Weekly Art Practice - Week 10
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.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
Feeling rusty that’s for sure. Dynamic poses without a reference are up there on the difficulty scale so there are just so many bad proportions here. I was feeling pretty done with it after just doing 3 half bodies but I think pushing myself to fill the page helped a lot to go beyond my comfort zone.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
I ended up doing way more pages of day 2 than usual. I have wanted to up the speed in which these speed studies are done and I found that action poses take up a fair bit of room on the page.
It was harder than I thought it would be to find photographs of sword fighting action. Lots of fencing, some historical style with samurai swords, but not too much else. Found one or two shots of actors learning some choreography, but definitely expected more LARP-like content. But I also was trying to focus on what looked professional so that the people in the photos had proper form. But given I don’t know what proper form looks like it’s not something I should realistically be trying to judge.
Day 3 - Reference studies
While working on these I started to consider a good practice approach to be choosing one pose and trying to draw it from multiple angles. Just to pursue trying to understand the pose and not just ignoring anything that the limbs or the weapon hide from view. I didn’t end up doing that because I wanted to try out a variety of poses. But if I revisit the subject I might give it a shot.
Day 4 - Style studies
Reference: Link which I believe is from one of the original Legend of Zelda guide books.
Reference: By kaysd999 on Twitter
Reference: Screenshot from the anime, Solo Leveling
Reference: Random Swings by NEIGHBORSTUDIOS on DeviantArt
I didn’t feel like I had any really solid discoveries or moments of enlightenment from working from this style studies. A lot comes back to having a good grasp of anatomy and understanding how the body moves. I didn’t notice that one of the arms in the Solo Leveling reference was pretty messed up which then made me question the pose overall. But given that it’s a screenshot it’s not like it’s an image that was meant to be overly scrutinised. What seems more important is being able to “sell” the movement.
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
I possibly made the mistake of waiting 3 days to do the final test day. Felt like the knowledge had already left my head.
Conclusion
I can’t say I loved this week. It was difficult and nothing was really coming out as I hoped. It’s been a while since I’ve done a full body pose and it shows. Really thinking that what I should be doing is spending a week every month on figure drawing just to get confident in human bodies again.
If I can find some good references I’d like to try again as weapon poses are very much what I’d like to be doing with D&D art but it feels like there are lots of pieces to master before pulling off dynamic poses.