Week 1 of NaNoRenO is over, so time for a re-cap of what I could get through this week. This will definitely contain spoilers, I guess?? But also the game is completely in flux so who knows what a real spoiler is.

Spending a week on trees is kind of a weird one. It’s pretty rare that I would want to draw a singular tree, more often I’d be wanting to draw a forest as part of a landscape or some simple background shapes where the tree isn’t one of the pain focal points. But I still wanted to do this week to spend time looking at West Coast trees and try to find ways to quickly construct trees that I could possibly re-use for the NaNoRenO project.

This week is another alternate take on the format. With the plan to do NaNoRenO in March, I know I’ll need to draw a look of backgrounds in a short amount of time. The game I’ve been ruminating on is set around a lighthouse which would mean a lot of outdoor shots and probably some establishing landscape shots. These have never been a strength of mine so I wanted to spend a week trying to figure out a style that would work for both:

1. The vibe of the game
2. Could be executed quickly

This leads to trying to find the right balance of detailing. I attempted to try out a few different approaches to this, taking lots of inspiration from Jacob Drawfee's “I made myself draw backgrounds every day for a week”. While also trying to remember the main take aways from the landscape course I did last year.

This week we’re back in my comfort zone; drawing creatures.

This week we’re breaking from the format. Kind of in a small way, kind of in a big way. For this week I chose goblins.

Now it’s kind of just like doing another creature, except it has humanoid anatomy and it’s well, not real. There are no real life photographs to learn from for fictional creatures. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to deal with this lack when I started the week but I feel like I found a decent formula.

This is another week where I wanted to push the boundaries of the format. A large part of drawing practice is to get more ideas into your head, basically to build a shape library. So my goal with this week’s focus was twofold: broaden my mental library of hair styles and also find ways to convey hairstyles as minimally as possible.

After 5 days of it, I’m not sure how I feel.

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.

Honestly surprised that this is 4 for 4 this month. Maybe I can do a blog post every week. Though I suspect committing to extremely minimal social time for January and my workplace being a disaster has contributed to having enough time to pull it off.

Anyway, I hope you like looking at hands. I don’t find them as exciting as pigeons or squirrels but after a few weeks of easy-ish creatures I wanted to try something that would be a serious push. And which would be applicable to more art pieces. I have an animation I’ve been working on that’s taken twice as long because of how much time I’ve spent fighting with the hands. Ended up going with a very blob like shape in the end just to keep making progress. Time to see if a week of hands can carry me through drawing more hands in the future.

Another week of having a good amount of time to devote to art. Huion tablet setup is reliable once more and now I don’t need to fight with making sure the pressure settings are working every time I turn it on.

Pigeons are the 3rd most common creature on our back patio so this is a creature a see regularly, unlike the pangolin. Love to see him, love when they awkwardly try to cling to the trellis.

A wild week at work resulted in me spending most of my evenings trying not to think about it by drawing. So here are a bunch of sketches of pangolins.