Reflection #41 – May 21

Good day once again!

It has been at least a solid week since the last rain and we got sunshine since. The air is still cool but the atmosphere speaks summer, just the weather I like. Thinking back, we’ve had a long and cold couple of seasons to be sure and I am not the only one inviting the fruitful times of summer, hoping them to be at least as fruitful for my creativity.

So starting off with last month’s resolutions and progress to projects.

The storyboard is almost finished and while I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, I won’t be able to share it just now… I’m not even sure how anyway, so it’ll need some thinking. At least when it’s out of the way, I’ll have more time to do personal stuff if my upcoming exams won’t take up too much time that is. Maybe this will give me just enough time to work out the Fruit Hat piece that I omitted doing. The pose is technically finished but I’m not all too sure about it and the fruit hat’s design. I want to keep it simple for sure.

During the month, it wasn’t certain, which project would be finished first, so I had both the Fruit Hat and the Raffle Winner to work on simultaneously. As the month kept passing by and I lost track of time, as usual, it grew more and more apparent that the Raffle winner should take the pick. Designing this piece was not easy. It started out completely different; side perspective, character far out to the left and much space reserved for the tattoos. I eventually scrapped this idea with the help of the recipient and continued to work on this secondary pose I made and I quite like the end result. It’s a little too overwhelming, especially with the tattoos on his arms, but considering how many colours had to be balanced, it turned out very nice if I might say so myself.

Just like last month, I kept filling in a sketch page for every day of the month. With the help of the app daylio, I kept track of my goal and am now at 61 consecutive days of filing sketch pages. But I have to say, yesterday was very exhausting and having to fill in a page wasn’t exactly pleasurable. If days like these keep coming, I might have to break up the habit, as having to fill a sketch page every day should not take up too much time to block other projects or take up some of my bed time.

Anyway, I am pretty happy with my sketches this month. While the focus was on freestyle sketches, I also squeezed in some anatomy and animal exercises, but those should probably be more frequent. Also, there should be more experiments other than sketches, maybe some value paintings or more creative scribbles. I cannot understate that my pose quality was measurably increasing and I do want to keep that up.

My speedpaintings experienced a nice mix of brushwork that I could utilize here and there but I still like to stick to the blocky brushes more than the soft blending one. There is still a lot of room for improvement and I’d wish for more actual paintings without the need of a reference.

Maybe I have made the impression to some that with so many environmental paintings from me, it seems odd how I haven’t implemented them into my figure drawings. The reason for this is that landscape- and figure drawing are generally respective fields: A landscape has to either be designed to work on its own or to make space for a figure. These speedpaintings are exercises to work on their own and you wouldn’t be able to place a character in these landscapes. Since I want to keep coming back to last year’s works like the blue Lagoon Basilisk or The Red Princess, I need to practice in the respective field to connect figure and landscape and not landscape or figure individually.

The last work I want to tackle briefly is the Portrait excourse I made this month.

Drawing busts is a relatively simple task for me, so I wanted to do more finished renders to also practice in this field, hence these little drawings. The Xeno-ones especially were fun because they allowed me to approach them very differently than my other figure drawings. If I could manage to adapt this method to my more ‘humane’ figures, that would probably boost my rendering speed a little and make it more direct, relying on less blending modes.

This should be it, I feel like I have written a lot this time but it also has been a very productive month for me and I will try to keep it up, refine my style and work towards finishing more projects again.

I wish you all a lovely June!

~Souvillaine