Weekly Art Dispatch, No.2 🎨
Welcome to Vega’s weekly Art Dispatch, issue two.
Here goes my second Art Dispatch. Hooray!
Study Art
This week's exercises:
- Knocked over 50 boxes for the 250 Boxes Challenge in Draw A Box (DaB) - the art course I'm currently doing.
- This week's "art drill" was figure drawing studies of heads using the Loomis method, which I learned from Proko.com last week. Through them, I've gotten a handle on perspective -- though extreme foreshortening will always be a beast -- so I've achieved my goal of nailing down a head-construction method. Facial features still look rather flat and off-proportion, however. I plan to work through Proko's videos on facial features one day.
Heads figure drawing practice, in pen. (references: Croquis Cafe)
Current study focus:
Nothing new. Consolidate my learning through figure-drawing drills with focus on gesture, whole body proportions, and heads -- and do it in pen, to practice being purposeful whenever I decide to lay down a line. In fun art, continue to focus on draughtsmanship -- cleaner, smoother linework, and consolidating my current workflow. Need to figure out a method for cleaning up draft/sketch lines. My art pieces are still pretty messy, but not as bad as they used to be.
Fun Art
Applied the Loomis head to my characters from the Dragon Age video games. Compared to my older art pieces, they are looking much more proportional. Now the challenge is to reproduce these headshots faithfully across all my future art of them.
Emmael Tabris, Grey Warden (Dragon Age: Origins)
Idris Lavellan, Inquisitor (Dragon Age: Inquisition)
And everyone's favourite Witch of the Wilds.
Of course I had to draw them in full-body.
Warden Tabris and Inquisitor Lavellan.
The A4 canvas was too small to draw their faces in any detail, but I did get to practice drawing proportionate human bodies here. And I ran into a problem that has regularly plagued me: construction went awry somewhere, anatomy was out of proportion, so I have to erase and redo the drawing. I completely erased and redrew Inquisitor Lavellan after progressing quite far (on left). I think the second version (on right) of him works better in the overall picture, though I'm still not happy with it. I'm hoping that repeated practice will help me catch proportional errors much sooner, or reduce them substantially in the first place.
I was experimenting with drawing in perspective for the first version of Lavellan. Didn't work out too well.
Closing Notes
Artwork pictures in Dispatch No.1 was scanned, whereas here in No.2 they are photos from my smartphone with a bit of filter editing. Still deciding which looks more presentable...
For the last weekend of 2020, I'm going to do a big "2020 Art in Review", and pick out 3 of my top art pieces of the year (to use them for art progress goals). I can't wait to evaluate my progress this year and reflect on next year's plans.