Dasia's Sketchbook- because university isn't tough enough

[dmdoodles]

Hey guys! So I had a MUCH long spheel here, but I decided to shorten it because
1) I tend to ramble and
2) you came for the ART, not my life story! XD

So here's a couple things you should know about me:
- I'm a 19 year old sophmore in college whose dream career is a visual development artist
- Never received a formal art education until last year, but then discovered that the art department at my university is a joke, and decided that i'm not going to wait for them (but start intensive self-studies)
- Just like many others i've grown up with manga and anime and worshipped the style for quite a while, but somehow came around to realizing I needed to learn the rules to break the rules in high school. I've been working on that every since.
- I have quite a drive when it comes to studying, but the problem is I don't really have a regiment or a place to start or a track or..or anything really! So i'm sort of going with the flow now but i'd like to be more organized

Now, I guess for a start I can list my goals and work from there?
Goals:
- To get a good foundation in the basics of art (value, color theory, form, composition, perspective, etc etc)
- Really if you want to get down to it...To be able to draw everything in my head. I'm extremely imaginative, but it's pretty frustrating when I can't accurately portray what I want to on paper or canvas or whatever. My mind's all working but then my skills are sometimes the cockblock of creativity XD

So I guess that's that. Time to upload some actual art! Don't know what the pic limit is here, but I've got a bunch coming @_@

Thanks for reading if you read all that, and I look foward to this journey!!

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Gestures from my last semester drawing observations class. They just threw us in front of a model and said go. I'm glad I was self studying hampton at the time, as it made it alot easier to search for specific things.

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Was trying to put myself through an art bootcamp sooner but, like I said, I have a hart time coming up with a direction to take that's solid, so I ended up doing some Peter han assignment studies from the internet. SO GLAD I DID. Helped me see forms alot better.

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Some random character design work on pysch notes:


FINALLY near the end. Have some digital value doodles:

[meat]

Welcome to Crimson Daggers! Your studies are looking really good! Since you already have the Hampton book, I'll suggest one for color and lighting: James Gurney's Color and Light. Other people here will probably have other book suggestions for you on each topics.

[Fedodika]

great start! good line flow on the figures :). hamptons awesome and those bean/shapes are lookin pretty good too! hmm if you wanna learn color, learn values or grayscale black and white first, any painter/ullustratot will tell you that! Hope you post more and welcome!

[dmdoodles]

Welcome to Crimson Daggers! Your studies are looking really good! Since you already have the Hampton book, I'll suggest one for color and lighting: James Gurney's Color and Light. Other people here will probably have other book suggestions for you on each topics.

great start! good line flow on the figures :). hamptons awesome and those bean/shapes are lookin pretty good too! hmm if you wanna learn color, learn values or grayscale black and white first, any painter/ullustratot will tell you that! Hope you post more and welcome!

Thank you both for the warm welcome!! :-) @meat I actually already own James Gurney's book and it's wonderful! But like Fedodika suggested, i'm studying values and grayscale first before i'm able to jump into what seems like prime instruction. I can't wait!

[smrr]

Welcome to the daggers!! What a fantastic start to your sketchbook, definitely keep up the Peter Han form studies - its only gonna get better from here!
Hamptons good, Vilppus good, Loomis is good, they're all bloody good - I would actually recommend any and all anatomy books and videos - it seems tiresome, but no one man is right in the end. Anatomical construction is just a combination of ideas over the generations. You sort of have to feel your way around life drawing anyway, so taking bits and pieces from all of these masters lessons will help in the long run.
But hey its up to you xD (I ramble a bit as well haha)
Oh and quick gestures as a warm up before you study is also something I suggest :)

Anyways, love the work, welcome once again to CD and I hope you enjoy your stay!

[dmdoodles]

Welcome to the daggers!! What a fantastic start to your sketchbook, definitely keep up the Peter Han form studies - its only gonna get better from here!
Hamptons good, Vilppus good, Loomis is good, they're all bloody good - I would actually recommend any and all anatomy books and videos - it seems tiresome, but no one man is right in the end. Anatomical construction is just a combination of ideas over the generations. You sort of have to feel your way around life drawing anyway, so taking bits and pieces from all of these masters lessons will help in the long run.
But hey its up to you xD (I ramble a bit as well haha)
Oh and quick gestures as a warm up before you study is also something I suggest :)

Anyways, love the work, welcome once again to CD and I hope you enjoy your stay!

Thanks! And I find it so funny that you'd say that because i'm keeping sort of a journal and in it I pasted instructional sketches from loomis, hampton, and hogarth and somehow had the realization that each one of them represented a certain skillset I could work toward with anatomy (despite the fact that they all talk about the same body and being). Hampton is deliciously analytical and can help with my skill in seeing the human body in forms. Hogarth is also pretty analytical but what stands out the most is his handling of light and shadow and how he uses value to create the forms rather than line. And Loomis's illustrative approach is (seemingly) geared towards having an understanding of form but learning to draw without the construction (with his laying down the features first. that part really helped me)
They're all apart of what i'm aiming towards in my art XD

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This weekend I went home and seeing as i'd be in my room all Friday I decided i'd burn through hampton's book (again.) I did it once last year in a month, but since Peter Han's form exercises I felt like i'd be able to understand everything alot better. I was originally just going to go through chapter to chapter, but at the last minute thursday night I decided to make a...very precise schedule XD

At first I thought it might be TOO precise but much to my own surprise I followed it pretty closely :O This is the first time i've made such a schedule, so think I might do one again! Here's all of the sketches from that day. It was a loonng and fruitful one :)


















Sorry for the low-res phone pics. My sketchpad's too big to fully fit on the scanner and I wanted to get everything. Also I unfortunately had to skimp on the legs and never got to hands and feet because my mom wanted us to get pedicures (how about that? XD)
But I WILL be doing those this week sometime hopefully!

And in other news I had to do a master study for my figure drawing class and chose Rubens's "Venus". When I was cleaning out my newsprint pad today I found some figure drawings from class last semester and compared one with the study from last night and just felt like sharing it because It's sort of a reminder to myself that I was able to get myself this far in just 5-6 months whenever I get discouraged ^_^


Old ---> left
Master study--> right

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This weekend I went home and seeing as i'd be in my room all Friday I decided i'd burn through hampton's book (again.) I did it once last year in a month, but since Peter Han's form exercises I felt like i'd be able to understand everything alot better. I was originally just going to go through chapter to chapter, but at the last minute thursday night I decided to make a...very precise schedule XD

At first I thought it might be TOO precise but much to my own surprise I followed it pretty closely :O This is the first time i've made such a schedule, so think I might do one again! Here's all of the sketches from that day. It was a loonng and fruitful one :)


















Sorry for the low-res phone pics. My sketchpad's too big to fully fit on the scanner and I wanted to get everything. Also I unfortunately had to skimp on the legs and never got to hands and feet because my mom wanted us to get pedicures (how about that? XD)
But I WILL be doing those this week sometime hopefully!

And in other news I had to do a master study for my figure drawing class and chose Rubens's "Venus". When I was cleaning out my newsprint pad today I found some figure drawings from class last semester and compared one with the study from last night and just felt like sharing it because It's sort of a reminder to myself that I was able to get myself this far in just 5-6 months whenever I get discouraged ^_^


Old ---> left
Master study--> right

[dmdoodles]

So i've been working diligently, but haven't been able to scan my sketchbook in yet. At present I am working on hands and feet (the most often forgotten parts of the body when it comes to learning..for me anyway). However, I discovered Matt Kohr's ctrl+paint tutorials a month or so ago and was waiting for my yiynova tablet monitor (which i got at the end of august) to try them out. I'm so thankful for the exercises he puts with them XD His tutorial library really is a great resource! :O
As i'm planning on working on my digital painting skills, I'm going through his digital painting exercises. Here are the first three. By the way, the ones on the left are his, and the objective was to copy his with as much accuracy in edges and gradients as possible.

This was the first one, and it was pretty hard...I use photoshop alot with digital painting but it's all very basic..meaning im not used to blending outside of the smudge tool (which isn't as horrible as it sounds. It's modified to be more like the water brush from paint tool SAI). I'd never really been a fan of soft brushes, but after that exercise i'm convinced it's because I never knew their blending merits (which, might I add, are AWESOME.) I'd also never really given thought to having the pen pressure control things other than the size. For the first time, as per Kohr's vids, I used what is referred to as an "opacity brush" and it works WONDERS. ESPECIALLY when combined with large soft brushes.

The second one was alot easier. I'm not sure whether it was more because I'd had experience with the first one and knew how to work my brushes or more because it's color and different colors are easier to decipher for me than values (though i'm sure it's a combination of both)

The last exercise was to work on straight lines, and so he provided a worksheet with a dome and it was basically "color in the lines" to work on brush control. After the previous two exercises this one was REALLY easy...until I got to the left side with the lighter values. And then it got a bit harder.

Overall a positive experience if I had to rate it. I learned alot about brushes and functions that aren't basic and how to change them to get my desired results (because some edges in the first two needed to be hard, some needed to be soft, some gradients needed to be well blended, some didn't), aswell as how I needed to apply pressure for each thing.

[dmdoodles]

Went to the books-a-million in a nearby mall just scouting for whatever artbooks I could find, and by chance I found a book called "Animals: real and imagined" by none other than Terryl Whitlach. Now before I found this book, I had no clue who she was. But BOY was this the best By chance finding I could've ever had the pleasure of having
The book includes both her imagined animals and her methods of studying the real animals that inspired them, and I can't wait to get my hands on her other book!
One thing that stuck out to me the most was her mention of using.....
TRACING PAPER!?
She mentioned drawing the bones and then placing tracing paper over top of that and drawing the muscles, then doing it again for the surface anatomy and I just...facepalmed because that seems like such a good idea XD So I took that technique and put my own spin on it.

Thus started Dasia's book of knowledge- a book where I dig a bit deeper into the anatomy of things with actual precision (sorta, i've never been one to study bones and i just started muscles this year, but it's actually fun!)








Sorry for the REALLY crappy quality. I had to take pics because the sketchbook I ended up getting recently is STILL too big to fit in my scanner haha
Also now i'm..stumped? Well not really stumped but wondering where to go next. The next logical step would be to practice, right? So i suppose i should do that. But I don't want to keep spinning my wheels on the same subject.
Maybe I should do practice on what i've learned while also learning something else? (maybe digital or an animal or something?)
yeah i'll do that XD

[Ursula Dorada]

Welcome! And yay, nice start!

[dmdoodles]

Welcome! And yay, nice start!

Thank you!

And now, for the motherlode. I tasked myself with reading through the entirety of Burne Hogarth's book in a week. I started last monday and finished today. Now, note I said READING and not just drawing from. This is because i'd tried the latter numerous times before- just looking at the pictures and drawing what he draws. But, and this may seem simple, it's AMAZING what you'll learn from ACTUALLY READING hahahaa

And so I embarked on a journey and came out not only with a more rounded knowledge of head drawing and the anatomy of the head, but also with a reinforced sense of self-discipline. So imma shut up now and just let the pictures speak for themselves:








































And, alas, some application (without a model)

[dmdoodles]

I haven't posted here in FOREVER. To be honest, i'm posting more on my tumblr over at:
Dasia Doodles

So for now, just a little update. When 2015 rolled in, i took the sketch a day challenge, and you can find those there in the #sketch a day tag. It's been going very well so far :) In addition, school has been picking up a bit, ESPECIALLY with this paint class i'm taking now. I don't need the class, but wanted to take it because i want to learn how to paint (aswell as pick up some things about color here and there) and at first i was a bit annoyed because of how expensive everything was.
But this class truly has been indispensable. I'd never oil painted before this semester. So the fact that my third ever painting looks like this makes me a bit proud
http://dasiadoodles.tumblr.com/image/113716786018

And you know, i never realized LITTLE i knew about color in general So last night i did some back to basic color study (because i didn't even have a good idea of all of the types of harmonies/schemes)


It was surprisingly fun to spend 3-4 hours on this, and i learned a hell of a lot. But then again, mixing actual oil paint is strangely relaxing too so I can't really be surprised can I?
I want to learn more about handling color and lighting so I can break myself from this "Photoshop mentality" that has me substituting knowledge with overlays and layer settings..