Here And Back Again

Hey, I finally finished star ocean two (expect characters from that game to show up now and again) So that means I have all the time in the world to spend drawing/blogging…it’s not like there’s much else to do…summer is deceivingly uneventful...as far as time wasting goes. Drawing wise I’ve made large leaps in skill since summer started. Sure I can’t draw bodies yet…but I am getting better at drawing shapes/drawing rough shape centric drawings, and it is awesomely awesome. Sure, a year/month/week I won’t like the drawings I’ve made very much, but they are stepping stones to higher point in drawing. Every bad picture I make helps me improve in some way (except for my fiasco with four legged animals, that baby was a dead end.)


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I’m monologing right now, aren’t I…yeah…umm…I’ll just get started on my non intro part of my blog right now…





Anyway…in the actually blog post…I should probably talk about what I’ve been doing (art-wise) since I last wrote to y’all. You see it all started when I was in the Wahacan jungles of Guadalupe. After I periled…umm…oh yeah…this is the wrong story, that tale shall be saved for another time.

I admit, part of the absence as of late has been laziness, pure and simple… and lately I have been doing some (“) diligent (“) drawing practice. I found some really good tutorials for drawing Furries. I must say that I found quite a bit of use out of them. While I didn’t copy them completely or anything, I did gain new abilities I didn’t have yet.

The other half has to do with the sketchbook I got from Madame Mystery. You see the issue has to do with my scanner and it. If I want to scan a page from the sketchbook, I have to take that piece out of the sketchbook which, in my experience, usually means I’m not drawing anything new on that paper again. Not wanting to waste paper, I try to prolong my scanning experiences. Right now is just one of those times when I’ve filled a page. Granted my drawing is smaller than usual, but when I get more comfy in my own britches, I’ll probably take up more space when drawing solo pictures.

Now that I’ve got the explanation out of the way, I can start talking about just what I’ve been drawing lately. I must say that it has changed radically over the last while. It’s become a lot less cartoonish. I can’t draw any more than heads still, but I am becoming comfortable in drawing skeletons for my characters. It’s really great for me, as I am not very partial to the cartoony look of some pictures (including the ones my pictures had.)

These last weeks have marked quite a few firsts for me, but I’ll mention those as I come to them. First I want to talk about snouts. Drawing snouts are a love-hate relationship. I can’t draw snouts easily, but I really, really want to be able to. Luckily, the tutorials I found were pretty helpful on that, but looking at someone show you how to draw them only gets you so far (I’ve talked about it a lot. If you really want to know which it is, I can post a link). I had a lot of failures before I even got the first success.

My first snout related success.

 

More Snout success

I tell you what. That success was so great just because I actually…well, succeeded. That was followed by more failures, of course, but I got some to work every now and then. (Word of advice: if you’re going into art, be prepared for many, many, many failures. If you aren’t familiar to the term failure yet, you will be soon.)

But, alas, it was not enough. Not for me anyway. I had to do different face positions. I probably failed on that more than I’ve ever failed on a specific thing before (at least not on ones that lead to success anyway.) It was long and painstaking, but I finally did it. Here it is, in all it’s hard worked glory.

I admit that this contributed a lot to the lateness. I was hesitant to call this picture “done” and rip it out of the book (see paragraph 5)

This makes me proud for many, many reasons:

1. This took me quite a while. Usually I can finish a picture in thirty minutes, max. That made me unsure though, because everyone else said it took them hours to do pictures of theirs. Believe it or not, the length it took me to finish this is one of the contributing factors in my happiness, as weird as that sounds.

2. It actually looks really good. It’s based off of shapes, yet doesn’t show said shapes too noticeably. If you look at my past pictures (even just those two other pictures in this very blog post,) the shapes are pretty… there, but this seems to hide it better than all my earlier drawings.

3. It looks more complete than my usual drawings. I always hated how my drawings were all sketches, and my sketches were always finished drawings. It makes me happy to think that this is not a sketch, and I’m proud to say it.

The only thing I feel I need to focus on right now is hair, so expect that to be my focus in future blogs. I’m sorry this isn’t that long for a five week hiatus, but it was a fulfilling hiatus for me as an artist, so I hope you understand. Not much else to say really, just…see you next blog post, whenever that may be.



Cheers,

Pikachao