Hello again!
I tend to forget how short February is, it surely catches me off-guard every time it is realized (usually mid-month >v>)
Anyway, straight to the point, because I have even less time than usual today.
It was planned initially, to execute the moving today. Though I postponed it to next weekend to get some more breathing room since it would have not been possible to get everything done in such a short time frame. The following week won’t be more relaxing though, yet still a little more pleasing than the last, as most work has already been finished.
I’m getting this out of the way first so you know that I probably won’t be active for a little longer. Maybe I’ll return back to the usual after I’ve fully settled in, or at least start posting weekly status updates again. It all depends how it all unfolds with the pressure of studying with the virus still around.
Now to the art-stuff!
After last month, I wanted to avoid projects that were designed to, uhm… be finished. I know that I easily get carried away wit those things and often, I won’t be doing anything else that day because continuously adding session after session to a single piece is what broke my daily sketching and studying flow last. This isn’t a bad thing at all, because it just means I have fun with something. But it is counterproductive to the goals I have in mind. So while having a larger scale thing going on in the background that gives me something to work on when I don’t have much motivation to do anything, I’d still find enough time to do some scribbles, some sketches, some studying and some painting. I’m also still following my strict policy of not playing games except for Saturday and Sunday… although I think I need to work on that since that causes me to be absolutely wasteful with my time and not doing anything art-related sometimes xD
These excerpts are from my daily sessions to showcase the wide range of things I’m sketching. Though personally, I aim for more refined and thought-out things rather than random ideas to throw at a page (not necessarily portrayed here >v>)
It would also be nice to focus more on anatomy studies, which I sadly neglected (well I did go for other sections, as you’ll see).
The other part of my exercises surrounded digital painting. While not as frequent, I did some of those to practice laying down texture and blocking out shapes, as it feels necessary for future works to be able to paint things that probably would look terrible with my usual outlining. I still haven’t found a way to properly blend those two styles together if that’s even possible. The biggest challenge will be to overcome my large blocky lines or maybe I’ll have to divide those styles completely.
Choosing the reference images was mostly guided by wanting to render water and rock formations realistically. The reason for this is that I am planning to work on a very big project soon, an idea that I followed for about 5 months now. I haven’t really been working on anything scenic in a while and it is supposed to push my limits and learn a lot more things as I go.
I also did a couple animations, but boy, they are so much work >v> I don’t know when I’ll have time again to work on an animated project, but we’ll see…
For the future, I want to refine my sketching, learn to decrease the brush-size and add more details to designs. Posing, anatomy and stylisation will be the focus of daily practice and the ideal balance of working on a project while maintaining sketch- and studywork is the goal.
With that, I’d like to conclude this month’s reflection.
I’ll see you all next time and wish you a lovely and warm March!
~Souvillaine