises, and I end up trying to schedule them all in, or end up with pages of exercises to choose from that’s so big I get overwhelmed and resort to just doing the quickest, easiest ones to set up (2 min gestures from photos… again…).
Then when I do get stuck into it, I start to doubt that what I am doing is really useful, since it was only my own amateur artist brain that thought this up, no teacher or pro said to do it in this specific way and based on past experience of my brain, it tends to make things unnecessarily complex. Sometimes I think a case study type approach would be better… like pick an IP and study the hell out of it, and produce an artwork in that style. Again it feels super useful, but then I worry I am neglecting some character skills if I am focusing on finished illustrations as the final goal.
It all becomes overwhelming and I fall back on doing the same inefficient studies, or pushing ahead with my work knowing it’s not improving cause I’m not learning anything new.
How do you guys study from pro’s? Is there a simple, foolproof method like a ‘Do this, then do this’ type of approach - that won’t cover everything - but will get a lot of it covered, so I can free myself up from thinking about [i]what[/i] I am going to do, and just get on and do stuff, churning out those studies and drawings/paintings and making those sick gains!
I thought about some kind of mentorship or consulting session with some kind of pro artist, but my notes and plans are so long and complicated and my thoughts so unformulated I don’t think I’d be able to provide them with the right info to get the right advice back, and don’t want to just dump pages of disconnected notes on anyone >.<
Yeah! That’ll do for now. Really interested to hear any responses! Guess this was a kind of rant/blog post more than a question, but I appreciate anyone who gets through it all, and hopefully the responses can help other people in similar positions!