JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[JyonnyNovice]

Smrr Thanks miss Smrr! That really made my day! Have to keep working to get them looking consistently solid like that ^_^


So figures in perspective has always been something I struggled with. I can catch a good gesture from life and can do decent enough ones in imagination work but when I'm constrained by a perspective space my characters totally stiffen up and look weak and weedy cause I'm struggling too much to keep them in that space. This is a big problem since it limits me to drawing a single character and building perspective around them then unable to add more characters - or like with my buddhist chanting illustration being limited to simple characters. Perspective scenes take a while to draw properly so doing a ton of quick practice was hard before I realised to get a load of photo reference and add characters directly on top. Gonna try this practice method for a while to adapt my brain to characters in perspective. Here's the first set:





Pretty weak, stiff and awkward for the first one, second one a little better. I'll determine to do this practice at least a few times a week.

[JyonnyNovice]

Was so great to complete the crimson crucible and so amazing to struggle along with everyone! In the start I thought it'd not be so good to look at everyone elses WIP's in case they were too similar to mine or I found myself influenced but that was nonsense in my head - brought so much to the challenge to be able to support others and get support myself!!

here's all the stuff I did, plus the very final one which I added some little effects (too late for the challenge, forgot to add them yesterday - not sure if it makes it better or not but it feels complete now).

















^ This is the one I submitted


^ This is the one with the effects I forgot to add for the challenge

[JyonnyNovice]

Vilppu's book advises mastering this mickey mouse style hand first then adding complexity bit by bit til you get to a real human hand. I'll follow his advice - sometimes hands end up so ridiculously broken and I can't figure out how to fix them >.< will keep practising!

[JyonnyNovice]

This is gonna be my daily training for a while, 30 minutes of form practice, 30 mins of hand practice and 30 minutes of expressions practice. After that gonna go hardcore anatomy study and practice for the rest of my time.

[ShinOkami]

Hey man, just took a quick look at these last studies and pieces you've made and man- you passed me ! XD
You're waaaaay better than me in so many ways ! XD

Just keep on rocking dude, you're doing great ! : )

[JyonnyNovice]

Shin Thanks man! if you think that you better hurry up and pass me again so I don't lose my rival X) seriously though, I'm sure you can do stuff like that, you should enter the next crucible challenge and see where it takes you!

More form, hands and expression training. It's fun to practice hands like this - don't need to worry about proportions and realism just enjoying trying to puzzle out how the forms fit together in different poses.

Help me figure out what this guy does...

I started reading Black Joke manga - drawn by the same guy who drew Battle Royale (Masayuki Taguchi). I really really dig the way he does his pages, with the ink outlines and smooth gradations. I am trying to figure out what tools / process he used - to me looks like ink lines then could be graphite even, or black coloured pencil (Adam Warren uses graphite instead of ink, then photocopied / scanned it comes out looking black). I don't think it's ink wash or markers because the edges look so controlled and smooth and I don't think it's digital because the paper texture looks too real - anyone have any idea about how he might do these pages?

[JyonnyNovice]

More form and hands training and my anatomy notes from the last few days drawn up neater. I'm trying to take more pride in my work and spend the extra 30 minutes or so to make stuff look more pretty with ink and colour. It really makes me feel I've accomplished something instead of the messy pencil smeared pages I usually do, plus its more regular practice inking and mixing colours.

[bonesworth]

Good Lord, JyonnuNovice! You S.B. is fantastic! I never saw such S.B. from a beginner showing that much of evolution, and, let say, gradual evolution! You really proved that it is possible with discipline!


CONGRATS!

[JyonnyNovice]

Bonesworth Thanks a lot! That really gives me encouragement to keep going harder than ever ^_^

My new training regime seems to be working out for me. It's simple enough that I don't have to write it out and is not cluttered trying to fit in everything I want to learn in slots throughout the week.

Morning: three x 30 min - 1 hour sessions. Set stopwatch to keep focused and keep to time.

Topics (switch in a new one each week, minimum of 1 week before switching)
skulls, asaro heads, expressions, face rhythms, form, figures in perspective, gestures, quicksketch, rendering, perspective rooms, vehicles, 3d shapes etc.

Afternoon: at least 4 hours, spend a minimum of one week before changing the topic

Currently studying Vilppu anatomy (pelvis), next week move onto legs

Evening: When there is time and opportunity, draw from imagination in sketchbook practise the stuff I've been studying that week

Weekends: Work on comic book / other personal stuff


I think this way of sticking with a topic for a number of days works better for me than doing multiple study areas in a week. I determine to maintain this schedule til at least the end of June to see how it's helping me.


Recent stuff:

Form practices:






Skull practices:





Expression practices:




Anatomy practice:




Stuff is still a bit scattered and inconsistent but hopefully in the next weeks I'll get more solid with this new schedule and will have 5 x practices from each thing plus some personal work from weekends.

[Pax]

Oh my god, the amount you're putting out is incredible! Honestly that's more inspiring than the leaps and bounds of improvement you've made over time; your consistency in practicing is admirable. Liking the constant application with a good stream of theory; honestly, that's probably the way to go, constantly applying after learning a concept in order to understand it and how to use it within your work to represent what you want to represent. Great job dude!

[tripna]

Hey man nice gestures. The way you studied blacksad's characters and a scene from game of thrones is very effective, i think that's the best way to study and learn something instead of just copying it from the same angle. Keep it up.

[AV_Jacobs]

These are great. The level of improvement is really interesting to see. Keep going dude!

[JyonnyNovice]

Pax Thanks so much! I find the 'putting all eggs in one basket' situation really helps me to keep going. We always have a choice but when it's a hard choice like 'get good at art or do jobs you hate for the rest of your life', it's quite easy to keep the motivation up.

Tripna Thanks dude! Gestures and quick figures are probably my favourite thing, glad they are looking ok ^^

AV Thanks for the encouragement and for stopping by!

Some form and skull practices, plus a really crappy expression practice page that I really don't want to post (but I will because I don't want to curate just the decent stuff to upload).






(seriously need to do more practice of characters interacting)


Didn't finish this next one but wanted to post it up cause I'm really buzzed about it! Finally starting to do comic pages (my first one since last Inktober - and my first page that was composed with all the panels fitting on one page). It's just an exercise really, dialogue is kind of cringing, but it was soooo fun to create this little world from my mind and make it real on paper.

The writing prompt was from Scott Mcloud's 'making comics' book and it was this one "Queen dies, then king dies of grief" and the exercise was to make a one page comic using only one transition type.

There are 6 transition types he identifies.

Moment to moment: seeing multiple frames of a character performing a single action
Action to action: different actions by one character played out over multiple frames (pulling cigarette packet out, removing a cigarette, putting it in mouth, lighting it etc.)
Subject to subject: switching to a different character in the next frame (ie in a conversation)
Scene to Scene: switching to a different physical location in the next frame
Aspect to Aspect: showing different parts of a single scene (ie close up of dirty ashtray, then empty beer cans, then a pile of dirty laundry)
Non-sequitor: An abstract string of images that don't seem to make sense

This page was done using 'scene to scene' transitions, so each new frame had to be in a different location in space or time. It was sooo fun to do this, gonna keep doing these exercises cause I love it, and I feel like I am finally moving towards my goal of professional comic artist!

(big version here: http://i.imgur.com/chw518y.jpg )



the pencils actually looked much nicer than the ink - the ink was so rubbish (as you can see from the unpainted panels) I scanned it to add value in photoshop. So I need to work on my inking. I use the brush pen a lot but usually in super loose quick little drawings where I don't care about screwing up and things are nice and big. When there are all these tiny details and small faces with important expression I found it super super difficult. Plus using a lightbox on pencil under drawing it was too hard to see and trying to 're draw' stuff with ink and brush was beyond my level of skill (as you can see from some of the awkward errors). So I need to work on my process a bit, and practice inking more and more (and also think more about light when I rough stuff out so I can get some well placed blacks in there). Only way from here is up ^^

[JyonnyNovice]

Haven't been able to draw for a week or so due to real life stuff, back on it now!

Have given my morning practice sessions over to this 4-week pen training course from 'Pen & Ink: A Manga Startup Guide'. It's Japanese so pretty hardcore and grinding, doesn't say how long you should spend practising each day but from snippets of interviews in the book it seems like you should spend all day on each task (one interviews talks about doing 100 pages of this second exercise). I can't manage so long on one task but will give a good 2 - 3 hours per day on them.

This is the task for day 2, drawing freehand straight lines:



Writing up Vilppu pelvis anatomy notes:

[John]

That's pretty hardcore. Nib pens are tricky little things. Hard to master but once you get the handle of it, god, the beautiful things you can do with it. Glad you're back Jonny!

[JyonnyNovice]

John Thanks dude! Good to be back! Yea I'm determined to master this nib and get my stuff looking tighter!

One more for today, some fanart type of thing for Vikings, practising with the g-pen.

[JyonnyNovice]

Pen training day 3: drawing straight lines of uniform thickness



And more vikings / pen practice:

[StardustLarva]

Great stuff Jon, I can already see some improvement in your lines from doing those exercises! Keep at it, man. That last Vikings piece is particularly good, I like the textures.

[JyonnyNovice]

Stardust Thanks dude! Texture is one of my most annoying weaknesses, so I'm glad my (long avoided) efforts are paying off!

Day 4 of pen training, thick -> thin / thin -> thick / ebb & flow lines. This is the first day I found difficult, my hand just isn't trained to going from hard - > light pressure. The other way around it feels ok. Might even redo this training tomorrow since I felt like I was getting it towards the end of the session.



And a vase of flowers in the style of 'Roaul Dufy' from watercolour class (it looked better before I put the darks in, those drips going upwards were a mistake that I tried to make look on purpose by adding more - doesn't really work but my teacher says 'you'll learn more if you ruin your paintings')

[JyonnyNovice]

Day 5 of pen training; drawing evenly spaced sets of lines, then adding a second set of evenly spaced lines right next to it, so that the lines join and the join isn't visible. Partly successful, again felt like I was getting it by the end. (Decided to push ahead instead of repeated days I was weaker at else I'll never get through the whole 4 weeks. I will keep doing the ones I'm not so good at as short warm ups in the mornings before I ink).



And more vikings + pen practice. Thanks to Jameswxu for giving me the tip about clamping the pages of my sketchbook so the page is pulled tight and I can paint with watercolour without the paper buckling!



God damn those screwed up eyes and that wonky chin... I swear the day I can do justice to a beautiful woman is the day I'll be ready to accept death...