November Wrap Up

October ended up being one of my busiest months of the year, which led to only sporadic 21 Draw lessons between travelling and playing Baldur’s Gate 3.

In December I plan to do a few end of year posts which means I want to try to cover the last 2 months of art practice in this post. So buckle in for some random courses and projects from the last 2 months.

21 Draw - Pets

Multiple new courses have launched on 21 Draw during my year of taking classes which has been very exciting. If a little disruptive to my early plans of having pre-chosen which courses I wanted to focus on. One of these was a course on creating cartoon versions of pets.

I don’t have a cat or dog but I have a friend who sends me lots of photos of her cats so I had a lot of material to work with as reference. I didn’t finish this course as I found things start to get pretty repetitive when the artist is covering basic line-art and painting techniques. But the more central part of the program, breaking animals down into basic shapes and ways to portray age and personality with some design choices were helpful.

I ended up only working on the sketch phases with the references I had. I do love drawing animals but doing simplifications or cartoonification is definitely a weakness of mine. I struggle to choose what details aren’t important and can be left out. And I struggle to make eyes larger for soften personalities instead of trying to replicate sizes to proper anatomical proportions.

21 Draw - Colour Theory & Intermediate Procreate

I started and nearly finished it (I’ll probably wrap it up next week), a short course of colour theory. A few of the longer digital painting lessons touched on colour theory so a lot of this was repeat information to me but it had a few gems still. Colour theory is something I over think, or that there is some mystical secret behind. But I feel like it really comes down to understanding the colour wheel and having a good eye for colour. I’ve been forcing myself to work with palettes a little more in my last few pieces as well as to use the Procreate colour selector to check complementary and tertiary colours for my main colour themes.

This had a few pieces of homework but none of them interested me so I didn’t do them. I probably should have for the practice but I felt like I had multiple courses on the go at this point and was struggling to focus on putting Apple pencil to tablet.

I’m not super confident in my colour selection of pieces, I probably go way too saturated most of the time. And then jump around to whatever colour I like instead of taking the time to see if colours work well together.

Simone Grünewald’s intermediate Procreate lesson has been pretty good but it’s hard to focus on a 5 hour course with no homework assignments. The main thing this course did for me was convince me to buy Max Ulichney’s Watercolor Brushes for Procreate. Simone used these for nearly her whole painting process and I really came around to how they looked and behaved during the main hours I watched her paint.

D&D Maps

These pieces were small projects during the year I didn’t post about as they contain spoilers for the D&D campaign I’m running. They’re maps that are meant to convey locations of places easily to players instead of a battle map. I’ll often find battle maps online for my needs but for more unique locations I want to be able to communicate the area I’ve created and find that this can be more reliably done with images. Hence spending way too much time on these maps that the players may never fully see.

Altar Stone Projects

It’s been a while since we launched a new song (see October being busy) but I’ve been picking away at putting together scenes for future music.

One project started with a fish sheet.

I love seeing other artists' sheets of creatures. There’s often so much variety to each creature and everyone interprets them all a little differently. My fish sheet is all fictional creatures as I wanted to build up a repertoire of basic fish to have around in the D&D campaign. So I spent a lot of time looking at fish and then smashing together my favourite bits of real fish to make up these fake fish.

Then I started to animate them.

Not all of them, but so far I’ve created simple animation loops for at least 6 of them. Then I made them a place to swim.

I’ve put together this full animated scene already but it’s not online yet, so you’ll have to wait to see the completed piece.

Next up was a player request. I introduced a giant awoken octopus as a smith in my underwater city. People thought he was pretty cool and asked if he had a themed song (he did not). But my girlfriend went ahead and tried a few things to put together something that could capture a forge vibe.

For this piece I really wanted to try out the MaxU watercolour brushes I mentioned above. They seem well fitted for background work and I wanted something more gritty and textual than my previous background pieces. This did mean it took much longer as I had both a learning process to get through and many layers to work with to get the right blend of colours and textures from the brushes.

I’m not super satisfied with the final product, I know what areas I want to touch up, but I’m leaving them for the animation edits so that I can play with lighting more dynamically instead of having it painted on directly. Hilariously enough, the large octopus going in front of this will cover most of the background anyway.

Conclusion

I'm hoping to squeeze in one more 21 Draw course between November and December. Then my subscription will come to an end. I'm already making plans for 2024 and what I want to focus on but we'll see how well those plans hold up. After a year of trying out a lot of different stuff, I can see myself ending back up at figure drawing lessons once again.