This was a messy WAP week. Dana suggested fancy books so I gave that a shot, but turns out inanimate objects just aren’t that interesting. Reminding me why I so rarely do still life pieces.

WAP is back.

It was hard to get back into this practice style after a month away. I kind of forgot the physical steps of it and had to remind myself of what the days were for. Maybe it didn’t help that my returning subject was a more difficult one: Swinging swords.

I had wanted to do something a little more dynamic pose wise. But it one where anatomy is so important that without a really good grasp of the photo body references, doing style studies feels extra challenging as I’m not 100% sure what’s correct.

My approach to March was to put my Weekly Art Practice on hold while participating in NaNoRenO in an attempt to really push my art skills into focusing on scenes and backgrounds. I felt like I started off pretty strong on this mission but at this point in the month I know it’s not gonna happen.

NaNoRenO​

While I spat out over 8 different backgrounds in 2 weeks, when I went to switch into writing mode I wasn’t really feeling the project any more. I have most of the ideas fleshed out but I don’t love it. I also don’t get the same creative hit from writing as I do from working on visual art.

Week 2 has been a rather slow one. The time change hit me really hard so I felt a little ill the first few days just from my sleep getting messed with. Then my other projects and volunteer work took up a fair bit of space on other days. And today I’m off to get a tattoo which likely won’t leave me in a “go make art” kind of mood after either. So we’re in challenging times!

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.