DaCeronNine - Art School Journey

[daceronine]

Hello! I go by DaCeroNine in the internet. I just bought the Art School course and I'm very excited to get started! I have very few accounts on the internet I keep up to date, but most of my content can be found here in one way or another:

https://linktr.ee/daceronine
https://www.instagram.com/daceronine/

Webtoon - Nozomu - English
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/nozomu-english/list?title_no=800887

Webtoon - Nozomu - Spanish
https://www.webtoons.com/es/challenge/nozomu-espa%C3%B1ol/list?title_no=800872

I've been interested in digital arts since forever. I was originally going to make it my main career, but circunstances took me to specialize in programming and sofware QA. I don't regret it, I also love what I do a lot (and it pays well), but I could never get my mind away from wanting to do something on the digitial arts space.

Back in the day, taking professional digital courses was simply out of my reach, not to mention the accessories required to even get started were way too expensive. This changed a lot in the last 10-15 years, and so, here I come back to pursue one of my life passions.

For now, my main focus is the webtoon I have in the link above, Nozomu. It's a story I've always had cooking in my head and I'm finally spending some time and resources to develop it. I believe I'm "OK" when it comes to drawing, but I REALLY want to develop my skills further. To be the best I can be at it and maybe eventually become good enough to make of this my main living.

Regardless if I can live off my digital art skills, I'm feeling fullfilled and happy by simply being able to pursue this career and I know I will continue to work on webtoons/manga and digital arts for as long as I am able to.

I'll try to post progress as I move through the course, though I will probably go slowly at it due to my work schedule.

[snakker]

Welcome! Can’t wait to see your work

Cheers

[mitsuki-youko]

eyy welcome to the forums! nice webtoon though i only had time to read the first ch. Ur art reminds me of Dragon Ball Z tho ive never watched the anime lool

Nice to see another artist looking to get into webtoons
I also want to publish a webtoon someday though i'm still plotbuilding and world building it (its a large story with 2 worlds, 5 mc's and 100's of side characters)

I'm also planning to animate 6 trailers for it and hopefully make my own music for it as well.

Can't wait to see more of ur work

[Pattu_w]

Welcome to the forums

[CYP2C19]

Welcome to the forums!, you already have a very good head start on Art so I'm curious to see where you'll end up, good luck!.

[daceronine]

That sounds pretty intense. I'm interested to see it once you start publishing it, so if you can please let me know where to see it.
And yea, I'm obviously influenced by Dragon Ball, though I'm taking a bit from everything I see.
I really wanted to "get it right", but quickly realized the more I plan out, the more it got postponed, so I figured I would just "go for it" and learn everything in the process.
Looking back, it's almost embarrasing to read the first chapters due to how much I've learned already.
I get the impulse to go and redo them again, since they are the first impression people get, but in the end, I think it also shows the progress made as an author and artist, and I know that even if I redid them, by the time I'm done, I would have improved more and would just want to redo them again in a perfeccionist cycle.

So... might as well leave it up as is and just keep improving.

[daceronine]

Thanks, I'm honestly impressed by many other artists here. It's intimidating. But in the end, all we can is just improve ourselves to be better than we were before, and see how far we can take our own skill.

[daceronine]

Finally finished some of the initial excercices. I'm actually trying to use CSP instead of Photoshop since that's the main tool I plan to use in the long term, so I had to translate some exercises and find the equivalent brushes and tools. It's all very similar, so there were only a few things that didn't apply.

1 - Pen Control.
Notes: Straightforward, nice to loosen up. I did use the rotate to accomodate myself better, which I think is fine, since that's what I do on a daily basis. I tried to find similar brushes to do the pressure exercice, and for the most part I think it worked out, except for the last one, were I didn't find the options to emulate fade sensitivity without size sensitivity.

2 - Image Adjustments
The initial hue adjustments were simple enough, but color, curves and the final image proved to be more of a challenge. I tried my best to get as close as possible, and in the process got familiar with the adjustment tools, which I think was the whole point of the excercise. I didn't match it exactly, but after fiddling for many minutes, I was satisfied enough and really wanted to move on. I've always had a particual challenge with the finer tones of color, so it makes sense this felt harder.

3 - Image combination

I'm happy with the resulting image, even though I think I could have tweaked the resolutions to make the different pieces match better. Otherwise I think the colors and lighting match fairly well.

Wish I could continue, but I'll have to stop for now. I'll resume lessons tomorrow.

[mitsuki-youko]

haha thanks so much for your interest!! I'm still plotbuilding and worldbuilding and have a lot of work to do on it before i can publish so i'd say i'll probs be able to publish in like 10 years? because i do work full time... so the time i have to work on this is very limited. but i will post my art on ig and on youtube - albeit i may post less art but better quality ones.

i post my music and animations on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2_j3oXTtc4KbePI4jvSdyA

and my art on ig: https://www.instagram.com/mitsuki_youko/

^ that is also where i will announce when i publish my comic and the full 6 trailers will be on youtube. now remember im talkin like 10 years from now so dont get toooo excited even tho im super excited at the thought of it XD

I also coded this website. still wip but eventually ill draw all the pics. so if u see a placeholder thats cus im not done yet XD

https://mitsukiyouko555.github.io/hackwebcomic/

^ rly proud of this one cus its the first website ive ever coded and it turned out exactly as i wanted it to

I get the impulse to go and redo them again, since they are the first impression people get, but in the end, I think it also shows the progress made as an author and artist, and I know that even if I redid them, by the time I'm done, I would have improved more and would just want to redo them again in a perfeccionist cycle.

there is a webtoon artist named Cloverloy. she had the same issue but she just made a separate "redraw" comic and put the redrawn ones there you could try that if u rly wanna redraw them

das all i have thanks for ur interest! it makes me really happy ^u^ hope to see more of ur art as well!

[mitsuki-youko]

nice work! and eyyy fellow CSP user!

only thing i'd note is for #2 you could still draw more lines without them touching

[Gordon003]

Hey, another software developer! Welcome!

I'm also a developer but I have the sentiment as you have as although I'm interested in digitals art, I decide to work in technology area due to high prospect area (still have the same amount of passion though). I decided to keep art as an hobby but not sure if I can continue it as a hobby...

This is a random question but is there any software methodologies/process that you look to apply in your art journey? Just interested to know from another developer perspective into art improvement.

Good luck with your webtoon!

NOTE: I love the manipulated image you done for image combination exercise. I think you need a slightly more mist effect on the dragon but the colours and lighting matches a lot!

[daceronine]

Ha, I didn't realize the point was to fill the whole thing xD I figured I just had to go half and half. Anyway, it was a good warmup

[daceronine]

Thanks a lot!

I agree on adding more mist to the combined image, I think I could have also added a few resolution adjustments to make the images mesh better. In the end I had to stop to continue the next step, but the excercice itself was very useful to learn some of the manipulation tools.

I hope you can indeed keep this as a hobby. I kinda drifted away for a while because, well, working and then studying and practicing is really hard, especially as a gamer who wants to play some of my backlog. But it's been so fullfilling the effort is very worth it, and it's great to share and see what others in similar situations are achieving.

On regards to the methodology... I guess the biggest lesson I'm coming to apply from my work experience (which involves programming/management), is to:

1) Have a clear goal.
2) Break down the path to achieve that goal into achievable tasks with rough time estimates.
3) Learn from the mistakes, improve them in the next iteration. Repeat.

It's how I've been able to continue the webtoon despite the arduous work that goes into creating it. I'm sure that if you compare the initial chapters to the latest one, you will notice a huge leap in quality, and i've not doubt it will improve even more, not to mention that at least the webtoon is now a reality (an actual product), even if it needs improvement. Kind of a scrum process if that makes sense.

[daceronine]

4 - SelectionsLiquifyHealStamp
Interesting editing excercices!

1) The apples one was straightforward enough. I took to hearth the tip of "backing up" pieces of the original to overlay and "push" the new apples to the back, instead of cropping the new apples. I think I hadn't considered this for illustration.

2) Figured I would try the aging excercice on myself. Yep, that's me. Business profile picture. Mid excercice I realized that with CSP, it was easier to copy bigger elements, then use a soft eraser to "blend" the elements with the orignal picture. As well as using some actual blending to remove some rough edges.

3) The alien was quite the challenge. with all the lines in the face it was hard to do fine adjustments. I think I could do better, but more importantly I can already see how I can use liquify and wrap to do some quick proportions adjustments to my own illustrations.

[Gordon003]

Compared to you, I'm so young but hearing your perspective, I hope I don't regret too much of not making art my primary career as technology has both my skill AND my passion which is why I intend to keep it as a hobby.

Anyway, I'm glad that you mentioned SCRUM as it's a process I worked under in my software company and I'm currently using to set up my art progress. I initially thought my art and software journey will be completely different but as time goes, it has more and more similarities; in particular how to improve which is via iteration like you said. But yeah, thx for specifying more on SCRUM and good luck with your art journey!

[daceronine]

Some of today's Term 1 practices.
I kinda skipped the warm up lines and cylinders excercice mostly because I have done similar exercises before and I've had limited time lately. Still, I tried to fit as much as possible into my schedule to keep building up the mental and hand dexterity.

First some skeletons from photo references. I do wish I had time to do more, but it's still great practice.

Then some skeletons from imagination, which seems to be a bigger challenge. I hope to get better with these in time.

Some body proportions practice, granted I had some experience going in, but I'm still not able to do it completly from memory, so I'll keep practicing until I can. I also noticed I might need to adjust the legs a bit more next time.

Finally some 30 second and 60 second gesture practice.

I'll keep repeating these exercices daily, as instructed, while I continue with the next class.

[Gordon003]

Deconstruction from photo references look nice. I do suggest that you should use different colour for cylinder to indicate if the cylinder is pointing toward us or away from us. (e.g. green if cylinder toward us; orange if else).

Gesture-wise, your work looks pretty expressive with simple definitive lines. I do suggest to avoid adding dress for the time being as it's may convoluted the gesture drawing. But all's good.

Keep it up!

[daceronine]

Thanks a lot for the feedback! Yes, that's pretty sound advice, I'll keep this in mind with today's practice.

[daceronine]

Term 1 - Daily exercices

1) More skeleton wireframes from photos and from imagination. These have been taking some time, so I'll probably simplify the exercice in order to keep doing it. Used a few different colors and layers as recommended to try to make depth more clear on the limbs.

2) Male / female proportions. I'm now doing this one from memory. The male one turned alright, but the female one turned out more... "male" than it should. I noticed it's mainly because I made the neck a bit thicker, and the overall torso/hips also need to me slimmer. I'll probably retry the exercice again until I get the "look" right for the female.

3) Finally did some gesture exercices, 30 seconds first, then 60 seconds. I tried to keep it without clothes this time, which does help to make the overall figure clearer. I noticed strokes are also more defined now. It's definetly helping build a pose library in my mind and should make drafting poses easier in the future. This is one exercice I can see myself continue for a long time. It REALLY helps

4) Finally, a few quick medieval guards designs I had to do for the webtoon. The only item worth noting is that I tried to apply the skeletons and proportions lessons learned so far. I believe it did allow me to make the overall draft for them a lot easier and faster (speed in general is really important for me since I usually face tight schedules)

[snakker]

Great job on these studies!