Knight's sketchbook

[Farvus]

Hey. Great stuff. It must be refreshing to be able to draw again without any pressure of trying to be professional artist. It's why I got back to sketchbook thread because I like to sometimes experiment and fail without too much exposure.

I like how organic your rendering is. Crosshatching has always been hard for me so it's easier said than done but I would work a bit more on simplifying values and working with limited amount of shades. Also some tighter hatching would help in some areas where you got the stronger contrast.

I'll keep an eye on this thread. Keep it up :).

[dimensional-knight]

Great update. I resonated a lot with your description of "sonar pings" when it comes to placing testing marks at smaller plane changes to aid in placement. I think when I was digitally painting I would intuitively do something similar, almost like a shorthand for judging without actually measuring specifically and putting down distinct shapes? I think it aligns somewhat with the idea of tracing surfaces and volumes like with contours but without the continuity of lines. If I get what you said, I dig it. I might also try this again but with my trad drawing :)

I think for someone who "doesn't know what they are doing" your figures are quite charming and express a  feeling of weight and balance. Even the scribbles you push within the forms, somehow feel to aid the overall, rather than make a mess, so obviously there's intent behind them. Keep it up! I'd be curious to see what you do with bigger drawings in trad. With your figures , but ofc that's harder with pencil and a limited hand health window so I understand if you don't.

The portrait sketches are great.
Sorry I don't have much helpful feedback, but take that as a good sign I guess :)

Haha thanks!

I didn't know you used to paint digitally! It doesn't really surprise me, you're very good and deliberate in your surface renders and digital paintings are so pliable and inexpensive they lend themselves to studying surface.

I'm also curious about what a bigger traditional actual illustration of mine might look like. There's a bunch of minor issues I want to chip at before but I have no doubts I'll eventually try my hand at bigger drawings. It's just a matter of spreading it across multiple days.

Edit: Oh actually I do have a tip I was told with where to cut figures in compositions recently. The idea was to only cut off forms at their widest width. Eg. the widest point of the calf or hips or any form where a decision needs to be made where it will go off page. Not sure why, but on reflection, it might be that it aids flow into the page and also the suggestion of existing thing continuing movement out of the page? Maybe it works, but I haven't explored that yet.

That's an interesting one, thanks! I'll hunt for examples in my ref comics. As for the reason, hmm... I think it's related to balance. Cutting on the widest parts will create more stable-looking compositions. Cutting on narrow parts can look as if the center of gravity of the character is displace, and carries the extra risk of directing the eyes to random locations off panel due the resulting funnel shapes.

Hey. Great stuff. It must be refreshing to be able to draw again without any pressure of trying to be professional artist. It's why I got back to sketchbook thread because I like to sometimes experiment and fail without too much exposure.

I like how organic your rendering is. Crosshatching has always been hard for me so it's easier said than done but I would work a bit more on simplifying values and working with limited amount of shades. Also some tighter hatching would help in some areas where you got the stronger contrast.

I'll keep an eye on this thread. Keep it up :).

Thanks! I agree about the values, they're not that great in some of the later pages because I moved to faster sketches. I enjoy the look of the ones with a lighter range + darkest for a few details, and learning to do these more efficiently is on my list.

About the hatching the funny thing is that I'm not setting out to crosshatch. I never crosshatched well when I tried it. :'D I'm just picking the edge of some plane and following along with parallel lines for a while, sometimes crossing with lines originating from another plane, sometimes going deliberately against another one. It's fun and a bit how I treat brushtrokes when I paint.

I also agree with making them tighter. The times the hatching is too dark and not really pretty I was either stressed or wanted to be done with it because it was starting to hurt my hands—which is stressful anyway hah.

---

Update

And now for something completely different, studies in the shape of digital sculptures!

For a feature with so much weight in the way I structure heads my noses have been criminally understated. I know how their bits and pieces are supposed to work but I don't fully grasp yet what the planes of the wings and the cheek connections are supposed to look like.

The skull filling is pure indulgence, I've always wanted to try it! Make no mistake, this is no anatomically correct way of going about it. The thinnest part of face must be ~5mm thick; I was super sloppy when dimensioning the skulls. 

European Woman 01




Asian Woman 01




I'm hoping to do another one tomorrow to complete a set before moving to assorted noses.

[dimensional-knight]

Wrapping up the set~~
I tried to be more mindful of the skull shape this time.

African Woman 01

[one_two]

I totally dig your pencil drawings, man. These last sculpts look solid too! Great work overall, will surely keep an eye on this thread.

[Skeffin]

Those sculpts are really good, and I really like your figure drawings. Even if you say they're stiff they still have a solidity about them thats really nice

[dimensional-knight]

Thanks!

I think I didn't post any proper painting yet, did I?

Here's a random adventure with lasso tool. I usually try to respect planes with my brushstrokes, but that's messy and tiring and I'm sick of the look to be honest. I've been drawn to more geometric things nowadays and intend to experiment more and more with this kind of stylization in the future.




A poster version to show the original colors without being 100% identical to the other. I find yellowish palettes interesting but can't directly paint in them for some reason.

[JosephCow]

Dang that looks really cool! love the jacket especially

[one_two]

Dig the last portrait, nice edges!

[Skeffin]

Love the portrait, esp the brushstrokes and the texture on the jacket

[Kassatay]

These pencil sketches are freakin amazing. I always have problems drawing portrait that looks natural and not boxy. You seems to have find the right way to do it. 
The last painting is incredible. It reminds me of Craig Mullins’s style. All these variation of textures etc ….
Hope to see more of these.

[cgmythology]

The portrait you posted is ridiculously good, some very confident brushwork and great use of textures/brushes there, really helps make the portrait look so much more interesting. Great job!

[Ben Nissen]

Your sketchbook is amazing! Love the use of texture and the brushwork you have. This is something I've become really interested in since I started painting. Your painterly way of rendering in pencil and digital is something that I'm trying to achieve, so I try to focus alot on mark-making. Would love to hear your thoughts on brushwork and mark-making when you can.

Anyways, great work and can't wait to see more!

[Kilillan]

Wow your paintings are on point! Good stuff!

[_spec]

Loving your sketchbook studies- it's been too long since iv'e drawn with a pencil myself! Keep em coming :)

[dimensional-knight]

It's been a long, long time I've not logged onto CD. Lots of stuff going on, then the pandemic happening on top of it. You know how that goes.

My very bleated thanks for all encouraging messages! I've kept working on my pencil skills and while they're not impressive I like to think they improved. A bunch of my latest pages:







And color studies to spice it up...






I'm also at sculpting again. I absolutely love it, it's a lot of fun!

[VitorCardoso]

glad you're back, great stuff as always, especially the sculptures

[Dominicque]

Oh, how I wish I could do great pencil work like you! Are these from imagination or reference/studies? How long do they take on average? Your sculpts look nice and 'painterly', too.

[dimensional-knight]

@VitorCardoso Thank you!

I've got a bunch of other sculptures already, but they need a final pass or hair. I'm working on a way to make hair easier to setup because it's a nightmare, easily taking over half the time spent on a bust and doing a vague sculpted mass + strands on top of it like in the first doesn't look good. This is time I want to spend on art, not pixel-pushing.

Oh, how I wish I could do great pencil work like you! Are these from imagination or reference/studies? How long do they take on average? Your sculpts look nice and 'painterly', too.

@Dominicque I'm so happy the sculpts look painterly because sometimes I chisel a lot of planes that shouldn't really there to capture that painterly energy through the light. I'm glad it's coming across!

Most are studies, but it's better to call them from reference for reasons expanded below. Each portrait takes 20-50min on the average, usually on the upper bracket. However, when larger or darker they easily take up to 2 hours. I don't keep track of time, I only set a time by which I need to put the pencil down and start my day because getting anxious about my sluggishness won't make me more efficient. I'm not slow because I'm getting lost on details or something, I need every one of these seconds.

Sometimes I can't believe how far my pencil work got and will leaf through my sketchbook to convince myself, haha. A couple of years ago I had accepted this skill was beyond my reach, period. That was something for good, real deal artists, not my inefficient lazy ass.

~~ Long rant about art improvement and motivation strategies ~~

I'll babble now but I hope it helps! You sound like me these years back, and I saw you also struggle with speed and expectations.

What turned it around for me and made my art objectively improve was figuring how to make it comfy and pleasant. Years berating myself for not being as good as I'm supposed to be did nothing for my skills. There's being disciplined, and there's pointless punishment. Being constantly disappointed in yourself falls into latter; It won't make you a better artist, it just makes you miserable. So I accepted that while there are aspects in which I might never be good at, I can still enjoy the ride. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The cool thing is that chasing this enjoyment counts as practice, whether you meant to practice or not. Practice which brings improvement, whether you're looking for it or not. Leveling up happens as if by black magic, all by itself. And all you need is reframe and be kind to yourself. This kindness is not only about going out of your way to shut down your brain weasels when they're acting up ("You're too slow! You can't get the values right! It looks nothing like the ref!"), but finding what makes a drawing personally satisfying. You'll have to identify your own happy places. As an example, mine are:

- Faces. I just love them. They don't need to come with a body attached, because that's costly and turns a happy thing into a stressful thing. So if it looks like a person, not necessarily the person I was drawing, I'm already happy.
- Rendering. Making the end result pleasant-looking makes me happy. Sometimes it means value-crunching or deviating from the reference, and that's an acceptable loss to me if that keeps my spirits high and momentum going.

They're the key for me coming out from a drawing happy even if I fail at whatever I was studying, so I place them higher in my priority list than the study. It's my secret to avoid burn outs. "True, I couldn't capture the forehead plane like I wanted, but it looks cool!"

I found a time slot to draw that works for me, as I down my morning coffee, and now I draw every day. It's okay to do a shitty drawing when you have the sure opportunity to do something better tomorrow, plus a bad drawing among many okay ones just fade into the background.

I budget my stress carefully, making the point of picking no more than two things to study a day. Any aspect that stresses me out also counts as a study subject: Larger drawings, full bodies, darker shading, likeness, and such. I don't take them for granted or mandatory, I make room for them in my energy budget. Rather than trying to not overrun in time, it's important to not overrun my stress budget. If it's a bad day, I can simply not consciously study anything at all. Whenever you spot a fish, that's a day I just wanted to chill. ^^'

I also follow my whims. I don't need to devise rigid study subject schedule because the brain weasels constantly whisper where I failed and how I failed. I can simply approach one of these points of failure when I feel ready, or when I feel like it. Some weeks I might try noses, others larger drawings, others I don't focus on a subject at all. Following your whims is fun, thus also mood-improving.

All this emphasis on not overworking myself is because I already have a day job in which I often do things I don't feel exactly like doing. There's plenty of things on my life to stress about. I don't need to turn my study time into another source of anguish. If anything, it's counterproductive.

---------------------------------------------------------

To compensate for that wall of text here's a small style exploration.

It went surprisingly smoothly, and though at first it didn't felt like "me", throwing it into an abandoned WIP showed it works. The knowledge and confidence gained from all these pencil portraits is starting to bleed into my color work.







Oh, and rocks tests!

[JosephCow]

Glad to see you're doing well, your new work looks really good. It was nice to hear your thoughts on improvement. I think we need to give ourselves a break more, be okay with not being able to do all the things we want right away. Otherwise it's easy to get burned out. I keep feeling like I'm running out of time or something sigh

[VorpalBug]

I love your work! Especially your expressive paintings, I can feel the breeze in the cloud pics. Also really love your philosophy on practice and motivation, lots of positive stuff to remember and it seems to be working :>