My intent here is to start a fire in myself and keep it going with regular practice.
If I have to spend some days only drawing straight lines and circles I will do so to keep on the path. I will begin with posting a number of drawing I've posted online from the past year, up to the current month. The following is not in order.
I'd like to spend some more time working on my general draftsmanship and understanding of design to make more full illustrations, veering away from drawing characters without context. I feel I don't really communicate much with my current work, which is incredibly important for visual art in general.
You're pretty good at expressing volume, characters feel solid without shading help. Gesture is also good, I can't say how you'd fare at dramatic poses but both the stationary and the moving ones have no stiffness, so my guess is you'd be fine.
Do you already know what sort of finish you want? Lineart only, cellshading, something with more volume and light?
Regarding illustrations, my advice is to start working on creating backgrounds and objects for characters to interact with. Fashion photoshoots are great reference for this kind of initial "inserting into setting" approach. Most are fairly minimalist, someone leaning against a wall, standing in an empty narrow street in a close cut without many background details, chair in empty room, going down stairs... With the focus is the model and clothing they don't have much noise, perfect for practice. Once comfortable, you can add more objects to the scenes, if not a second character.
Welcome! From your introductory post and this one I understand the need to go back to the basics, maybe not a million lines and circles, but I would definitely suggest doing some realism in order to progressively twist it into the stylization that works best for you. Keep posting!
Quote:Do you already know what sort of finish you want? Lineart only, cellshading, something with more volume and light?
I'm still trying to figure that out. I'm interested in expanding what kind of stuff I can draw in part because I want to try clashing styles in the future. That is, having both realistic elements and character with unreal/cartoonish elements an characters in an image. Due to my large gaps in practice, my skills with the former aren't nearly as tight as they would need to be to explore such a concept.
Quote:Regarding illustrations, my advice is to start working on creating backgrounds and objects for characters to interact with. Fashion photoshoots are great reference for this kind of initial "inserting into setting" approach. Most are fairly minimalist, someone leaning against a wall, standing in an empty narrow street in a close cut without many background details, chair in empty room, going down stairs... With the focus is the model and clothing they don't have much noise, perfect for practice. Once comfortable, you can add more objects to the scenes, if not a second character.
I was actually digging around public domain image sites like Artvee for ideas on that front, but I never thought to expose myself to fashion shots. Thank you for the advice!
Quote:Welcome! From your introductory post and this one I understand the need to go back to the basics, maybe not a million lines and circles...
Too late for that I fear, I'm about halfway through a graph notebook full them. But I'm not doing them for nothing, it's to improve my line confidence as well as learning how my body/arm moves when making marks. It makes drawing other things much easier, even though they're not representational themselves.
Quote:...but I would definitely suggest doing some realism in order to progressively twist it into the stylization that works best for you. Keep posting!
It's been some time since my last post. I haven't stopped drawing, though the stuff I'm doing right now would be better described as mark making. I didn't think it'd be terribly interesting to post multiple pages of lines and circles on graph paper, but now that I've practically filled a book with them, I may as well update.
A big part of my struggle for the past while has been less about my technical skill, but increasing the amount of time I draw. A series of unfortunate life issues had served as a strangle on my pursuit of illustration, my full time job also serving as deterrent. It's difficult to gain skill without mileage, and my circumstances and slow drawing speed was making mileage difficult to acquire. So considering this, I double down on doodling lines and circles, adding values and hatching to the daily practice. It is practically a warm up, but it kept my hand going and that was the most important thing for me.
Of course, I drew other things during the time as well, but I'll save those for another post.
At a point drawing line and circle doesn't do much it become more of a warm up than a exercise to build control but you can always find interesting way to increase the difficulty so it never a waste of time but it doesn't pay the bill if that what you are looking for.Those exercise are in a sense a space where you aren't stressing over subject matter or the process that much you are simply building confidence in your drawing ability those are great exercise to get back into draw if you feel any rust at any level of mark making.
For example if you want to increase the difficult you don't use that paper that you use in the last example you post since that paper you are using you are still in my own opinion trainer wheel by using those ''guideline paper'' idk maybe it just what you have to draw but normal paper is the standard for a reason in art school you don't want any kind of guideline cutting cross any of the line you make.
I don't recommend drawing concentric circle because once you screw up it affect the rest you can make of ellipse or circle from small to big circle for example and you can invert that order from big to small as for ellipse you should to draw more of those then you had so far and for the circle you should become good at defining the size at will so far you only do about 3 different size of circle small circle are mostly pointless they don't require alot of training to master so time you might prefer to use what little time you have for medium and big circle or ellipse.Remember small error are alot easier to fix than large one and you rarely drawing perfect circle in most drawing scenario but if you plan to draw alot of car spending time on ellipse is a must.Circle are in my own experience more of proportion thing they help build up the structure of thing they don't need to be perfectly connected in most case they just need to maintain symmetry for the most part.
