I put off a lot of the full illustration classes, to me they feel like putting together all the bits you’ve learned to try to make something more comprehensive. I had also hoped they would be more digital tool focused than traditional drawing tips but one like Laia Lopez’s are pretty basic on the technical aspects if you’re already familiar with the basics of the program you’re using. This course was titled 'Digital illustration for beginners' so maybe it's just time that I start taking the courses marked 'Intermediate' instead.

I enjoyed the exercises she proposed but I don’t feel like they prepared me for working on a full illustration.

After feeling pretty disappointed by the first creature course, I was excited after watching the introduction to ‘Designing Fun Animal Characters’ by Rodgon. His approach made sense to me right from the start.

1. Figure out the stand out physical features of a creature
2. Work from a simple base
3. Put those stand out features on the simple base

After enjoying my tiny goat lesson from earlier in the year, I was hype to get back to drawing animals again.

I managed to finished a a course at the start of May before Tears of the Kingdom came out, ‘Telling a Story Through Illustration’.

I was a little intimidated by this course because the idea of doing full illustrations still feels very challenging to me. Make a scene, draw a background, manage areas of focus and lighting. All the parts of drawing in one. Which I feel like I’ll never be ready for!

Thankfully this was another Tony Bancroft course and I’ve come to love his approach and his assignments. As a classically trained animator he’s focused on foundational aspects which is exactly what I still want to focus on.

In April I went through the course ‘How to Stylize Characters’.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this course. “Style” is a very nebulous thing, one that I’ve been told over and over again will develop with time and mastery of the basics. The course ended up focusing more on how you can work in different styles by taking different approaches and really iterating on your ideas.

The teacher broke down each part of the course with very well focused assignments and practical steps. With the idea being to draw the same character to match two different use cases. He was working on developing a Frankenstein’s Monster character while I made the mistake of choosing one of my own D&D characters who I’ve iterated on a few times already. I say this was a mistake as choosing a fresh character would have given me more freedom to experiment instead of feeling locked in a previously established character design. But even with that mistake on my side I felt like I was able to learn a lot from the assignments.

After a month focused more on digital art practices I decided to go with more challenging courses for April. Not challenging on a technical level, but challenging because this has always been something I've felt my own drawings have lacked; energy and expression.

One of the March courses touched on this a little, going into the importance of silhouette and body language. I felt like that course had a lot of practical advice that was easy to start bringing in to my sketches. So I wanted to find a course that would keep elaborating on these approaches. Ending up on one titled "How to Bring You Characters to Life."

I wasn't sure what to expect from the course as I knew it would be different from the typical, here's how to understand anatomy that lots of art classes start with. Thankfully the instructor started by breaking down the main parts of a character that add life to an image.

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.

February was #funguary over on Twitter. A yearly art challenged focused on making different types of mushrooms into creatures hosted by @feefal_.

I stumbled across this challenge in December and kept it in mind for my year of art practice.

Funguary 2023 is soon upon us! A February drawing challenge based around fungi🍄 Here are the rules and all the prompts for the month! -- feef (@feefal_)

A few years ago I was doing monthly challenges like this a few times a year. Those often meant drawing something new every day. For this challenge, I followed the suggested format of doing one a week to keep things more manageable.

In an attempt to make the process smoother for myself I spent time on Pinterest collecting images of all the suggested mushrooms for each week. With this reference collection I spent the first few days of the month sketching the mushrooms. I was hoping to do this for every week but it ended up taking more time then I expected.

I also spent time doing thumbnails for a few of the weeks. I wanted to use that as a chance to push past my first idea and try out different compositions or concepts. But just like sketching mushroom, this took up a fair bit of my limited drawing time so towards the end I started to skip this step.

There were a lot of fun mushrooms discovered during this month so I was a little sad to only choose 4 to focus on. I did end up trying to fit in a few of the other ones in to a few of the projects. These are my 4 final pieces:

I resisted doing any cute lady mushrooms as that was my first instinct. But it felt too easy to just turn all the mushrooms into dresses. I'm not super happy with any of the pieces but there are parts that I like about all of them. I feel like #3 is decently creepy, I like how the shading came out on the body of #4 and I'm shocked I tried to do a scene in #2. I regret not tracking how much time was put into each one as I know I kicked out the last one in one day while the first one took at least 3.

Over the course of the month I did feel like I was improving and becoming more comfortable with Clip Studio Paint as time went on. It was nice to remember a few tricks to using the software too, proof that I hadn't forgotten everything I learned a few years ago.

I don't think I'll do another challenge like this for a few months as it ate away at my actual art lesson time. But it was very nice to take a break from figure drawing humans all the time.

Towards the end of 2022 I had already started thinking of 2023 as a year I wanted to make more of an effort to get back into drawing. I missed being creative and hated watching my large collection of expensive markers slowly dry out and die.

While browsing Twitter one night I saw an artist I followed had recently published an art course on 21Draw. I'd never heard of the website before and was surprised to see that it was possibly the perfect fit for my 2023 goals. Online art lessons focused on core skills and even digital tools I was already familiar with.

I don't usually like buying something as soon as I see it but I got sucked in by the countdown clock at the top of the page promoting an End of Year Discount. 2 subscriptions for 1/3rd the price of a normal signal subscription. And I only had 5 hours left to take advantage!

So anyway, 30 minutes after finding the site I was registered and ready to go with a whole year of access.

While I was very excited to get to the courses focused on character design, Clip Studio, and Procreate, I forced myself to choose a beginner course as my first lesson. Then after the first lesson to stick to some core lessons like anatomy and perspective. So basically figure drawing all the time.

I'm now entering month two and I'm finding my time to devote to course material fading. Balancing two D&D campaigns, other hobbies, and drawing is still a struggle. But thanks to the February drawing challenged called #Funguary over on Twitter I'm still putting in some drawing time every few days. Just a little less focused then I'd like it to be. I'll talk about #Funguary in my next post.

Hoping that in March I'll have more then just a few figure drawing sketches to share.

Hi!

This blog is going to be used to document my Return To Art.

I used to draw regularly, then I returned to working full time and the hobby died while I was busy doing a capitalism. Trying to find a little more balance for hobbies in my life now by making a conscious effort to take courses and build habits around regular practice.

My plan is to use this blog to document my lesson homework and other art challenges I try to take on over the rest of the year.