WAP Up
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:
I only posted a few of my Altar Stone backgrounds there, the rest mostly only ever being posted to YouTube.
The best part is that I don’t feel burnt out on art. I didn’t have anyone to answer too, didn’t have many projects that took more than a week or two. Sure there were definitely days I wasn’t keen to do more WAP practice pieces, but every day I still wanted to try to find the time to do something. Weekly Art Practice Subjects: All my weekly themes in a list. This is mostly to create an easy way for me to find the ones I want in the future.
Beyond the WAP
For a few of the weekly studies I did end up pushing the subject matter beyond the basic 5 days. For week 4’s Hands I ended up using those hands in an Altar Stone video. The Goblin from week 6 has been turned into an animated gif, critiqued on a Drawclass, and animated in Godot. I used the Me piece on the About page on this website. After doing a Pokemon trainer of myself I also made one of my wife.
I think practicing can feel like it’s “going nowhere” when you don’t have finished pieces you’re proud of. If I look through my blog posts it does just feel like a bunch of messy sketches and those don’t have “a use”. But this is from productivity brainrot of everything you do needs to lead to something or produce something and a big part of taking on a creative project for me was to get away from that mindset. In 2023 when I spent the year doing 21 Draw classes I felt like I didn’t have much to show for all the class time I put in. This year I have physical sketchbooks and multiple iPads filled with everything I’ve been doing. But I still want more “finished” pieces not so much to have something to show for my time but because there’s only parts of art that you get to after the sketch phase. And this year has been a lot of the sketch phase.
It’s easy to forget that I was also making animated backgrounds for Altar Stone for 10 months of the year. And working on some side pieces that I just felt inspired to do.
Courses
While 2023 had been about trying to take as many 21 Draw courses as I could, I didn’t focus on courses this year. I’m at the Drawclass level of the Drawfee Patreon which means one, 2 hour course every month which has been a nice way to mix up art practice as it’s often on something I’m not focusing on myself.
Like Julia’s room class:
And Karina’s dynamic pose class:
I spent some time looking at Domestika and did buy a map drawing course because I thought it would be a nice skill to develop for making D&D locations. But I only ended up getting a few hours in before bouncing off it. Maybe I can revisit it during the winter holidays.
My favourite course of the year was probably Spencer Wan’s 2D visual effects course. It was a very intense 3(4?) hours but covered techniques I’d never seen before and really made a case for being an animator who specializes in effects. It felt like a course I could instantly take lessons from and apply them to Altar Stone videos. I shared my notes from it in my WAP 24 post (sparrows).
My course consumption will probably remain similar in 2025, Drawfee classes every month and a few one-offs here and there as they come up.
2025
I mentioned in one blog post already that I’m starting the year off by doing a game jam with my wife. I suspect it will be a rather big challenge, even while trying to keep the scope reasonable, so I won’t be doing any other art projects during the month.
In February I’m going to try to do a style study of a select artist (I’ve been putting together a list of artists I’d like to learn from). I’ve really been enjoying watching style study videos on YouTube and I’ll try to follow a similar format of how Thom O'Clock does his Render Breakdown series. I found his video on the art style of Hades very inspiring both in process and execution. These types of things seem decently effortful and intimidating so I’m setting my goals of doing 1 style study a month.
Another idea I have for a week-long project is a little less structured. I’ve created 3 Pinterest boards for the year, one is a collection of interesting looking places, one a collection of characters I like, and another for colour schemes I’d like to try. Once a month I’m going to randomly choose a piece from each Pinboard by rolling dice and then combing the character in the location while using the selected colour scheme. This is a bit of practice for learning to draw from references, to try to develop more environmental design skills and also work with colours I wouldn’t likely choose on my own.
I feel like anatomy studies are still important to keep in the rotation, and there are some WAP themes I wish I had thought of earlier. So I think my 2025 months might look something like this:
- Week 1: Style Study
- Week 2: Anatomy Week
- Week 3: 3 Board Challenge
- Week 4: Classic WAP
I don’t yet know how much effort style study weeks or Pinterest style pieces will take. So I may need to simplify my schedule in the future. What made WAP so doable was that it was the same rotation every week. I found ways to make some days easier over time from doing it over and over again. Not sure I’ll have enough repeats to learn faster techniques for these new challenges but I'm excited to get started.