Marco - Art School Journey

Hello,

my name is Marco Richter I´m 31 years old and from Germany. I purchased the full art school program nearly a year ago with the goal to improve my drawing skills to a new level. I´m trying to learn drawing traditional for roughly five years now with different programs free programs on the internet but my goal when I started my art journey was always to become a digital artist. When I first saw Marc Brunet´s program, I was drawn to it due to the huge coverage of all necessary skills needed for digital art in combination with the clear structure and the exercises this program offers.
Since last September I worked actively on the program but after I saw the new weekly study companion guide Marc has released, I decided to start over and follow this guide to push me a little out of my comfort zone (I tend to move to the next lesson or term only, when I have the feeling I mastered it and I think this slows down my progress). With this restart I also decided to share my progress on this forum and try to interact with other artists here, which I avoided until now in nearly all other drawing programs I did until now.
Since I work fulltime as project manager for a small company and English isn´t my first language, and therefore need a lot more time to write the comments here than in my native language, I don´t know if I am able to reply every day to possible comments from other users or post my current progress but I am at least to reply two times a week on Wednesday and either Saturday or Sunday, so please be patience if your comment something and I don´t answer asap.

With all
the introduction done, here are some examples of the exercises I did on week
one.

Starting
first with Pen control. Below are my tries of Day 1(Tuesday), Day 3(Thursday)
and day 6 (Sunday) and from today (Today I reduced the size of the brush from
3px to 1px to give make the exercises a bit harder). Last year I modified the picture bit, so that I can practice all 8 directions
for the straight lines and both directions of rotation for the circles on one
sheet. Since I have some mileage with this kind of exercises, I think my
straights are Ok but is clear that the horizontal lines are my weakest part and
therefore wavier then the others. I still try to find a comfortable movement of
my arm to draw them but made some progress over the last months. Overall I
think there is also some room of improvement to the other lines but I´m content
with my current progress.

For the
exercise where we should divide the rectangle with straight lines, I did just 2
directions per day, because this takes a lot of time. In general, I find it
much harder to draw get straight lines here, in contrast to the first exercise.

The circles are ok, but I have to try if I can get smother lines if I draw
them quicker without losing the accuracy. This is something I am going to try
this week.

Finally my thoughts
for the pressure control exercise. I think they are also ok, but there is also
a lot of room for improvement, especially in the sense of uniformity between
the lines and the, maximum pressure, where I often don’t push enough to get the
max. possible outcome.

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Her is also
my attempt for the image adjustment exercise. The first 3 exercises are ok but
could be better and with exercise 4 I’m not satisfied. I tried several hours to
get the right values but every time a came close with one part, another got
worse and for the sake of my sanity I left at the stage you can see, where I
think it is somewhat close to the original. I think I will consult additional
material how the 4 tools we learned so far work an try this exercise after
finishing term 1 again.

Hello snakker and Norma,

thank you for your concern, but i don´t have the plan to go over board with this exerciese. The sole reason i spent so much time with it this week, was that on the first week of Marc´s Study Guide ther aren´t so many exercieses yet, so that i had a lot of spare time. If this was not the case, I probably would have stoped earlier.

This week, there are the first three assignments of “Nude Figure Drawing” at the agenda of the study guide and here are my first attempts of them.
Starting with assignment one (Line of Action over photos as warmup) I included my first attempt from Monday. I think this assignment is straight forward and I don´t have to many problems to find the primary line of action on the most poses, however the sitting poses are a little bit harder. On the last pose, I´m not sure if it is better to draw a secondary action line for the arm like I did ore if it gives more clarity to leave it out.

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The next assignment was the one page of the cylinders and here I included my pages from Monday and today. In my opinion this exercise is a lot harder for me than they look on the first glance, especially if I try to draw the cylinders like Marc did it in the video for this lesson. At day one I experimented with Marc’s construction Method and the method I used until now and the hardest part with Marc´s method for me is, to draw the same ellipse two times for the top and the bottom of the cylinder without a boundary on the sides. This leads to cylinders, where the bottom is too big or has a false opening and therefore cylinders which don´t appear in the right perspective. I also sometimes struggle to align the ellipses around the dots and, so that the top and bottom ellipses are offset. Forward I choose to stick with Marc´s method and think at some cylinders I made some progress in today’s attempt compared to Monday. At least, it feels better when I draw the ellipses, than on Monday.

Monday

Today

The last exercise is the one, where we should draw a simple skeleton over photo references.
Here I posted my tries from Monday and today. I must note, that although Marc mentioned his video for this lesson, that the ovals and rectangles as replacement for the head, torso, and pelvis doesn´t work to well for poses, which are in a stronger perspective I also included a few of such poses. The reason for this is, that I have a lot of poses due to a past membership of new masters academy and there are of excellent quality, these poses aren´t sorted in as specific manner on my hard drive, so that I would need a lot of time search them for simple standing poses, which I see a bit wasted. Instead, I just pick some random images and load them into photoshop, which results in the random selection of poses. I know that this is not optimal but as long as I have “enough” simple poses, I am also willing to try this exercises on some quite hard poses. What I have registered so far, is that ovals are somewhat ok for this hard poses but simple rectangles don’t work at all. Since I have a little experience with boxes as replacement, I am going to try to abstract the head, torso, and pelvis on this poses with them and have a look, how this works out.
For the cylinders as limps, I think, that I am mostly able to see, in what direction the cylinders should be open, even on very flat angles, but have some problems to find the correct degree of openness of the ellipses, that start and endpoint of the cylinders and sometimes I try to hard to match the contour of the limps. This are definitively the points I am going to work the most on, on the remaining times, I do this exercise.

Monday

Today

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As I mentioned, a lot of this poses are from my membership of New Masers Academy,
and I don´t know exactly how the copyright situation are for this. If this
should be a problem, I immediately remove the pictures and must search for some
with an open licence. Although it will cost me a lot of time, I rather would
like to stay safe.