gavindel stARTs from the very beginning

gavindel

Here's my first month submission for the Watts challenge. I have no idea what I'm doing. Watts really doesn't cover rendering much, and the forum submissions are very inconsistent in their approach, reference and rendering. Not particularly impressed by the result on this one, but I've got to start working on rendering eventually.

Other than that, working on the second half of Head 1. Stuff like this:

I remember trying a few of the classic asaro shots in December 2015 and being just completely unable to manage them. So, progress. And in the vein of artists everywhere, progress means higher standards. Definitely a bit of a skew on that last head.

gavindel

I should update. I'm working on Watts' course Figure 1. I tried a few assignments and had a lot of difficulty, so I decided to do the assignments without turning in at first. When I know a picture is "for" something, I tense up like a vice. So I'll put in some practice runs. Slow down, breathe, focus on basic shapes and proportions.

Iruka

Its really fun to watch you progress, and to see watts be effective even when its all online. It seems like you are getting better at self correcting, which I think is fairly difficult/slow without a teacher and direct feedback in a pretty constant stream.

The heads are starting to come around! I can be pretty bad at proportions myself after years of anime, so I have a tendency to stretch people out.

gavindel

Yeah, its probably a whole other world doing this in the actual atelier with the instructors correcting on a regular basis. Still, I'm out here doing this on my own. Nobody I know does art in any capacity. The AC is the closest I have to an art community, and you guys can't sit over my shoulder all day. I have to give myself more time do this than a dedicated art student. Something something patience, something something meditation.

I even got a complement from a friend a few weeks back. "Yeah, I'm amazed at how long you've been doing this. I figured you'd have quit by now!"

gavindel

Part of my assignment for the ovoid mannequin. Work has been an ass kicker these last few months, and my practice time has suffered.

Angel_of_Bacon

I feel like the legs are a little short on most of these- it may be helpful to keep in mind the general proportional guideline that the distance from the top of the head to the base of the crotch, is generally equal to the distance from the base of the crotch to the bottom of the feet.

gavindel

Really? Bah. Last I got a critique, they said my legs were too long. Suppose I overcompensated the other direction...

Angel_of_Bacon

gavindel wrote: »

Really? Bah. Last I got a critique, they said my legs were too long. Suppose I overcompensated the other direction...

Yeah, that sorta thing does happen- all I can say is try not to get overly worried about it.
There's always going to be a period of 'this porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold' with any concept, before you hit the porridge that's just right, and can hit it consistently.

gavindel

Mini update just to keep things fresh. I stopped explicitly working on the Watts program and took a week's vacation from drawing. I'll still be effectively using Watts as my primary source, but everybody needs a bit of variety in their program.

A warmup head that I thought turned out alright for what it was.

I lied. This update is actually cats.


But you can see the corner of my art 'studio', so this totally counts.

Iruka

nice cats, effectively rendered napping.

Mixing in some non watts drawing will help fight a slow burnout, for sure. Variety is good, and you never know what advice will work better for rooting you with good principals.

gavindel

Perspective studying. Brutalist evil buildings seem to fit the mold.

A couple measurement errors, a couple unforeseen tangents. Otherwise, as far as I understand, the perspective is correct.

gavindel

Nothing exciting. Trying to do a round of every major topic as I prepare for the boot camp in September. It won't be a cheap thrill - my $400 in art supplies attests to that. Tried some painting at home, and it looks pretty terrible. Mixing paints in correct shades is a bigger bottleneck than skill. Hopefully I can figure it out before I get to the workshop.

Staring with the head once more...

Trying to pay more attention to proportions.


A skull study. Yep.


Need to practice shading a ton more. I still can't figure out how Watts does his crazy detailed shading patterns.


Facial features are a bottleneck for believable faces.

Iruka

It might feel like a slough, but every time you post I see a little improvement and it's very exciting! I hope the boot camp goes well for you, I can't wait to see the results. Keep at it, man!

gavindel

I admit to avoiding posting. Looking at my bootcamp art a week later is an exercise in frustration. Most of what I did was below par even compared to my average. Well, I can post some of the stand outs.

I've been looking at formalizing a training program based on the bootcamp. Really, it boils down to rotating a series of subjects on a weekly or monthly basis. A day doing figure layin, a day doing head layin, a day doing facial features and expressions...There are a lot of different areas that I need to improve together. In terms of priority, its probably more important to work on the rhythm and flow of my gesture and layin than to do renderings. Final renderings don't do much if the underlying drawing is stiff.

gavindel

This one came out okay. Head is a bit squared off, and there's too much space between corner of the eye and the bottom corner of the jaw, but lips and eyes are better.

gavindel

Latest study: hands. They are very difficult, as basically every artist will attest to. I'm aware that I focus too heavily on the bumps and undulations of anatomy. To compensate, I want to focus on gesture and cartooned hands to build up a feel for an aesthetic representation of a hand and then build anatomy on top of that.

gavindel

Continuing my figure study. If we consider a figure study as stages: Gesture, structure, anatomy, rendering, then my priority right now remains gesture and structure. I want to improve proportions and pose. For these, I'm only using shadow to demarcate the line between line and shadow groups.

gavindel

The last month has not been kind. I worked most of December straight, and January probably won't be much better.

I wish there was more to say, but frankly I'm just drawing when I can find the energy right now.

Iruka

Drawing when you can find the energy is no small accomplishment.

Give some more thought and time to your feet structure and placement. Its super hard, and feet are annoying, but solidly placing them can really sell a pose. Some of yours feel small, and you might want to describe the bend in them with a bit more confidence.

gavindel

I'm doing the livestream Watts classes this spring quarter: head drawing and head quick sketch. Presentation is minimal, but the critique sessions are pretty sharp. I'm probably the worst person in the class.

As the critique pointed out, her head is too narrow. Another half inch of cranium would have done a lot to balance out the rest. The eyes and nose are starting to resolve into proper features.



Honestly, this one feels like just complete shit.



Turns out that I have very poor rendering skills. Suppose that's not surprising given most of my practice has been with line, not tone.

Whining about how hard it is aside, I feel like individual features are becoming less of a stumbling block. My drawings feel like they look worse, but its because they're starting to look like ugly people.

rcwalled

Hey I think these are looking good, as you said they are looking like specific people. I wouldn't worry about feeling like the worst or making ugly pictures but instead think if what you need to do to make it look how you want it too look. You know you need to make some changes in placement and proportions of features so be sure to measure before comitting hard and divorce the negative cannotions from it.

As for rendering it always seems reliant on taking the time to build it up anf make it look good. Rarely do you find a well rendered peice quickly done. At some point if you want to improve that you're just going to have to sit down and dig into it. I would recomend maybe picking a small area say a couple of inches by a couple of inches on one of these where you have the ref and really dig into it.

Finally what paper are you using. It looks like newsprint in some of the photos. If it is it might be time to jump it up to a little better quality. Keep up the work

gavindel

Thanks, rcwalled. Yeah, I'm using smooth newsprint and Conte pencils. A super cheap setup that has served pretty well for three years. However, the smooth newsprint gives up the ghost pretty quickly under multiple erasures.

Sublimus

Nice stuff dude! Hope you're learning a ton in the watts class!

gavindel

Classes continue. We're in week six now.

The model for this second one is not, in fact, bald, but I was already 35 minutes into what is supposed to be a 20 minute head quicksketch, so bald he is.

Sublimus

Nice! Do you feel like you're learning there?? What has been your biggest take away so far?

gavindel

Sublimus wrote: »

Nice! Do you feel like you're learning there?? What has been your biggest take away so far?

My largest take away this semester has probably been the need for really solid basic construction. Every stage of the drawing needs to look "good" in the sense of reading as the basic object. Shading or shadow won't save me if the eye is too high in the socket or whatever. If the construction is solid, even simple value mappings will read well.

Sublimus

Mmmmm interesting... I'll make sure to nitpick your construction then lol!!

gavindel

Week 8, I think? The semester's almost over.

This one came out kind of lumpy. It looked better before I tried to add rendering. I'm still working on getting my tones to go down smooth.



20 minute quicksketch class. Except this one took 55 minutes. Watts tells us not to take the 20 minute time limit too literally, but I may have cheated even with that...

gavindel

Final week of the semester.

The sign up for next semester was very unclear. It looks like the three livestreaming classes have filled up in ~1 day. Does that mean for in-person seats or the livestream critiques too? I don't know.

Maybe next I should spend a few weeks experimenting with landscapes or something. Take a break from the human form.

gavindel

Not dead.

Figure drawing is an area where I've heavily suffered from "What next?" syndrome, so my approach there will be to try and focus on gesture -> structure -> two value to get off the ground. I'm also in head drawing again, building on last semester's work. Need to describe more forms and less outlines. Still some proportions issues to watch as well.

gavindel

The spring semester at Watts is over. The summer semester is mini, and I need a break from the more formal schooling anyways, so I'll pick up in the fall.

In the meantime, draw without a deadline...

Warm ups are a good time to self test with drawing from imagination.



Copying some eyes from Eric Gist.



A more intensive eye from imagination. Some proportional issues I'm still wrestling with: the right side of the eyelid is a bit wide, overall iris is too large, not enough inner eyelid fold on the left side.

gavindel

Figure drawing - still rough.



Shadow patterns - they're important.



Male eyes in three quarters is my fetish.

gavindel

New semester. New assignments.





I erased the left eye a few times getting it lined up, and you can really tell with the texture on the tone. Newsprint really doesn't forgive more than one or two light erasures.

SeveredHead

some nice forms, they loose but still good structure

gavindel

I stopped doing art for quite a while as my shoulder/neck healed from an injury. (My absolute shit ergonomics in my little drawing corner did not help that injury!) I started back early this year, though I didn't post. Don't plan on returning to the regular update schedule, but I do think its nice to compare before and after fundamentals.

Had a lot of expensive paints in my closet, so I signed up for a Watts Atelier still life class. This turned out to be...uh...biting a shark by its tail. Exhibit A of Gavindel way over his head:



There are a ton of things going on with oil! The brush, the paint, the pigment, the canvas...I spent the semester trying to figure out how in the world Meadow Gist and Jeff Watts were busting out these great effects while I couldn't even lay an even stroke! So that was a disaster.

Well, fortunately, they offered a fundamentals oil course the summer semester. A course entirely about "how do we make the paint behave?" Okay, now we can at least start talking about what's wrong instead of the painting failing at the gate.



Big takeaways: (1) draw more, (2) seriously, draw more. Painting just takes everything hard about charcoal and triples it. (3) The exact mixture of gamsol and paint will radically alter the results of the paint. Too much gamsol -> can't even lay down a new stroke because you just picked up the old one. Too little gamsol -> shoving mud. Brush control? Thin lines require using the edge/side of the brush like it was a pencil. Big fat thick strokes are actually the harder ones.

In some ways I'm trudging through intermediate hell. There's a never-ending supply of newbies with Loomis and wobbly circles, and there are the people who stuck through to proficiency. Right in the middle, there's the quiet climb. Nothing to do but keep going, I guess.