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.
The way I titled this post implies that I’ll post one of these every week… I don’t think that’s feasible. I have most of the first week of January off so this week is already easier than every week which will follow this year. I think it’s more likely that I’ll try to summarise one or two weeks a month, or I’ll summarise a whole month of practice all at once. It will be difficult to find 15-30 minutes for art every day along with writing and blog management time.
But since I have the time now, I’ll detail how this first week of the Jacob Drawfee Schedule went for me.
Theme for week 1: Squirrels.
I paid around 80$ for a year subscription to 21 Draw, and it came with a free give away subscription which I was able to give to a friend. I had tried a few online learning programs over the years, more so when I was unemployed, but none with a year long commitment. I didn’t have any big plans for the year, I was going in with a kind of consistent job, a life still lived under semi-lockdown, and a longing to return to hobbies I’d struggled to get back into. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go but I had hoped that putting some money down would help motivate me, setting myself a goal of doing 1 course per month.
In the end, I finished 20 of the 24 courses I started.
There’s no way I could review all of them so I’m going to highlight my favourites in case anyone else wants to give 21Draw a chance.
October ended up being one of my busiest months of the year, which led to only sporadic 21 Draw lessons between travelling and playing Baldur’s Gate 3.
In December I plan to do a few end of year posts which means I want to try to cover the last 2 months of art practice in this post. So buckle in for some random courses and projects from the last 2 months.
A few months ago my girlfriend asked if I could draw a piece of art to be the image of a YouTube video for her music. She was composing a fight track for a D&D campaign I run and since I use Sync-Tube to sync music with my players during a game, uploading the track to YouTube was the easiest way to share it. But this meant having a visual aspect to the music as well.
An idea came to mind pretty quickly for this and I was able to put it almost all tonight in an evening. A large octopus with a sword fight with silhouettes of the characters from the campaign:
