Drawfest, and going on a newsletter hiatus: Weekly Art Dispatch No. 22 🎨
Welcome to Vega’s weekly Art Dispatch, issue twenty-two.
Ah, this is going to be a short newsletter. This week has been somewhat unproductive regarding art – I’ve been preoccupied with non-art things, including playing Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, which was the recently released remaster of that iconic video game series. I continued with study art, and started some fun art pieces, but haven’t finished any of those unfortunately!
I’m also going to take a short hiatus from writing this Art Dispatch. I’ve published it weekly for over 5 months! It’s been a great record my learning and an accountability tool, but I can feel myself getting a bit fatigued with the pace. To avoid burning out, I’ll take a break for the month of June, and resume the weekly posts when I make my Quarterly Art Review at the end of June. I’ll still be drawing fun and study art of course, and will keep posting them on Instagram and Tumblr. At least, that’s the plan!
Study Art
I didn’t progress with the 50 Bird Challenge this week, but I’m slowly continuing with Lesson 5 of Drawabox, on drawing animals. Only now are the principles of this constructional drawing method sinking in, and I’m getting more comfortable with following contour lines and drawing solid forms on other forms. I have 2 more animals left to draw before I finish with the lesson, which should be done in time to submit for critique at the start of June.
Fun Art
I’d started a new piece of my character, Faiye, but unfortunately didn’t finish it yet – partly because my motivation/focus was low this week, and partly because Drawfest happened this weekend.
Drawfest is a “massively multi-artist online drawing festival” hosted by Wacom x Pixiv, respectively the drawing tablet manufacturer and the Japanese social media community for artists. It is a free but “closed” livestreaming event that I signed up for, along with my art buddy and our mutual Discord art community.
The Drawfest livestreams featured artist tutorials and demonstrations of painting/digital art technique, and a Q&A with the featured artists afterwards. Base materials were provided for some of the streams, and the community was invited to draw along as the presenters explained their painting/digital art techniques. While the subject matter is anime art (not an art style I’m particularly interested in drawing), the tutorials have been extremely educational. I was mostly watching the streams and taking a lot of notes instead of drawing, and plan to practice them in future.
But here is my WIP of Faiye that I was working on before Drawfest started. My digital art drawing is still messy as I’m experimenting with my workflow, especially about how to organize things into layers (if at all), and when to use different brushes. Hopefully I’ll settle on a method soon – and I want to try some methods demonstrated in Drawfest too.
On left: initial rough layout of character and background elements. On right: developing the lineart and some details from the rough layout.
And here begins my hiatus from the Weekly Art Dispatch. I’ll pick up the schedule again in the last weekend of June with my Quarterly Art Review. In the meantime, follow me on Instagram and Tumblr, I will keep posting art there. And of course, you’re welcome to email me (see the footer for my email address), or catch up with me on Discord and elsewhere.
Thanks for reading this week’s edition of the Art Dispatch! 🎨