ART GYM

Have you progressed since last year, either in technique or quantity of art?

I just started drawing last year, so that's where the bulk of my progress took place, but I've been trying to draw more often this year. I'm going to start working on my lining and learn to draw something besides just heads.

Here's a year-in-review thing I never uploaded anywhere:



I think it's early to tell if I've improved at all technique-wise, but I've been making an effort to draw faster and so far it seems to have been paying off. Commission prices are a race to the bottom and I'm not internet famous enough to charge otherwise, but asking $15 a headshot suddenly feels a lot more worthwhile when I can be done within forty minutes.

Counter-intuitively, one big help has been doing away with my tablet pen's faulty pressure recognition; not having to take it into account leads to way fewer stroke outtakes. I may have a good way to visualize the time saved and will check after I sleep.

So I don't time myself but the app I draw with automatically makes little time lapse videos where I assume one move = one frame, a shorter video would mean fewer actions. Have they shrunk over the past six months?



I guess a tiny bit. For the headshots you can see a pretty instant effect at the point I resolved to try and get any given one done in under an hour, those are more or less unchanged time-wise after that. (And an hourish also seems to be close to the speed limit, quality visibly drops for anything close to or below a 30-second video.) Other types of art get a bit quicker but not much, usually with less time dawdling on the rough sketch.

(Also something I've never been able to do before: just pull up 90 art samples like nbd)

Top row: Still a WIP, today.
Bottom row: A finished lined piece, September last year.

Awesome! There's a lot of improvement in there that goes without saying but what's interesting to me is the lineweight. I notice a pattern that beginners aspiring for realism tend to overdefine facial features at first, while beginners apsiring for anime (me) tend to define way too little. (See title.)

Of course, judgment improves with time for both.

Thanks, I'm pretty thrilled about it! And I can see what you mean, that's interesting. When I first started out I added lines where shading would have been more appropriate, like lining out the entire nose or exaggerating lips, making hair great big shapes with some lines tossed in rather than drawing it in "pieces".

I also used to strictly study the work of other artists (independent and comic books) to try and get a feel for how they drew. It was tremendously helpful for learning the basics, especially proper proportions, but looking at photography and forging my own style has brought me a long ways. I'm still a sucker for Deviantart tutorials of course. Combining tutorials with real references has worked best for me so far!