Good work OneSketchMan! Killing it with the discipline despite your sickness.
For regular excercises:
- Lines: Good, keeping both to a page so you can focus on animals. As long as you keep doing them every day.
- Cylinders + Boxes: Do some form intersections and work that into your excercises instead of basic boxes and cylinders? Or combine those two to one page and do another page of form intersections
- Forms: Instead of the ones you're doing now, do some form dissections
(just giving you some more advanced regular excercises to try out, that I haven't seen you try yet)
For animals:
I think you should instead be doing 1 page of animals, all of the same animal in diff poses. ex. 1 page of all flamingos.
And instead of setting a time limit of 1 min, progress like this
(2 - 7) lay ins - ball and string / fast lay in only (10 mins total): focus on accurate placement of elements relative to others and accurate measurement (height / width) + angles.....do as many as you need to until you feel like you've got the proportions down, as fast as you can. esp. from a video would be good, because it will move (and you can wait till another animal assumes that pose you started). Sticks for legs / arms, balls for head + arm attachment location + ribcage + leg attachment location
(1 - 3) medium lay ins and 3 quarters (20 mins ish): on top of fast lay in, get facial feature placement down, flesh out limbs. do as many until you feel comfortable with trying 3 quarters view. try a rendered 3 quarters if comfortable enough with 3 quarters and enough time.
Good Animals to Cover:
Flamingo (start with this and master it, good example for ball and string method)
Kangaroo
Cassowary
Iguana / other large lizards
Zebra
Giraffe
In general animals with a very distinct shape, not "fluffy" (big ball of fluff obscuring body structure) or fat/round/cute...want to be able to tell what they are by silhouette
Thanks for the thorough feedback, Panda! Going off of your advice, I think I'm going to try and vary my exercises a bit more. Maybe bring back the box stream? I'm going to hold off on animal lay-ins until the end of the week, when I can get out to the art supply store and grab some markers.
== Day 24/25 ==
Still here! Posting for both days again, but still drawing every day! I'm still sorta sick, except now I have to go to back to work, too (blegh).
Varying up exercises. I have compiled a list of exercises, and will be rolling dice (because I'm a dice-carrying nerd) to determine which ones I'll do for a given day. Today, I got one which I've never done before - the texture gradient. No idea if I did it right, but it was fun.
Hey, it's great to see someone doing the Draw a Box lessons! :) Great work, keep it up. Lotsa details on dat form dissection. I had trouble with those, but I got better. LOL Keep practicing those lines, arcs, and waves; they help a lot. With the form intersections, you are doing okay overall. There are some mistakes, but we all have those. It's hard to wrap our heads around form intersections. But play with boosting the line weights on the forms we can see more! Right now the line weight is a bit confusing.
Keep on rocking. I wanna see more posts. And you inspire me to get back and finish Lesson 3 already. :D
"Drawing is a skill like hammering a nail. You might not be great at it yet, but there is nothing stopping you from gettin' down and hammering away." -Irshad Karim
Dice came up with "free sketch" today, so I worked on that space picture some more. I realized that my values were way too light/close together, so I started redoing the values on the astronauts to have a bigger range. Also, the eye tended to run off the top right corner and the entire left side of the page. I put in some extra objects to catch the eye and bring it back into the image.
I noticed that in yesterday's iteration of the launch pad sketch, the flags weren't aligned to perspective. That's been fixed, but I don't think it's worth posting a small change like that.
A bit too much going on around me right now... I was a derp and forgot to take pictures and post yesterday. Sorry for the interruption. Posting for both days.
All i can say is use ghost movement before you go for the kill let me explain you what i mean by ghost movement.Let say you want to make a cercle you start by hovering over the page in a cercle motion and then when you feel the power of the cercle you go for the kill.It the same thing for line or curve.It basicly like aiming a gun at a target but instead here you control the speed and the angle before you shoot.
Thanks for the feedback, darktiste! I use the ghosting technique when I can, but I find that with circles and curves, a lot of the time my ghosting itself is inconsistent from motion to motion (yes, I'm that bad - that's why I'm grinding the bare basics everyday). For the lines, curves, and ellipses exercises, putting down lines makes the mistakes visible.
== Day 35 ==
Today I decided to overstep my bounds and try using my newfound line and box powers to draw part of an idea I've had since forever. It turned out pretty bad (as expected), but it felt pretty good being able to get even there without a ruler. Also, I got to play with grey markers a bit.
The problem is see with line being retrace over is that the hand or the finger can block the view of the eye so it important to use a hand grip i call the evasive hand where the hand and finger stay as far as possible of the point you draw. I personally like to start form the bottom to the top of the line so that the hand is never over in the way.So basically you let say want to draw a curve you need to adjust the angle of the hand and finger so that the eye can capture the movement.You start from the natural position you feel is natural for you it can bevfrom top from bottom or bottom from top.It also a good exercice to inverse the natural position so you can draw faster in any given situation.
