Month: July 2018

Continuing on with the project I started yesterday, today’s work revolved entirely around trying to get some proper value shading going on yesterday’s figure sketch.

I still find the shading process to be pretty satisfying, pulling out depth from the 2d image. Not that I have a good feel for exactly where the forms are actually supposed to be, mind you, that’s going to come with practice and study, and I just don’t have enough of that yet. Even so, I think it makes for a nice result.

Tomorrow I come back to finish up this piece with some colorization and finishing touches, hopefully it will be a good finale for my first 30/30.

For these last few days of the drawing 30/30, I decided to go for a bigger “final paper” style project. Considering the ghastly figure drawing that I’m using as my “before”, I went with a plan to do a full figure drawing of a waving woman.

So for today’s work, just the basic sketch. I managed to find a more or less valid reference image online, as close as I could get to the type of pose I was going for in the original drawing. It’s not quite right, of course, but if I’ve learned anything during this skill sprint, it’s that I don’t know nearly enough to work without some kind of valid reference. Regardless, it’s close enough to the general pose and tone I was going for in the “before”, so I’m calling it valid.

I still haven’t had a chance to really study how to draw hands, and I certainly haven’t had time to really practice them, so they are a bit wonky in the sketch, but honestly I think they came out better than I expected. Same thing with the feet. I’m sure I’ll probably spend a few weeks drawing nothing but hands and feet at some time in the future, but today is not that day.

So yeah, I’d say that over all it’s still not a great piece of art, but as far as pure figure sketches go it’s certainly the best I’ve done yet. With more practice I could actually become a “real” artist.

And, like I said, this is a “final paper” kind of scenario, so this won’t be the last you’ll be seeing of this young woman. The piece must be finished.

Finished up the shading and coloring on yesterday’s sketch.

Over all I’m pretty happy with the results. It’s still not quite right, and the process is way too slow to be really useful, but it’s certainly progress. The more practice I get, the smoother and faster things should go, and the better my art will get. But to be honest, I kind of can’t believe that it’s already going as well as it is.

I took things a bit more slowly with the piece for today, so I haven’t finished the shading and coloring phases yet, but I think the initial sketch came out better than my previous efforts. It probably helps that I was actually working off of a model this time around.

I followed up with my own advice from yesterday and went with a 3d model reference off of sketchfab to drive the practice, and I think it’s working out pretty well. I like the idea of being able to do the same face from multiple angles, and the lack of hair helps at this stage, since it isn’t getting in the way of facial features or throwing off the size of the head.

I’m also pretty stoked that I managed to get the sketch as close to the reference as I did, so far any time I’ve tried to work from reference the end result has always come out looking nothing remotely like it was supposed to, but this one needed far fewer alterations than normal. Still needed some, of course, I’m still learning, but the whole process seemed smoother than normal.

So, following yesterday’s face painting, I got extra inspired to go back and work on some of the facial features more, hence the following noses and eye sketches.

The cool thing is, with all of the practicing I’ve been doing I think I’m actually starting to get better at some of this drawing stuff. With the noses especially the lines were coming out more or less where I wanted them more often than not, which is a nice change of pace. It would be nice to reach a point where I don’t have to fight my hand to get a line placed where I wanted it to go, and only had to deal with fighting my eyes and brain to actually get things in the correct perspective.

With a little bit of practice under my belt, I decided to go ahead and try a second face study. Practice makes better after all, and I do think that this one came out considerably less Nicholas Cage looking. I did end up falling back on the liquefy tool a little bit to adjust some of the perspective in the final product, but the adjustments weren’t nearly as major as they could have been. All in all I count it as good progress.

I’m also particularly excited because I just realized that Sketchfab, a site for hosting 3d models, also doubles as a great art reference site. I’m already using it as part of my cgcookie.com training, and planned to use it to post up my own 3d models here during the 3d 30/30, but I hadn’t considered the reference benefit of having models that you can rotate around, zoom in on, and adjust the lighting for. And there are whole batches in there that pretty much just exist as anatomical reference guides for artists. In theory I shouldn’t have to wonder what happens to a body part when its viewed from a different angle. You can’t pose them, and I’m not sure I’d trust the mesh deformations when posed anyway, not as a reliable body reference, but still, that’s a wealth of visual information I’ve been overlooking, and I’ll certainly be adding it to my study regimen.

So, not that this is new information or anything, but faces are hard.

Like, really hard. That being said, outside of my rushed shading job, I think I actually really like the look of the skin-tone technique, now that I’m more or less implementing it properly. It’s the technique that I failed to properly follow with the arm painting, wherein the value layer is actually a mix of whites, grays, and transparency, on top of an underlying base coat for the darker values. The advantage of this is that you end up with a  slightly transparent “skin” layer of value that can be colored as you like, but you can inject another layer with varying strengths of red underneath it, simulating the natural translucency of the skin, and allowing for variation of coloration. The end result can actually look really nice, with practice, so you can bet I’ll be giving it some practice.

Speaking of practice, while I am absolutely loving this new technique (which by the way involves building up values from dark to light, rather than the traditional other way around), it can only do so much. It’s very forgiving of relatively minor issues of line, and even proportion to a certain degree, since you can kind of sculpt the values to correct faults in the original sketch, but you still need to know what it is you are actually trying to sculpt. So with that in mind, I decided to spend a bit more time going back over some of the basic features of the face, starting with the nose since I really feel like this one was particularly dreadful. Much practice is still needed, but that’s really the point of this whole exercise. And honestly, I still think it’s finally starting to pay off, even if my face drawing ended up looking mysteriously like Nicholas Cage. And no, that wasn’t originally the plan, though I think my next one may intentionally be a Cage pic, based on actual reference, just to see how it comes out.

Every now and then you hit upon a moment in the journey where you really feel like you’ve reached a milestone. Some checkpoint that really hones in on progress being made.

Today was one of those. It may not look like much, and honestly it kind of has an old school video game feel to it, but that’s the best drawing I’ve done so far.

I’ve still got a lot to learn when it comes to anatomy and muscle placement. I corrected the proportions about a million times with delicate use of Photoshop’s liquify tool. And one arm does not a full figure make. But still, all in all I’m fairly ecstatic about today’s progress, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can render out tomorrow.

 

So tired!

After a bout of insomnia last night where my brain was insisting I think about making a 2d top-down action game strongly parodying the original Legend of Zelda, I spent most of the day completely wiped. And amazingly enough, it’s really hard to learn properly when you can’t think straight. Who knew?

Even so, I did manage to make a little bit of progress. I spent my 30 minutes today, and a bit more, practicing the techniques from the Udemy class on painting my very own wood texture. Despite having done the first few layers multiple times, I haven’t really managed to progress above that. Oh well, that’s what practice is for, right? And hopefully with some sleep it will start to click.

Some days I really feel like I’m making some actual progress. Today is one of those days.

On the art front, I started my newly purchased course on 2d art asset creation in photoshop. And sure, I’m just following along with the instructor, aping what he’s throwing out, but I think it came out pretty well.

The next lesson is a better wood texture for the crate, but I think that all in all even the simple one didn’t go too poorly. I’m not going to be selling any assets any time soon, but I think the basic ideas are clicking in, and that means that at least some of the last twenty-one days of practice is actually paying off.

On the game-dev side, I also managed to get a couple of what I’m going to consider big wins. I added an audio manager to the game, so now there are actual sounds for the button clicks and one of the game elements. And I learned how to implement a singleton pattern for objects in the game, which is going to help me clean up the rest of the code immensely. Now if I can just get my display and upgrade code sorted properly I’ll really be cooking with gas.

So, I think I may have worked out how to add proper game-state saving in Runic Alchemy, and how to include sound effects, so I’m pretty stoked about all of that. I haven’t had a chance to implement any of it yet, but both have been on my back burner and worrying me a bit, so that’s a bit of a load off if it actually works.

One of the other issues that I’ve been a bit concerned with is being able to produce proper 2d art assets for the game. Obviously I’ve been going through all of this drawing practice to help get myself up to snuff for exactly that sort of thing, but to this point it’s been mostly focused on general drawing and figure drawing. Game assets require a slightly different focus, even if they are using many of the same skills. So to that end I picked up another Udemy course specifically on creating art assets for games, which I think will be incredibly helpful, while still helping to advance my drawing skills, so you should probably expect to start seeing slightly different subject matter in my daily drawings. I still need to learn the figure drawing, as that’s going to be hugely important, but the need for nice looking navigation buttons is a bit more pressing at the moment.

That being said, today I spent some time in my original Udemy drawing class, actually doing the homework for once. This image is the result, a study in basic shapes with form from light values and rendered shadows. I know I’ve posted things like this before, but these things do take practice, and dang it that’s what I drew today.

With so much work going into the game these last few days, I’ve managed to get very little in the way of actual sleep, so today’s video update is a bit of a short-cut post, in that I didn’t actually record any video. It’s all audio and images, but an update is an update, and I decided both that something is better than nothing, and that I really wasn’t up for an actual full video this evening. So there you go!