Jaik's Sketches & Thoughts

[Jaik]

Monkybread: Yeah completely agree about that master study comment, its crazy how much photos leave out, and the effects that painting can achieve with seemingly out of place colours.

Heavenswill: I'm giving your advice a shot this week, it's harder and slower (obviously) and I am still learning a lot.

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Focuses this week:

• Skin Colour
  
• Portraits
  

This week I didn't just focus on art. Some of it was focusing on other aspects of the art business, networking, marketing etc. Figure if I can get a very vague understanding of these things, then when it comes time to actually put these aspects in to practice it wont be so difficult as starting from scratch. I also did some research on to how people have organised some scheduling, I found out the importance of breaks, a fair few successful people spend roughly 90 minutes on focused work, then 15-20 minute break, so I tried this out, its not that its hard to concentrate for 90 minutes, I can do that easily, its the self discipline to stop for 20 minutes then go back to it and focus for another 90 minutes.

I found out that the human brain struggles to focus on more than 7 things at a time, whether that is numbers or names, etc. So I decided to try having only a couple of goals for the day, keep them simple and easy to achieve and come up with these things the night before. When I have some more time I think that I'll look into also adding weekly goals, monthly and so on.

I have been writing down more stuff, sort of like every time I have a thought that seems semi-relevant or important I write it down, probably wont reread anything but its good to get things down, keeps my head a little emptier and I find it easier to focus. People should try it, especially if they are feeling confused or overwhelmed.

Mind vomit after work, about 1hr

I'm also 60 heads through my 100 head challenge, I find a portrait and I have 3 minutes to draw it, and I have to do 100 of them.. Fun fun. They all look terrible, I'll upload them once I am done. I also saw a really good video by Garret AJ (who has some really good articles on his blog) of thumb-nailing heads in value, and got me thinking that after my 100 3minute heads, I'll do 100 of these heads, but that will take me a lot longer lol.. Like 6 months longer if I only do 4 a day, I'll see how it goes. Here are the first 4 anyway, each at 20-30 minutes worth.

Portraits 20min each

So I have also been doing gestures as warm ups, looking at Michael Hamptons work (I am saving up for his book) who is an amazing gesture artist really understand motion and anatomy, I have been trying to imitate his sort of style, its not really working but I am getting closer to it over time. See what happens. A good effect I have seen so far is that my 1min gestures are looking like my 2min gestures a couple of weeks ago, I think..

Gestures 1


Gestures 2


Gestures 3

I tried another imaginative portrait. I'm uploading the linework so you can see how it SHOULD look.. and then how colour vomited all over it and made it look like I'm on shrooms.

Linework


Coloured version, only really an hour of work, I guess if I dont push I won't get there.

Skin colour studies, the usual. Didnt use the colour picker on this one, so its not as good, but I also started a master study with no colour picker but its no where near done so I'll upload it next week.

Skin Colour Study

Didn't do as much as I wanted, but I think everyone who is going down a long hard path is going to say that.