Weekly Art Practice - Week 11
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.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
When it comes down to it, books are just squares. So it was pretty easy to quickly draw some squares.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
On day 2 I started to recognize an early hangup of this subject. Since books are basically just squares I’d much rather draw them digitally using square or line making tools for consistency. But doing any sort of intricate design on the cover, something that’s often requiring small, repetitive motions, is something I’d rather do with traditional media. I wanted to get better at drawing straight lines so I didn’t even end up letting myself use the square or line tools for day 2. So these came out rather messy and not detailed.
Day 3 - Reference studies
Tried to force myself into doing more time on these but I just don’t have the patience for doing detailed designs. So I swapped to doing more book themed scenes. Which are more engaging but the idea of drawing 100 books in a scene is a really big turn off.
I ended up spending more time trying to find a brush that would give me irregular squares to quickly fill shelves. I didn’t find exactly what I wanted in Clip Studio so kind of just moved on.
Day 4 - Style studies
For the style study I decided to do a scene study. Just wanted to try blocking in the shapes and creating a scene. I’m once again worried that this might be an AI piece, the one clue being “wtf is up with these hanging lights? Are they inside or outside? Is that pumpkin on the right attached to the tree?”
I was actually kind of happy with the stylized look of the building in the end, but got tired by the time I should start filling out the inside of the building so I just rushed through with the bare minimum.
Reference: Couldn’t find the original source, so just on Pinterest.
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
I really wasn’t sure what to do for drawing from imagination day since I struggled to find any main take away lessons from the practice days. I decided to go for drawing the bookshelf that was next to me. Which happens to actually not be many books.
It was still pretty painful to draw the books that were there. Was mostly hype about doing the skull. I was originally going to go into more details but the weekend quickly disappeared so just tried to push through to get the space filled.
Conclusion
Another week I didn’t find particularly inspiring. Trying to do too much and too little at the same time.
I’m probably going to go back to animals for a bit to re-find my groove with these weekly practices. Then every few weeks I’m going to try to focus on human anatomy and movement since I know it’s such a key area if I want to get comfortable drawing characters again.
This week I also found a YouTube video explaining a blind study method for art that got my attention because it’s similar to how I would study for school. It’s a practice that you should put at least an hour aside to do so I’m going to try to find time to do it at least once next week between whatever animal I end up choosing.