January extras
The weekly art practice posts are taking up a large portion of my creative time but I’m still working on other pieces alongside them. A classic instance of the more time you spend doing a hobby the more you want to do it. The near daily art practice is helping me feel “warmed up” most days, I don’t feel like I need to ease into art every time I want to start something new now. Still rather shocked at how much I’m making.
Courses
Courses aren’t my big focus for this year but I’ve done 2 small little focused things so far.
Domestika course: Illustrating Fantastical Animals with Procreate
Julia Körner is an artist I found on Instagram and saw she had a Domestika course. This was one of the main things that tempted me into a Domestika subscription. I was curious to see what went into her pieces that made them so soft and light.
The course ended up being a pretty typical “follow-along” of the kinds I had done a bunch of on 21Draw. The key takeaways being what kind of brushes an artist uses to get their effects and how do they texture or use light. I attempted to follow her flow when working on this piece of a kobold submarine captain from my current D&D campaign.
I’m decently happy with how this one came together, used a few shading techniques that I don’t often do and I like how soft everything looks in the end. Though I can’t say I feel like I have any confidence in being able to draw any more like Körner does by the end of the course. Her unique approach to animals is still very goals.
Live Drawclass
I’ve shared a link to a Drawfee Drawclass before, this time I upgraded my Patreon tier and followed one live. The videos are usually posted a month or so after they happen so this one on Character Design should be on YouTube soon.
I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t a clear process or steps explained as I’m a very steps oriented person. Just throwing stuff down or working through multiple ideas isn’t something that helps me focus. But it was still helpful to listen for the two hours and try to apply what was being talked about to my own sketches during the class time.
I tried out Jacob’s first character in a different pose and then simply copied the face he drew. He started with the idea of “tired eyes” which is something I hadn’t tried before so I just wanted to see if I could pull off the same look.
In the second part I tried to approach the prompt on my own. A plucky sidekick for the first character.
More D&D art
This is a digital re-draw of a piece I did probably 3-4 years ago now. I decided to use them as a character in my current underwater D&D campaign. I had them planned for a year before even starting the campaign, and I knew I wanted a new version of the piece to show the players for when the reveal would happen. It took almost a year of running the campaign before I even got to that reveal and I still didn’t finish this piece 2 months before I shared it in game.
Website icons
These were a headache. I had tried learning vector art many months ago now and failed to produce anything I was happy with. In my first attempt I was trying to re-create icons I had drawn in a regular art program. These ended up being too detailed and had too many colours to keep the svg format happy. I got frustrated and gave up on them.
This time around I was going to go in fresh. Which meant finding/learning a new program that would do svgs and choosing new ideas. I ended up using Linearity Curve for the iPad and it wasn’t terrible. It even had a “covert to vector”-like feature that you could do to any image. I did this for one royalty free squirrel photo I found, which became icon number one. Then I traced over messy sketches for squirrel 2 and the crow.
I probably should have done 3 squirrels or something to better convey what each section is but I wasn’t loving the process. Maybe someday I’ll revisit vectors but they just really aren’t my speed.