March Lessons

For March I tried out a few shorter courses, two focused on getting familiar with Procreate and one about bringing life to your poses.

The Procreate ones were fun, focusing on creating a single piece from start to finish while learning some of Procreates key features. These tended to focus on portraits, which aren't usually my own focus but they're a good place to start.

From pencil to Procreate

Course one was made by Feefal, the artist who ran #funguary last month. Her program starts with pencil and paper then bringing that over to Procreate to add colours. It was nice to work with physical objects again so I enjoyed working on paper to create the original outline for this piece.

I also felt like she really showed how to mimic her style by using specific brushes and colouring techniques. She definitely uses a few approaches I never do so it was cool to push myself beyond my comfort zone and kind of trust her process.

Having just recently kicked off a new D&D campaign I knew I wanted to try and use my drawing time to create character art for future NPCs in the game. For this exercise I chose an octopus type person inspired by the cephalid from Magic The Gathering. The end result doesn't look like something I would have reached on my own, so I'm pretty happy that it feels like something new.

Making expressive poses

Since I got through that course in a weekend I quickly jumped into another: Drawing Character Poses with Personality. This one was pretty different from everything I'd taken so far. For one, Tony Bancroft is a traditional animator who started the program with paper and pencil. It feels like he's coming from a background of animation and storytelling more then the previous teachers who felt like they specialized in character design and illustration.

The tricks and theory he taught were great. Really broke down some ideas that seemed complex into very digestible tips. He didn't have too many assignments during the course so I only have these few messy sketches:

Back to Procreate

After that theory focused, traditional approach I went back to another short Procreate lesson, this time by Erika Wiseman. This course was very similar to the first Procreate one I did, find inspiration on Pinterest, create a character, learn some Procreate tips.

There were a few techniques presented that I didn't care for and felt like they aren't great for refining technical skill so I didn't incorporate them into my sketching for the assignments. But I was very happy to learn the quick trick for making a layer for checking your values.

I once again made things more difficult for myself by now drawing a human. Choosing instead to take some inspiration from magical looking owl creatures. Maybe they'll make an appearance in a D&D campaign some day.

After slow progress in February it was nice to be able to check off 3 courses in one month. Next month I'll try to focus on more character design courses, but we'll see if I stick to it or get distracted by some of the new courses that 21 Draw has been teasing.