Fedodika the Koala

[KBarr]

Love the emblem piece though I would paint over and simplify the coral a bit more to bring the focal point back towards the eye-star thingy.

[Fedodika]

Kbarr: Hey thanks man! I agree, though i wont be bothering with it anymore lol

Noodle: It's called... CHEATING! Photos basically haha

So i dropped out of the contest because it was reallys stressing me out. I probably would have been better off had i entered it about two weeks ago when it started. Plus looking at the other entries made me feel like my attempts were futile. I noticed i do something Will terrell talked about people who are "good" but not "great" Is that "Sometimes you try to have a gimmick to make people like your work like you give them a funny hat or have a weird angle on it." I noticed all my ideas were kinda like that.

"It's a Coral, but it's a PENTAGRAM!"

"It's a merman, but with a GOAT HEAD!"

Meanwhile the other entries are just cool shapes and look a million times better than mine because fundamentals. I can't wait till i can make my corny ideas and they just look awesome because fundamentals. Also i shouldn't be painting and should do more drawing for sure. 

So i got back to Loomis, AKA the bane of my existence. I decided this december i should just really focus on absurdly simple concepts until i can flawlessly draw them. Just the sheer amount of screwy lines and struggling i go through drawing a basic loomis head lay in is embarassing and says a LOT about where I'm at. almost 5 years of drawing my balls off giving 110% in the most unorthodox zig zag pattern to level 1. Happens with anything i do so i shouldnt be surprised. 

So my goal is to hit 1000 of these to make sure i can draw them tight and fluently from any angle. Should take a few days, but the most rudimentary things in art help everything so much and it can only be worth it. They are definitely better at 125 compared to the first one for sure, so after about 800 or so more they should be very tight, as long as i'm concentrating. That and i have developed the "eye" to see how they "should" look so that should be interesting. 

Also going through proko's head drawing stuff (premium) and liking the 3d model he has set up as a Loomis head, its a big help. 

I think my biggest problem is i over intellectualize and overthink things and second guess myself a lot, end up being really shifty and all over the place because that is the curse of intelligence. I want to improve the fastest way, but I've studied debate and philosophy a lot and its made me second guess and question everything and ends up hurting me. 

I wonder what all the color anatomy and composition i DO know is all worth, because without whatever this thing I'm lacking in, it doesnt feel like its worth peanuts. Here I go intellectualizing it again lol.

I feel like its time to be the succesful bonehead I'd always felt i was above. I'm gonna do Loomis till it hurts and get this stuff over with (never ending journey.) And then move into also super basic figure stuff like the bean and robo bean stuff proko has for premium as well. And try to avoid painting as much as possible!

[Fedodika]

Everytime i have  little bit of the green herb I'm way more honest with my own work, and my god man, looking at this months stuff i feel like I haven't gotten one bit better at drawing in almost two years! 

Like HOLY SHIT!

ahahah

maybe not 0% but like... 30% better from two years ago.

The amount of errors i make drawing these heads is like crushing me. The bad elipses, the skewed placement, the hairy lines everything! Also how i wouldn't take this stuff seriously when i tried to do it. I'd just do it and think that was enough not checking and being thorough. When you really factor in how much you "could" improve after all those hours, man it's embarrassing haha. But you know what, I'm glad i see it now! Half my sketchbook is ignoring critiques and half of it is regretting not taking them!

It's getting to be a cliche post in my sb, but I'll just repeat it because its such a mind blow to me! 

I could have had jobs a LOOOOONG time ago had i focused on this basic stuff.. good fucking goofies!

[Fedodika]

So begins my month of Pei Mei, I shall smash this block of wood at close range until i break it

530 heads in

[Adzerak]

Sweet! They can't send ya to the Principal's office when you're the HEADMASTER yourself! 
Planning to draw/render out facial features on some of the more extreme angles? Always find that super tricky and sometimes it barely resembles a face in the end.

[Fedodika]

Adzerak: Oh yea of course; but my initial problem was just getting it right from a not extreme angle lol. There's so much that can go wrong in even the simplest of perspectives that I'm singling out the most fundamental most basic things. Thanks tho! The extreme angle thing isn't hard though, just understanding is the tough part. and even in real life when heads are at certain angles they look really weird. Like take a yearbook and flip it upside down, it makes me sick to my stomach...

Next im going to refine my knowledge of the features like the nose eyes and lips and good placement with them. May draw 1000 features as a way to drill that stuff in. It's one of those things I THINK i know but i really don't!

1000 Head lay inz BISH!
This consistency is giving me a halfie...

[Fedodika]

Upload ERROR: story of my lief

Most of this is from imagination/memory

[Fedodika]

I feel like im starting to get a lot of things... So i tried to apply it to an old painting of mine to see the difference. I find it really strange i thought the drafstmanship there had any hope of landing me jobs lol. So many features slur into eachother and have really weird bone structures and curvature indications. whew, shudderful...

again this is all about 95% imagination, some referenced from Hogarthe, and trying to rotate the noses in particular. probably gonna watch a 5 hr vilppu vid tomorrow on heads lol

[Fedodika]

Went back and tried to "correct" some of my old paintings; Most of them are from february 2016 i believe. Also an hour long head drawing from NMA with the 3d models. I'm gonna try to do a few more of these since it really makes me notice how much I'm precisely observing. But I've seen Proko not 100% nail a drawing, often changing things probably intentionally. 

"Draw a good head, not an exact head." Somebody said, i think shcmid. 

No harm in trying to be more accurate... Learning loomis has felt like solving the worlds biggest riddle. Draw this again memes are always interesting!

[Fedodika]

up to about 1250 head lay ins, goin for 2000. Gonna then go and do the same for hand lay ins, rib and pelvis lay ins, and maybe feet or legs, probably feet since i have a lot of trouble with them. My heads are still so skewed dang lol, this shit is hard!

Also need to watch Proko shade some more since i feel i aint cuttin it in this medium, need more UMPH

---

[Fedodika]

750

MY FUCKING ARM BRO

[Fedodika]

Hornkreis: thanks my man! will do!

So i did some studies from John Grello today; These are kinda studies, more like i was drawing what i was seeing from my own angles, putting the ref away doing what i could remember, pulling it back up etc. Learned a lot of useful things in a pretty short amount of time. Mainly about lineweight and how to dress up a feature, and also that a nice face drawing probably isnt gonna happen in just one minute. Gotta kinda sit there and baby the marks until it looks coherent

But yea making a nice drawing should feel like a task, not a breeze, at least in my experience thus far.

[Fedodika]

here's a couple heads from my head. Need to work on... something next, but maybe i should just keep pushing heads this month since it's a pretty viable thing to do!

[Fedodika]

On another episode of Fedo's House of PAIN. Tried doing some master studies in pen and my goodness were they FUCKED when i scanned em in. These are the heavily doctored versions of my pen drawings, STILL WRONG! lol i need to do more of these and just get it out the way, my main issue is kind of along the lines of placement and more fundamentally getting the tilt of the head todally wrong hehe

Mentoring tomorrow to hopefully get me on the right track with this stuff

[Knopfkater]

I really like that couple of refined Portraits of yours, and those studies make come back to loomis ^.^

But every time i revisit this post your dedication and ethic is amazingly inspiring to me. Daily uploads straight what are
are you a wizard?

keep the grind going, cya

[Fedodika]

Knopfkater: for whatever reason i thought your name was Knopflaker for the longest time haha


That's what this SB is here for man, to inspire anyone who still visits this site. For the people who didn't make it right off the bat and wanna see what it takes to get out of the woods when you stay lost for two years but have your foot on the gas the whole time. I post because it's what i would want to see someone do in my exact situation, so hey it's out there. And as far as being a wizard, I am a koala through and through :O)

Some feet layins today; Gonna try to make it through some Bill Perkins Composition stuff on NMA soon while i draw these. These are far more difficult than the head lay ins and require much more concentration with all the arcs and different shapes. Hampton has the best method ive seen so far for breaking these down; most peoples lessons on feet are too brief and dont give you something to work with really, just here's some toes and the basic shape go figure. 70 done, 930 left, but i feel i'll get much faster after a few hundred. Lotsa goof and scraggly lines in here, hopefully they'll go away like they did with the heads!

Also after my mentor thing today, i am gonna also be tackling the Reilly Construction method for heads so i can start seeing the shapes correctly. Then I'll also be doing some very seperated 2 value portrait studies to see the matrix of an image better before i go into the major or minor key of the values. 

[Fedodika]

alright these are speeding up, got to about 240 today so 760 left

[Fedodika]

I only got to around 24 feet pen sketches today so i decided to apply my knowledge and construct one nice foot and baby and comb the lines to sculpt a better result. I kinda like it! Had to look at a few different refs but i am getting the basic idea; and its crucial to refer back to hampton over and over to make sure im on the right track. His shit is absolute gold for what im after here

[Fedodika]

That commission i did a while back with the skewed perspective was loved so much by the client she printed it out on metal and sent me one too lol! Also another hundred or so feet, these are pure torture! Maybe i'll dream of a better way to draw them lol

[Kimonas]

Dude you are getting the juice. You discovered the secret: Learning to learn.

Really impressed keep it going man!