Weekly Art Dispatch, No.4 🎨
Welcome to Vega’s weekly Art Dispatch, issue four.
The first Weekly Art Dispatch of the new year. Blogging about my weekly art productivity has helped me stay accountable, and I’m enjoying it. Will I have 57 issues by the end of 2021? That is the plan, and my goal to shoot for!
I’ve created an Art Gallery on my main website, containing the best and exemplary works from my 2020 Year in Review. Haven’t decided if it’ll be on a monthly or quarterly basis, but I plan to update the Gallery as I continue practising and completing more works.
Fun Art
I spent most of the last week of 2020 working on this piece.
(Caption:)
Medric the scholar and Tevki the librarian look over a folio of illustrations. Neep, awakened by their banter, stretches and chirps at her mistress.
My goal with this piece was to develop my drawings from doodles into proper illustrations, to be purposeful about every step of the drawing process. In particular: taking the time and care to compose the piece, spend time designing specific elements (concept art) that contribute to the final image, and use thumbnails to figure out details that I’m not sure about.
In the past I’ve “drafted”/doodled directly into the final canvas – which I’ve now realized is a novice way of drawing a picture. Thumbnailing, concept designing, and composing all have to be done with care, and drawn elsewhere outside the final illustration. This process is more time-consuming, but it’s worth that extra effort!
I used this piece to practice these different steps, and to figure out a productive workflow. Here’s some of the “supporting documentation” around this piece:
Left: Thumbnailing the scene in pen, figuring out different poses I can use. Right: Concept art for Tevki the librarian’s outfit, based off photo references (Turkish traditional clothing, in this case).
Process slideshow. (Also my first animation made in Krita. I need to take more and better progress photos!)
Drawing this picture took about a week – much longer than I’d hoped. I was working very slowly and none too focused either, but I’m glad I got a feel of this process, it was a fine learning experience about the many steps needed to compose and draft a piece. Still - better step up my productivity game and be more focused and purposeful during my drawing time.
I plan to study image composition in detail later on, but it’s good start doing it now.
Study Art
Full steam ahead with Lesson 2 of Draw A Box (DaB). This is my second go at this lesson, so I understand the concepts taught by the exercises. It’s a bit tiresome to redo everything, but I can’t deny that practising linework, perspective and textures are helping a lot to improve my art skillset!
Texture analysis exercise for DaB Lesson 2. I was able to apply this learning to this week’s fun art!
Closing
I was going to blog about my 2021 Art Goals this weekend, but this post is starting to get long. I’ll do it for Dispatch No.5! See you next week.