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...
Going into the final week, I’ve done my (very likely) final pull request for art assets. Have done a few playthroughs of the game, hunting down any bugs. Between how hard we worked early in the month and our success at avoiding too much scope creep, we’re hoping to submit the game in the next day or two with a day to spare before the deadline.
It’s time for the week 3 summary. That’s 21 days of working on our game non-stop. Neither of us has taken a full day off since we started, doing probably 7-10 hours of work a day each (well, a little less for me on the days I go to my paying job). We’re still progressing at a nice pace but with more than half the month gone the to-do list feels a little scarier with each passing day.
The assets list increases a little every week. Last week there were 77 needed assets, this week ending at 82. Some of those are ‘nice-to-haves’ which I’m going to start tracking as stretch goals so they don’t contribute to the overall number necessary for launch.
New year new projects, starting with the Sealed With a Kiss game jam. My wife and I started work on the project bright and early on January first. With just a few days of vacation left I wanted to get as many assets done as I could before returning to work on Monday. Which has led to creating more art in a few days than any period last year.
The speed won’t last though. I got through most of the character art but now I’m mostly left with backgrounds and I probably won’t be able to get through more than one of those every few days. So far 5-8 hours seems like the average time they requires. But we’ll see how the next week goes, for now, it’s recap time.
When I first launched into this goal of practicing art in a focused fashion every week I wasn’t sure I’d be able to maintain it. I also wasn’t sure if it was going to be a practice that would lead to noticeable improvements. Just drawing every day isn’t enough to keep getting better, so I was really relying on the focused methodology of practice flow to pay off.
Given my last 2 weeks of revisits, my new found near comfort drawing hands, and lack of fear of the blank page, I feel like it has. I did end up drawing mostly animals as a comfort zone, but then expanded my focus halfway through the year to include anatomy weeks to make sure I was still continuing to work on the fundamentals. Then in the last few months I tried to add the goal of completing a finished piece once a month as well. Easily making it my most productive art year in a decade.
Cara, the social media platform for artists, took off this year. I didn’t post all my finished work there but almost all these pieces are from this year:
I was able to stick to my 1 book a month goal this year, squeezing in 2 extras. This was my first year of really seriously using the ebook library app, Libby, since I was able to get it to finally sync with my Kobo. This makes for really random book consumption as what you’re reading at any time completely depends on when holds come in. But it also cutely led to me and my wife reading a lot of the same books.
In the last few years I’ve had a bit of focus to my book selection. For a while I wanted to wrap up all the series I had started. And then for a few years I had a growing number of water focused novels I wanted to read. I no longer have any large goals like that and am actually out there trying to find new authors to follow or catch up on. With the death of Twitter I no longer follow as many writers and readers so my to-read list hasn’t been growing all that quickly. The only serious source I go to for new stuff is K. A. Doore’s yearly roundup of Queer Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy Books. I’m hoping library access will help make discovery easier going forward, but it’s a real shame how barely usable Libby is. An insult to app designers and librarians everywhere.
But on to the books. I tried writing this blog post a few times but found it was hard to talk about each one. So here are my top 3 and also my scoring (out of 3) for the rest.
This is another week of revisiting animal subjects of the last year. I even tried to embrace slightly more cartoony looks for them. Really kind of trying to put my brain on auto-pilot and seeing what comes out. I went and included side by sides for each day as I realized that seeing the comparison was really what I was doing these 2 weeks for.
(This is an original Root piece.)
