After valiantly trying to keep posting through my sickness in March and April, I finally lost the energy to keep up. All my energy was going into getting through the days and staying present at work. Hobbies are always the first thing to suffer when the going gets tough.
And as a person who works best with momentum and consistency, losing my stride is one of the worst things that can happen to my practice.
I’m now in the stages of trying to get re-interested in drawing. Doing focused practice isn’t “fun” but I did it regularly because I do find myself improving because of it. But that doesn’t make it desirable. So instead of trying to get back into WAPs and anatomy studies and doing the classic “draw what you want” approach.
Currently that means having a bunch of half-finished pieces hanging around with no idea if I’m ever going to finish them or not. But they have gotten me drawing again.
We launched our studio website the other week and while I’m happy with it I do feel like it’s lacking in art. I’d love to do little cartoon versions of myself and my wife but cartoon versions of real people is something I’ve never been great at. This week's study of guitar playing poses is me starting the baseline work for that as I know I’m going to do a few attempts of my wife playing guitar.
This 3 image reference study stretched into 2 weeks as I got distracted by other art projects and also had my energy drained due to on-going health problems.
And then Blue Prince was released and I forgot that blogging was a thing I did.
But a long weekend has given me the downtime I need to return to my hobbies and project and also Blue Prince.
The big masked creature is by Bryn Jones @artwithbryn. Trying to find the source really highlighted for me how awful it is when artists only have an Instagram page. I don’t want Facebook/Meta touching my computer so I’m not going to log into Instagram on my computer, which means I can only see the last 9 posts from a user >_>
This week started off as a reference study. I had my 3 references selected, got through some thumbnails, did some different colour compositions and even started painting.
But then there was a joke; What if Pink Pony Club, but it’s Pawmi instead of Pony. As context, a Pawmi is a recent gen Pokemon. This is a Pawmi:
The next day I went to see what colour shiny Pawmis are, and well, they’re pink. The joke basically writes itself. So I paused my reference study and drew Pawmis for a few days.
Time for a casual WAP week with axolotls. Partially inspired by the axolotl I drew during Root week, I thought it might be a good time to really look at them and see what features I might have missed in my quick cartoonification.
Second style study of the year is the art of Hades, the hit Supergiant game and one of my all time faves.
My approach to this week was to re-create some existing game assets and then adapt one of my characters into a Hades styled portrait shot. A slightly different approach from my Root week as I found this style much more difficult and just mentally draining because of how central the line art is to the style.
The last practice in the weekly rotation is classic anatomy and posing. I don’t even dislike doing pose practice but doing it for a week straight is a little much and by day 4 I’m tired of it. But I still want to push myself through the motions so I don’t just try to keep cutting corners with it.
I am still trying to keep these weeks on a theme to be a little more focused and also to keep getting new kinds of poses. This week is yoga, so not the most natural of poses but a good reminder in the ways bodies can bend and move. With the extra difficulty of really needing to focus on the length of limbs because they often need to land in certain places.
As I was preparing my art practice goals for the new year I knew I wanted to practice finishing pieces more often. My WAP weeks were about expanding my mental library of images and drawing things I don’t often draw. But those barely ever left the sketch phase as they were focused on getting the shapes down. The style studies are a lot of fun and I’ll keep doing them but they mean working in a very focused way to achieve a rather limited goal, matching someone else’s style. And while these will help me learn things that will eventually become my style, the execution won’t always feel natural.
And so I came up with this new exercise after watching a few “learning from references” art tutorial videos on YouTube. Basically the idea is that instead of just using one image as inspiration you use multiple so you’re leaning less on one particular artist or style.
Last week in my beetles WAP I wrote about how this would go. Rolling dice to select 3 images and then go from there. So we’ll start with my 3 images:
I was pretty excited about getting the boat first. Thought I could do some sort of Dredge inspired piece with it. The piece is by concept artist Arthus Pilorget.
But then I got the colour palette… which isn’t very Dredge like at all. The Genshin Impact Kazuha palette was put together by Caramello__o over on Ko-fi.
Dice roll 3 added these nature spirit guys by dagasi_yk on Twitter as the main characters.
Wanting to expand my ideas beyond just the three images so I made a mini board of things I felt were in a similar vibe. Full board.
I’m keeping some WAPs in the mix with my other practice things this year to give me some easier weeks and also to keep drawing things I don’t usually draw. It’s nice to return to a practice format that’s familiar and feels doable. Versus some of the larger challenges I’m also trying to give myself this year.
This first WAP is beetles, so I guess stop reading now if you don’t like looking at bugs as there will be zoomed in pictures of bugs.
As part of my WAP year I did one style study, Ken Sugimori’s Pokemon trainers. This year I’m going to attempt to do a style study every month to push me out of my comfort zone and also to learn to break down what I’m looking at when it comes to art pieces.
Kyle Ferrin was an easy first choice as he has both a very distinct style that’s almost instantly recognizable to me and it’s extremely cute. For this study I’m focusing mostly on his visual style of the boardgame Root and not his whole portfolio but he is pretty consistent in some regards.
Before jumping in I wanted to identify the main things I wanted to learn or understand in this particular study:
Ink work: Kyle uses blank ink for a lot of shadows, much more than I would usually
Shapes: We’re gonna be looking at a lot of little critters, how does he keep them recognizable?
Colours: The work in Root feels extremely vibrant while still natural.
Backgrounds: Kyle doesn’t do a lot of backgrounds but does have a few techniques he repeats.
Studies are going to break down differently from my WAP weeks, and may even differ from artist to artist. I made a 5 day plan for this one and mostly managed to stick to it.
Root and Kyle are, thankfully, both very popular. An added bonus is that Kyle has some recorded streams of his full art process. This makes understanding his workflow pretty easy as you can watch him do it in real time. I was even able to find 2 interviews he did where he talks about art which led to a few gems that helped me approach this study week.
It was in the images chosen for the More Games Please interview that I noticed the bush and tree techniques. So on day one I tried to recreate those techniques digitally. I then took my old goblin drawing and did an inking pass on it to practice where Kyle would put harder shadows, using this collection of skeleton warriors as examples to reference.
I then spent some time with the Root cover image and a collection of Kyle goblins. I love how expressive his characters are and I wanted to look more closely at Root character proportions.
Feeling pretty excited by what I learned in day 1 I jumped into creating a Root fanart piece. I wanted to draw critters that aren’t as common in Root so I chose pigeon and squirrel. Kyle has done a few squirrels but I have to say they aren’t my favourite designs of his.
I’m happy with a lot of this piece but there are a few areas that stand out for improvement. Mostly the building. There aren’t many full buildings in the Root art so I didn’t have much to use as a reference. Because of that I kind of just floundered and used it to fill space. I also could have played with more line/ink colour variations instead of just black and white.
So I would do the same. Instead of adding difficulty of coming up with a piece from scratch I decided to recreate a piece of Root art. I wanted something with a little bit of background as well as a character so I went with this raccoon behind a log piece.
(This is an original Root piece.)
I did a sketch and then tested my pens because it’s been a long time since I inked anything by hand. Most of what I own are Microns which didn’t feel right for this, they are too small and precise. So I chose my pens that had more of a brush tip for larger areas.
I don’t have a scanner so I had to rely on trying to get a good phone photo. It came out pretty decent after some level corrections in CSP but also felt like there were a lot of strange artifacts like red pixels and blurring in the photo.
I then colour picked from the original and tried out some digital watercolour brushes to get that textured look that Kyle gets. In the video Kyle shares the limited Root colour palette that he uses for all the board game pieces. And in one of the interviews he said:
“Most of the color pallet for the board art in Root is sampled from autumn foliage photography.”
So I also felt comfortable deviating a little from the source image as long as I kept the autumn colours in mind.
My own raccoon came out a little too small but I’m happy with the piece overall. I liked working with the water colour brushes as they keep the large colour areas interesting without even doing a shading pass. I did try taking some notes on areas of improvement.
For day 4 I took it easy a bit by doing a physical watercolour pass on the inks I did previously. Mostly because I enjoy working with watercolours even if I’m not very skilled at them. Unfortunately my pens weren’t waterproof…
Parts of it went okay while others got out of control rather quickly. But it was fun to do it physically after already doing the piece digitally.
For the last day I wanted to draw something new again. I did some thumbnailing and chose the parts of the style I definitely wanted to incorporate.
While most of the art for Root is small cards and mostly individual character pieces, I’ve been in full “scene” mode from working on the visual novel. So a background and multiple characters. Basically gave myself hard mode for the final. But I really enjoyed the ways of doing forest plants, I wanted to keep doing those.
I also didn’t let myself colour pick from an image and instead eye balled the colours to see how far off I would be. I don’t think any of the Root pieces do much foreground background stuff but I did darker a whole section to create some depth to the image. Trying to push the style a bit and also just bring in my own techniques for creating a scene.
I’m pretty happy with the piece! Something I learned while working on it, while watching another Root art stream, was that Kyle works at very small sizes. He showed off the pens he used and it made me realize I’ve just been super over sizing everything. When I went to use my own pens my thoughts were “these are too small” when it turns out they were way too big. I didn’t imagine that he was working at such a small scale, but it makes filling in blacks so much easier when you are fighting to fill a whole page. Due to working at a larger size I also end up with a lot of empty space. Most of the Root pieces don't have much sky and I probably shouldn't have filled in more of the background with larger grasses and more trees.
Something learned from the interviews is that the colour palette and line work style for Root is chosen with a reason; communicating game state. The art pieces are meant to be easy to parse and understand at a glance thanks to high contrast, be that between lines, colours, or shapes. Something that I went against by darkening the foreground. I have the freedom of not drawing this fanart for a game but it's extremely interesting to learn why certain creative desicions are made for particular settings.
I’m not the only person doing Kyle Ferrin or Root studies. I found one video on YouTube of another artist doing their best to replicate the style:
The artist goes for a full digital approach which is what I did in my first attempt as well. I think it’s okay for a single character but the larger Root scenes with backgrounds and heavier inking feel like they really need a physical ink brush to capture the style properly.
I also found another person’s Root fanart over on Reddit that I really liked: I tried to recreate the Root artstyle!. Their work also feels fully digital but I wasn’t able to find any active website or socials for them.
I feel like this was a very promising first style study. I’m happy with the pieces I produced for it and there are tricks here that I can see myself relying on to create more stylized backgrounds. It was a fun kind of investigation to really watch someone work and try to analyses their pieces. I’d also like to be able to draw my own lovable little guys but I think I still have more practice in that area to do. Downside to this study, I now want to buy all the Root games...
(This is an original Root piece.)
