Ihalom - Art School Journey

[Ihalom]

Hello, I'm Isbell and I'm a freelance artist for some years already.
I've noticed a lack of fundamentals when I was trying to make more complex drawings which affects my ability to grow. I got to the point where simple portrait / character creation is not enough and want to learn more, so I got the course in full.
Even if I have the experience with some topics here, I intend to start from the very beginning, to consolidate my knowledge.

I also use the recommendation to start from the Term 7 for Enhanced learning topic and with the notes I got I feel like I got back to school again . It's both refreshing and exciting as my school years ended long ago.

I'll intend to treat this topic as a blog and hopefully I'll be posting my homework here

[patrycja.lerch]

Welcome Isbell!

[Violante]

Welcome! Can't wait to see your art and process

[mitsuki-youko]

Welcome to the forums!!

Also your handwriting is so neat

i thought that was a typed screenwriting thing at first lol

[andysawesomemovies]

Happy to have you!

[ZekeDraws]

Welcome to the site!

[Ihalom]

Oh my, thank you <3.
I always thought that my handwriting is awful, especially the capital letters, so I decided to use those here, to actually practice writing this way a bit more .
I certainly hope that I'll be able to write this way on the screen too, because I love the vibe of designs with handwriting notes . It's been really hard so far, I'm writing with my right hand, but drawing with left, and I can't do anything on my tablet with right hand, haha.

[mitsuki-youko]

I see you do what i do XD

my handwriting is half cursive half gibberish

It only looks good if i write in all caps LOL it keeps it uniform and all the same size XD

[Ihalom]

I always thought that my cursive is better, but after year of keyboard writing it's just awful, I cannot even put my signature the same twice, haha.
I just hope that those notes will help me keep the caps a bit better

[Ihalom]

After a struggle with find the time to watch PS for the Digital Prod (I haven't seen it whole yet, it's always something that disturb me with sitting those 2,5 hours straight XD), I made a first assignment with pen control and adjustment, and the results are pretty expected.

My pen control is almost non existing LOL
I made the first in Photoshop on my Kamvas screen

And this one - just out of curiosity is from the iPad Procreate.
It's obvious that after 4 years of using Procreate on a daily basis my lines will be better on this app. But I didn't even realize that my big screen tablet is so hard to manage

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Same for the next. And circles are a catastrophe, omg...

Procreate was way more forgiving here.

The biggest problem with the exercise no 2. was my astigmatism I guess, because every time those lines went close to each other, my eyes were melting, haha.

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Pressure went a little bit nicer. Although I'm using way different brushes when I'm drawing, so I'm not sure if working with the big, general PS brush would be relevant enough

I couldn't find a good matching brush for Procreate, so it doesn't look that good and I decided to skip it. It's the big tablet the one I want to master at this point

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And the adjustments one was something I really hated, because I couldn't even realize what to do to make it right and I had the feeling I'm making a lucky guesses all the time, haha.
I was trying the color balance on the last one for like 10 minutes before I got the idea to maybe start with hue first...
It really took a bit of my nerve there, and I'm glad I was able to finish it.

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I'm sure I want to practice the pen control every day, because that was awesome, but the adjustments... I guess I'll practice it every second... maybe even every third day. I'm not sure yet how it supposed to help me more in the future with my own work, but I believe it will, so I don't want to skip it anyway, even if I really don't like it

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Sorry for such long post, but I wanted to share my experience with the first more serious lesson. Even if I considered myself semi-professional to this point, I learn so much already about Photoshop, all the shortcuts and other things that will be helpful in my future work.
So I'm quite happy so far

[Kaz_0]

Great work on the assignments ! I totally get your struggle with the pen control. For me when I switch to my screen tablet suddenly any pen control I had just leaves

[mitsuki-youko]

(I haven't seen it whole yet, it's always something that disturb me with sitting those 2,5 hours straight XD)

I watch it on 2x speed lol then if i dont understand something i rewind a bit and put it at normal speed then if it gets easy again i go back to 2.x speed XD that way you can watch a 2 hr vid in 1 hr

Your pen control is not bad, managed to fit a lot of lines into that box

the circles arent terrible either! they're a but wriggly but once you get the hang of it im sure they'll look great seeing as this is what ur starting with!

Sorry for such long post

naw its fun reading your posts

[Ihalom]

I found that the main problem is the weight of the pen. The iPad pencil is almost twice as heavy as the Huion pen and I cannot feel it properly when drawing. It is a bit better now than when I was starting with the bigger tablet, but I also learned to rotate the canvas in every way just to draw the lines from that one, most comfortable angle

[Ihalom]

I heard a lot about benefits from watching at 2x speed, but since English is not my native language, I'm afraid that it won't do much for me. Sometimes I think that the best way for me to understand everything would be to watch those videos 2x slower
Also, I'm stopping the video a lot to make notes, so the time I spent on this is even longer, haha. Good thins there's many topics I'm familiar with, so there's not that many notes ^^.

[Ihalom]

Day 3 of pen control assignment was today and I'm already see the difference and I have no idea why it's going so fast, haha.
I plan to post a comparison after a week or two of those daily exercises, so I hope the progress will be visible even more.

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But before all that, I'll do what I should do in my first post - because it should be clear from what place I'm starting and that I'm not a total beginner.

This is my starting point when it comes to Photoshop:
It's one of my recent drawing (May 2023) and it took me a tremendous amount of time. So I want to enhance my skills to draw faster, and better than this.

Also - I want to create many other things besides characters. I have my own world I'm building and making stories and comics based on it, so my goal is to master as many art topics as I can to draw what I want, minimize my use of references and stop worrying about anatomy, perspective, coloring and bunch of stuff that are currently slowing me in my work

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Thanks for taking this journey with me, it's been a while when I was treating something as serious as this course

[mitsuki-youko]

Also - I want to create many other things besides characters. I have my own world I'm building and making stories and comics based on it, so my goal is to master as many art topics as I can to draw what I want

noice! thats what im going for too
ur art looks great! I just finished rewatching FMAB recently

[Ihalom]

Thank you <3.
It's been a while for me since I've ended watching FMAB, but it was so good, I'll definitely rewatch it someday
Also I have a plan to make a small fanart for every anime I've seen so far, but I'm failing at it miserably

[Ihalom]

I did the first part of nude figure drawing and even if this topic was quite familiar for me, I've never quite used the cylinders, line of action or joints to create images .
I always used the main shapes, starting from the head or chest and then I tried to build the rest somehow.

Anyway, I found a bunch of 3D references on my HDD that I download from somewhere long ago and I thought those would be perfect for practice. Mostly because there's no strange light/shadows that are often used for some croquis poses from the net.

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So here's the first batch I made - just for "upgraded stick figures":

When I take off the pose layer - it's fairly obvious that for most poses there's no way to tell what is the direction of the limbs - just as Marc said:

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When I put a cylinders there, it started to look way better :).

I'm still not exactly sure if I put the cylinders correctly. Sometimes it was really hard to tell between flat and slight tilt, so many times I had to recreate the pose on my own (at least a bit) to check if the limb is closer to the camera or not .

But without a poses layer, it looks really good and in majority of cases you can guess the pose almost perfectly ^^:

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The absolute perfect idea I didn't know about before was to use the box for the head. The parallel lines work so good I didn't even have to worry about direction of the face and head, because it seemed so obvious and natural. I need to check this method for some more serious drawings, but it may save my life, especially when it comes to drawing the head that's raised a bit which always was difficult for me when using circle.

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Anyway - that's all for today's post. I want to make some non-traced poses next (and try to do the assignment 3 and 4 from Photoshop lesson, because it's a bit overdue already ).
And for my own sake I'll also fill the page with cylinders, because why not

[Ihalom]

It's been about 2 weeks on the course right now. Most of the stuff so far is something I was more or less doing for the past years of drawing, but it was really good to remind a basics and even I learned something new from those lessons.

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I've made an assignment for building figures based on the photos.
Trying to establish an action line (which I rarely done before) and using cylinders to mark the limbs direction was really helpful

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I also ended up the proportion and measuring lecture as well

While I was making the male proportions I felt like something was off, that the figure seemed too narrow, but I couldn't figure out why.
Maybe you'd know

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And also, I used some of the knowledge to make a two quick figure drawing:

I'm making those traditionally for some time already, but I always had problems with keeping the correct proportions and I think that finally I was able to make it a little bit better, especially for standing poses (sitting ones was always easier for me to draw from reference).

I think that's all for now, I'll watch the gesture drawing chapter (I realized that there are chapters in the videos and I actually don't need to watch all 2,5 hours on one sitting ) and probably make some gesture drawings, although those were always strange for me and doesn't make much sense, maybe I'll convince myself wrong.

Oh, and a promised page full of cylinders for the end:

Drawing a bunch of those became boring really fast, so I had to make it at least a bit more interesting, that's why I add some overlaps and perspective to it

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P.S. Sorry for the small size of the .gif in the middle of the post. I couldn't figure out how to make it smaller in KB without loosing everything and make it ugly

[kohkeeree]

Great studies keep it up!

I think the width proportions for the male guide isn't divided correctly. The inner 3rd (head width) is much wider than rest of the cuts. Not sure about everyone else but I don't mind this fit and slim boi