14 days in, so it’s time for another progress report on Love in the Time of Spellphage.
Not a huge change in the asset tracker as I wrapped up most of the small part and have spent the last 5 days in focused background mode.
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:
WAP 40, the final WAP of 2024!
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.
For these last 2 WAP weeks, I decided to change it up. For each of the days I would revisit one of the themes I had done in the previous 38 WAPs. I didn’t want this to be extra extra hard mode or anything, I just wanted to see how much of what I took out of those weeks stuck around. So I let myself re-read the original blog post and scroll through the Pintrest page of images before I settled in to do some drawing.
Still love squirrels, happy to revisit them. They were my very first WAP.
Then compare the day 5 from squirrel week to this iteration 50 weeks later.
As the end of the year approached I thought it was time to tackle a theme I’d been avoiding. There are 3 subjects that are often either ridiculed or acknowledged as being weirdly difficult to draw. Hands, horses, bikes. These likely aren’t the hardest for everyone but they come up and have been on my mind since starting this year long project. At the start of the year I did hands, just a few weeks ago horses, so it felt like it was time to stop avoiding bikes.
Pretty awful. I see bikes probably every single day, Montreal is a very active bike city, but it’s not enough for me to summon up bikes clearly in my mind.
Possibly last anatomy week of 2024??? This week is running, which I was pretty surprised I hadn’t done yet. Even just went and skimmed my tracking sheet to double check.
Some early day 1 space misjudgements here. Chopped off the top of a head.
I can’t believe I waited this long to do bats as a WAP theme. They’re an original favourite animal from my childhood, to the point that a book about different types of bats is one of my strongest childhood memories. However, the kids book Stellaluna may be the reason for my love of them:
Day 1 not too bad but I was probably picturing how dragons fly instead of bats. There is definitely more variety to bat faces than I could remember and I think my mental model of a bat has been fairly corrupted by cartoon versions.
After my week of horse riders I thought it would be appropriate to tackle horses on their own. One of the fabled Hard to Draw things along with hands and bicycles (which I have yet to try).
I thought day 1 was going pretty okay until I took a step back and got “dog” vibes from my first day of sketches. So I wasn’t exactly getting the legs right.
This week’s practice was a style/master study of Ken Sugimori, the original Pokemon artist, known for drawing all original 151 Pokemon.
I didn’t want to draw just Pokemon, instead leaning on my learnings from anatomy practice and my goal of a self-portrait, I wanted to make myself into a Pokemon trainer. I did a fair bit of YouTube research for this one and I’ll share the resources that were most helpful or insightful throughout the blog post.
Following the workflow learn from character design week, step one was to focus on the pose only. Starting from Pinterest I gathered up a bunch of references of original Pokemon trainer artwork as well as a few modern interpretations.
I tried out a few poses, 2 from game references and one that just felt like it really fit the aggressive trainer look.
I didn’t deviate too much from the original poses, wanting this week to be more about design and technique than anatomy or dynamic posing. For proportions, faces, and general shape design, Rjamez Valdez 4 piece trainer tutorial is absolutely excellent. This is someone who has spent a lot of time studying the originals and also drawing trainers. He breaks down each feature to make it seem easy.