oh no, my sketchbook

[atrenr]

Hey ohnoes! You have a nice start to your sketchbook so far. I saw you mentioned a fear of failing and just wanted to let you know that is very normal(we do want to be good at this afterall!) and it does take awhile to get the mentality of "failure is good" installed in your brain. It can be rough until you really get it nailed down in your head so hang in there and keep pushing yourself.

It's good that you are learning the skeletal features. Something I recommend to everyone who is learning anatomy is to learn the muscles of the body as well(no skin). There are a lot of them but when you know what exactly what is under the skin and how everything wraps around the bone/eachother, things get much easier!

As for your apple I did a quick step-by-step paintover thing. It got rather long so I'm just gonna put it in spoiler tags so it doesn't clutter your sb

Spoiler

OKAY! So we'll just start off with your study as the base, you did a pretty good job of getting all the colors to begin with!



So first what I did was just fix the edges of the apple so it wasn't quite so lumpy and added the shadow of the apple. Try to always get some kind of a shadow down as they tether the object to a surface! I'm not worrying about details at all yet, I just want to focus on getting the larger masses of color and shape fairly accurate first. Also going to ignore the edge lighting for now to keep things a little more simple.



Getting a little smaller now, continuing to refine the larger shapes without detailing.



I'm fairly happy with the shapes now. Adding the edge lighting now to push the values so it isn't so flat.



Everything up until now has been done with just a basic round brush (soft round for part of the shadow). Now I'm going to use a few basic texture brushes that I believe are default chalks and such. I'm looking at the textures and details in the apple separately and thinking of what tools I have at my disposal that can mimic and/or imply the given detail. For the speckles it's just a scatter rock brush. The brighter lines are just a chalk brush with 10%-ish spacing on it. And the under lying hue shifting is just a massive basic chalk brush that I tapped once. For all of these textures I lasso and free-transformed them to bend the strokes shape to imply the form of the apple. Finally I added the stem and shadow (going back to just the hard round brush.)



And there we are! To quickly explain the process of what I just did. I simplified the apple in my mind to basic shapes to keep myself from getting confused. I shut out the detailing and textures and focused on color, value and form. Only once I was happy with those did I move on to detailing (very important!). From there it was just using the tools I knew I had at my disposal to mimic what I was seeing. While the soft/hard round brush is extremely useful, it isn't always the most effective route to take(in terms of time and sanity ). While brushes aren't critically important and always take a backseat to knowledge, they are still very useful and it is important to play with them.

So that concludes whatever this was :O I hope it was helpful, and if you have any questions feel free to pm me or something. Keep trudging soldier!