Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah Staying Awake

[Vicianus]

EDIT: I hated seeing the drawing I had on this post, so I drew over it to make it less awful.

[alexfreitas]

Despite that self portrait that gave me the creeps, I like your sketchbook :D Good character designs

[Vicianus]

@alexfreitas
Thank you!

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wow, it's 2015! I have a handful of goals for this year, right now especially to use more reference and do more studies.

here's Alexis Bledel in Violet & Daisy

[Vicianus]

Some ugly ass metal, but here's an imagining for the face on a character redesign.

[Adam Lina]

Loving these portraits. Thats cool your getting into anatomy. I recommend the book Anatomy for the Artist by Sarah Simblet. Its the best anatomy book I've seen with top notch photo references and illustrations. Goldfinger's book is good too but the illustrations arn't as fun to look at :D

[lillysparks]

Nice portraits, I really like your brushstrokes, and the way you used blue to shade the girl with the bunny ears.

[Toxicpanda]

Your characters are very impressive and different expressions and designs are what make your style very complex and interesting. Work more on rendering, on textures, understanding materials, maybe that will help with the rendering part. Can't wait to see more from you : )

[Vicianus]

@Adam Lina
Oh, yeah! I have that book, actually. I bought it a long time ago and haven't used it anywhere near as much as I should. Since you mentioned it, I busted it out and have been drawing a little from it. :) The pictures are much more fun, like you say. To learn individual muscles, though, I definitely prefer goldfinger, since it covers every muscle in depth. I've always had an academic oriented mind, and I was even looking at Gray's Anatomy earlier this year; for me, I almost want that medical understanding for anatomy. Both books are awesome, thanks so much for reminding me of it!

@Lillysparks
Thank you! Actually, that one is meant to be a bunny boy. Whoop. But yeah, I love doing monotone paintings, so you can still play around with saturation to add differentiation.

@ToxicPanda
Thanks so much! ;A; Thank you for mentioning what you think I do well, too, it's good to know. For sure, you're right. I need to focus more on textures, it's something I've thought about a little while doing paintings, but more of an after-thought and of how to "cheat" textures instead of actually dealing with them. A lot of my textures do fall really short, now that you have me thinking about it I'm going to be sure to do some material studies really soon! Again, thanks so much for the feedback!

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I see a lot of you here posting pages and pages of your drawings, so I thought to myself that I should stop hoarding a lot of my studies and drawings to myself, especially since I want feedback. Here's the art I've made since the last time I posted, most of them are studies; I'm trying to think a lot about how the shapes form and are designed on the human body, really focusing on the graphic, designed shapes in fashion.

[ShinOkami]

Really digging those portraits and your style mixed in it, also those characters from before are inspiring, really interesting to see- hope you'll make some more. : )

Keep it up ! : )

[-echo-]

I really like the pages in post #28, those fashion sketches looks neat, give us mooar! :)

[Vicianus]

@ShinOkami
Thanks so much!

@-echo-
Thanks, man! I've got a whole bunch to post today.

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So, this last week I was noticing that I frequently cut off figures before the legs, usually because I made the drawing too big or it runs into another image, so I've been actively trying to draw more full figures, especially standing poses since I struggle with them if I'm just trying to draw straight without having to fix a lot of stuff.
Also doing imaginative drawing since I hadn't in a while, checking my progress. I want to work a lot more on drawing more natural bodies, I default to kind of grossly curvy/cartoony bodies, and while I love cartoonish styles I'm not nailing the kind of images I want to create. So, in the next week I want to continue focusing on figure drawing/pose studies to a higher and more prolific degree. Also on the itinerary is character studies, composition studies (still grossly inadequate at comp) aaaand.... environments. YARGH. Perspective and hard-surface is my natural enemy, I started a little today and the outcome is not good.

My pace for drawing has been 4-5+ pages a day, I have 60 pages left in my sketchbook and I'd love to kill it before school starts so I'm going to try to kick it up to 10+ pages a day for the next couple days. I'm also debating getting a much bigger sketchbook for during the semester, so I can draw people the size I like to... but then I'll have so much more space to fill, which is not necessarily a good thing. ''OTL I have a really intense semester ahead of me, and I'm SO excited.

Without further ado, here's my drawings since the last post, the good the bad and the ugly.




And I started painting again a little, need to get back in the groove before I can do some of the painting studies I ought to do :U


I've also been wasting time scrolling through Algenpflegere's sketchbook, really makes me feel like I need to work MUCH harder, which is ironic because I'm losing time looking at his stuff. That guy's improvement is so insane, goes from 0 to pro in like a year.

[antmora]

Really digging the style and energy in your works. I think the color choice for the flesh tones in the most recent portrait are a huge step up from the previous ones. Great stuff, keep working!

[Vicianus]

@Antmora
Thanks so much! c:

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Well... I totally didn't mean to fall off the face of the earth. My mom came into down and I basically didn't draw for that week, needless to say I didn't knock out those 60 pages in a week, but I did finish my sketchbook a week ago and got a much larger one which suits my sizing tastes much more.
I started drawing environments a little bit more, and then I stopped. =3=;

Here's some of the better sketches since last time, sorry about the terrible low-q loosely edited phone pics eAe;


Some of these are truly hard to look at, and I'm sorry... eAe;;; The red pencil I was using on somewhat yellowish paper really photographs poorly. I edited out a lot of pages because the image quality was just too bad, but some of them I wanted to share anyway.
I'm in two clothed figure drawing classes, so there's a lot of clothed figure from life.

I'm starting to learn ZBrush this semester, we've done two weeks of practice busts, here are the ones I like (in order of completion, not using alphas or fancy brushes.)






This is my first character of the semester, Altan:


She's a young Mongolian girl who, through a series of events ends up aging at the excruciatingly slow pace of one human year over the course of five hundred. Over 5000 years of history, she ages from 3 to 13. This is a costume design class and the idea is to combine historical costumes from different cultures during similar time periods, this is just the initial character rough and I'll be doing the first costume design this week.

As far as stories go, I'm developing and concepting characters and props from The White People by Arthur Machen. I'm really excited! Starting the thumbnailing this week as well.

Besides this stuff, I'm also trying to keep up on my anatomy/figure studies, and I'm also doing a bit of Scott Robertson's How To Draw exercises. I'm learning Autodesk Sketchbook and Corel Painter now, I'm actually quite incontent with my art as a whole and I'm trying to change up a lot of the old stuff I'm used to doing... a series of events led to me losing my copy of photoshop, and while there are a lot of options to continue using it I kind of think of it as an overpriced and overrated program, especially as far as painting and drawing goes. I'm hoping that getting some air on digital programs might also help me explore art and maybe learn to paint and render better.

[iggytek]

very cool stuff Vici

steady grind on those pencils :)

[Vicianus]

@Iggtek
Thanks!

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Really quick and dirty update here, mostly because I'm feeling so lackluster about my most recent painting/design.

Here it is:


I'm not feeling great about how it looks... I did this from imagination and you can really really tell what I've practiced versus what I haven't, my painting skills are dirty and my posing here is terrible. There's a whole lot about this that I'm really not feeling. I'd really appreciate thoughts and comments, feeling really "bleh" about my art recently. U_U

[Adam Lina]

I think her heads a bit big. From her body proportions she looks 7-8 but her head throws it off. Theres nothing wrong with using reference either. Professionals all use reference.

[Vicianus]

@Adam Lina
yeah, you're right. The head's too big. =3= thanks for the comment...!

Yeah yeah, for sure -- I love using reference, but ultimately it's my goal to absorb enough information especially for human figures that I can do interesting and convincing stuff without having to use it much, and because this one just kinda ended up being without strong reference I think it serves as a nice guage for how well I'm (not) doing that. U_U ideally I like to work from strong reference especially for age and posing, but I've found it pretty difficult to find good search terms for 7 year old girls... Not many people are uploading really useful photos of that kind, that I could find. The best search term I've been using is different grades and sports teams, but the poses aren't very useful so I did pen sketches and took down proportion notes and was trying to fake it... eugh.
I'm not going to bore with too much more of a ramble, except that I have a teacher who heavily stresses good reference and not frankensteinkng parts together, because the human body has very specific rythms that change with the slightest shift in position, and as I've been trying to work more from photos (albeit not super hitting the mark) I'm really seeing that a lot and frankensteiing or imaginative drawing almost always missenthe mark and looks off (not necessarily just in my work), and I'm feeling the same way even about things like cloth.
In any case, I always open up reference for some things like material, I definitely didn't do enough for this piece but I feel like I can't implement loose refernce super well right now, either, and even if I'm looking at it it won't necessarily read in the drawing... My process for this piece was/is bad, but it's what I default to on most things I have to do, I think. U_U hmmm.

Thanks for the thoughts, Adam

[Vicianus]

Always with the enormous dumps......
This is stuff from this past week, it's a mix bag of photo, life, and imagination. If you feel so inclined, clicking on any of them should bring you to a more legible image. c:





Been trying to think a lot more about gesture and pose, and how the body articulates itself together. Going to keep on with that, and also strive for more clarity in my work, I have some poor tendencies where I'll "indicate" stuff in a poor fashion that isn't nearly accurate enough.

Aaand, painted that last sketch:

[Vicianus]

Hey-ho c:

finished my sketchbook yesterday, mostly just gross figures from pictures but there's a couple I'll dump later after scanning it. Shooting for 40 sketchbook pages a week, going to try to do a 160 page sketchbook every month!

I was forced to draw digitally for figure drawing today, so here's some stuff that I just did:


(Photoshop loathes me)






It's nice to be doing some lit stuff. Cheers!

[Fedodika]

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