Jaik's Sketches & Thoughts

[Jaik]

Last post of the year! Next Sunday we will be well into 2014. Kind of scary how fast the year went by this year. It was a fantastic year, I had a lot of great experiences, met some awesome people and all round had a tonne of fun getting a moon tan from spending too much time inside in front of my monitors.

The 4th of January (yes I remember it better than I do my own birthday) will mark exactly two years since I started this drawing venture and I am both happy and disappointed with how far I have come. Happy because I can see the improvement (I make a comparison image every year for motivation). Disappointed because I think this year I realised that there are no short cuts and that until recently I was probably studying wrong. I have since worked out a method of study that I think will work, but I don't know what that means for the time I spent before that epiphany. Is it only worth 50% of time spent, 30%? Less? This is what irks me about the 10 000 hour rule. It is 10 thousand hours of focused study, but if I was focusing on the wrong things does it get subtracted or added. Meh, I guess at the end of the day the rule is only there so that people can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So not as much this week, my schedule got disrupted because of christmas (I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays :) ). BUT I did get a large intuos 5 pro. ITS HUGE! I have to rearrange my desk just to fit it on.. But drawing is SO MUCH EASIER to do nice lines. I could never understand how everyone kept saying "Draw with your elbow". I was sitting in my little man cave with my intuos 3 small, which is smaller than an A5 page, thinking there was something wrong with me because I couldnt get elbow drawing right.. But it is so much easier on the large tablets >___>

Thanks for the comments everyone, I will get back to your sketchbooks today :)

Armor study.


Moving on to Forms of the torso (not a lot this week as far as anatomy goes.. Damn Christmas)


Applying that anatomy


Horse gestures, trying to work out how the guy on the horse was wrong. These studies showed that people actually sit much further forward on the horse than I thought they did..


Okay so I think I am finished with this.. There are some things I would like to change, but I think I should just learn from it and move on. The light made everything very saturated, and comparatively the shadows were desaturated but when I focused on them, they were also very saturated.. I think this is because of the range of values and colours in real life is infinitely more than what a screen can produce, and also because of the eye adjusting to lighting conditions.. Needs more practice.


Readjusted the composition, altered the values. I think that helped a lot. And added a cape based on Lyra's suggestion to get something with weight down in the bottom right corner. I knew that I was jumping into details too quickly, but I couldnt see what else to do aside from detailing. Could someone please point out what they would have done differently? I tried to go from big to small?


Website Update. The HTML prototype is almost done, I just have to do skethbook and contact pages. Then I need to convert it to PHP and it should all work. Which means it will probably be up and running by the end of January.