I spent a bit more time watching the Proko videos I linked in the last post today, this time branching out and looking at some of his earlier studies, and I’m still impressed with his collection. Today’s drawing study was absolutely nothing worth posting, I spent pretty much an entire hour just drawing lines and elipses, trying to make them straight and not straight respectively, with varying results. Acquiring good pen control is going to be crucial if I want to produce the types of drawings I want to do, so there will certainly be days like today where that’s all I do. It’s not the first time I’ve filled several photoshop layers with something approximating circles.
I also managed to make some good progress on my new Unity tactic, convincing the program to build out an entire game screen for me at the push of a button. It took quite a bit of reworking of my existing code to get it to that point, but the effort should be more than worth it, as it will allow me to make changes to my design more confidently, without having to worry about going back and applying those changes umpteen million times to existing UI screens.
It occurs to me that I haven’t really mentioned my drawing setup at all, or how I’m going about this learning process and 30/30 challenge. I’ve got two apps now that I’m using for drawing. Primarily I’m working in Photoshop, going the full digital artist route. I don’t have a super fancy drawing tablet or anything, since it would be a stretch to justify at this point in my career as an “artist”, but I did spring for one of the low end drawing tablet input devices. No local screen or anything, it’s basically a hard mouse pad and a stylus, but it does a pretty good job with pen pressure, and I’m getting used to the disconnect of drawing on the screen with a pen that I’m not looking at.
The other app is something that I just started playing around with, mostly just so I’d have a way to sketch on the go. It’s Adobe Sketch, and I’ve got it installed on my small LG android tablet. No pen pressure, but it’s got a decent set of brushes, and has a direct connection back to Photoshop via the creative cloud for finishing work, so it could come in handy. Great for those days when I forget my stylus somewhere inconvenient.