JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[JyonnyNovice]

Inktober day 5:

[JyonnyNovice]

Inktober Day 6, just some ideas, might develop it into a full illustration for tomorrow's drawing. Mainly practising sketching directly with the brush pen:

[JyonnyNovice]

Inktober day 7:

Thumbnail studies


Pencil sketch


Inked version:


Didn't plan the shadow shapes too well, just did it roughly then kinda winged it, next time I'll take more care over that, otherwise I'm happy with it. Done with brush and ink.

[JyonnyNovice]

Crappy, rushed pencil sketch & ink for inktober day 8.

[JyonnyNovice]

Some brushpen sketching from imagination:





And some outdoor brush pen sketching - wanted to capture the light shining through leaves on the tree trunk, I think it works ok:



A few outdoor thumbnails:



And finally my inktober day 9 drawing, done outdoors with brushpen and watercolour:



I screwed up the colours a bit in this one (not to mention the top right of the image, which was totally rushed) - so many of the surfaces out there looked just varying shades of grey and beige I got a bit lost with colour mixing. Plus I just need more practice eyeing up and mixing colours.

[JyonnyNovice]

More brush pen sketching, trying to get nice tight controlled strokes.



And inktober day 10 - ink used mainly in the cloak, sort of rendered it in greyscale with diluted ink then washed colour over the top. The picture looks nice from a distance, scanned and up close it isn't that hot:

[JyonnyNovice]

More ink stuff, practising with figures, how to represent light and dark.



Inktober 11, practice for tomorrow, I've redrawn this figure on A4 and will ink it tomorrow:

[JyonnyNovice]

More practice with the figure above, I scanned it and printed a few practice pages to try different ink techniques, this one is the easiest way, with block shadows and feathered edges - I think the face detail is lost too much though.



This is my inktober day 12 drawing, just more figure drawing shadows practice really, trying to find a nice simple way to show the core shadow and reflected light:

[JonHop]

Hey dude, nice update, your line confidence and mark making are getting really nice, keep experimenting with what works testing out things, that's a good way I think to increase your learning speed.

[JyonnyNovice]

Jon Cheers mate, thanks for the encouragement! Getting there, little by little!

Finished pencil drawing for inking practice, got this as tight as I could, gonna print this out in blue on a few pages and try out some different inking styles. Gutted that my printer won't take the nice bristol board paper, so have to print them out on cheap copy paper which isn't great for ink since it bleeds, but fine to practice with. Will still have to ink over the original when I do the final one.



Gonna try and ink it like 56e in this one: http://i.imgur.com/zPsqSMe.jpg

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1st attempt:



The neck area is a bit messy and the feathering lines up the arms don't work so well, need to use them to define the form a bit more. Will have another go later.

[JyonnyNovice]

2nd attempt, with some gradients:



Need to do some anti-aliasing or something when I size these down, all the feathering goes a bit jagged - have to look into how to fix that next time.

[JyonnyNovice]

Figured out (I think) how to resize my inked images without getting jagged edges - you need to size it down by a multiple of 4. So if the scanned image was 2000 x 3000 you need to size it down to 500 x 750, otherwise the curved ink lines will look jagged. I'll test this out on my next ink drawing.

Here is pencil drawing for today, will ink this later:



It reads a bit wrong, looks like the sword will cut his foot, he is supposed to have dodged it completely. This is where thumbnailing helps I suppose! and good perspective instincts...

[JyonnyNovice]

1st attempt, kinda botched a few lines, need to add some shadows too to make it a bit more interesting. I tried sizing it down using a multiple of 4, idk if I can tell the difference - the lines don't look jagged but the feathering on the ninja's head wrap is now so tiny you can't tell anyway. Might just try setting a mask for all the black and using 'feathering' in photoshop instead and resize it to 800px wide like I usually do.

[JonHop]

Do you ever try (before downsizing the image) making it a thumbnail size (by zooming out) and see if what you are doing is reading or if the above problems are happening when you do that? depends also on the size brush you are using I usually use between 4-8 pixel for the line width with smaller ones kept for only certain places.

[JyonnyNovice]

Jon I'll try that, zooming out, see how it looks but I think it's a scanning issue, I'm no where near competent enough with a tablet to ink these digitally. They look digital cause I use the levels adjustment to make all the lines solid black. Working towards comic book pages so I want to get a clean even black and white. My scanner set to 300dpi gives me around 2500 x 1600 for a page, and it looks great, but when I size it down to post online I get those jagged edges. I think I found a way to do it though, using a layer mask over all the blacks then adding a tiny amount of feathering and smoothing (basically anti-aliasing it), then when I size it down using the 'best for smooth gradients' setting it looks better.

I did this one using the method above:



Here's a link to the HQ file ( http://i.imgur.com/PLClvWP.jpg ) if you wanna see how it looks in full res. To make it look better I'd need to scan it at 600dpi, which my scanner can't do : (

I'm pretty damn happy with this picture though! Lots of issues with the drawing itself but the inking seemed to work out - a couple of little slips here and there but I'm able to put lines right where I want them with the correct line weight using brush and ink, most of the time. I'm starting to get the hang of the feathering techniques too. Also, it's my first comic book panel, this is a pretty huge landmark for me since making comics is what all my study and practice is gearing towards. I was starting to feel like it's such a far off goal - it still is, but I know now that I can make a comic panel! Just need to keep working on upping the quality now.

[JyonnyNovice]

Started a short online course on children's book illustration ( http://www.craftsy.com/class/picture-boo...&_ctp=4831 ), doing homework from the first lesson: choose an animal to use in a story and study it.

I'm going to try and illustrate Aesop's Fable - The Ant and The Dove as a comic strip. Or at least I am aiming to do a couple of panels of it.

Studied some ants today:



Gonna ink the big one for inktober.

[StardustLarva]

Digging those ant studies, Jyonny! (Predictable, I know, haha) It'll be interesting to see the inked rendition of that last drawing.

[JyonnyNovice]

Stardust Thanks man! Had a feeling you'd be stopping by X)

Here's the inked version:



It's sooo bloody hard to get even consistent hatching lines with the brush tip! Practice practice practice...

Oh yea, I missed his antenae... >.<

[JyonnyNovice]

More homework for lesson 1 of Picture Book Illustration. Studying ants and doves:



Homework from lesson 2 - giving the creature human characteristics:



Next part is to do some drawings of the creature doing human things - playing guitar, riding a bike etc.

[JyonnyNovice]

More homework - I'm having a lot of trouble posing my creature, seeing how the forms stack and curve and wrap in 3D space. I have this trouble because I haven't done anything like this before really - I can roughly pose humans from imagination, I can draw simple objects, or boxy symmetrical things from multiple angles but I haven't tried to draw something complex, organic and imaginary from imagination - or rather, nothing that has a 'pattern' that I'm trying to stick to and fit in a certain pose. I'm sure if I keep hammering at it it'll click but I'm also sure there are some kind of exercises I can do to develop this way of thinking and seeing in 3D better.

If anyone knows some kind of drawing activity that can help develop this skill please let me know!