All right!
Day 30 of the Drawing 30/30 challenge, and that challenge is complete!
So, how did it turn out? Well, let’s take a look. First off, the notorious “before” image:
And then, the final project, now complete:
Sure, it’s not amazing, but I’d say that’s some pretty impressive improvement, especially for such a short time span.
So, what’s next? Well, the Drawing 30/30 challenge is over, but that doesn’t mean I’m putting down my stylus. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, and practice makes perfect, so practice I shall. You probably won’t see a lot of it here, I’m planning on mostly doing repetitive studies, practicing more specific things, and playing around with technique while improving my skill level. Honing the craft, as it were. I may do some other larger pieces, the kind that you work on for days, and if I like any of them I’ll put them up, but the other stuff is fairly boring, so I probably won’t waste your time with them outside of the challenge.
Of course, now that the challenge is done the main focus of learning will be shifting. It’s time for the next 30/30 challenge to begin, so starting tomorrow it’s time for 3d art.
The 3d 30/30 will mostly be focused on modeling and sculpting, specifically with Blender. I’m sure I’ll get some practice in with texturing, lighting, maybe even some light animation as well, primarily by way of presentation, but the main goal is to be able to turn out more or less high quality model work and gain a good familiarity with both the software and the standard techniques needed to get the job done well. I’m hoping that many of the concepts I learned studying 2d art will transfer over to the world of 3d, and I suspect that working with 3d will also help to improve my 2d skills. A lot of both falls down to how you see the world around you, developing that “artist eye”, so the two should syncopate nicely.
This time around, though, I’m giving myself an additional restraint. I noticed that with the Drawing 30/30 I spent a lot of time jumping around between my various resources. I found a number of good tutorials and classes on drawing, covering a wide array of topics and styles, and I spent a lot of time with all of them, trying them out, seeing which ones would work best for me. In some ways this was beneficial, since art creation seems to be nearly as subjective as art appreciation, but I also feel like my progress may have suffered a bit as a result. I was able to benefit from bits and pieces of several different courses, but I didn’t get the full lessons from hardly any of them.
So with that in mind, for this 30/30 I’m trying to stay a bit more laser focused. I’m sure I won’t be one hundred percent, my mind has too strong of a tendency to leap around, especially when I’m engaged, but even so. Prior to deciding that I needed to focus on the 2d art before anything else I poured through several of the introductory Blender courses on cgcookie.com, and I found them to be very well made and informative. Knowing that, the plan is to work my way through their Modeling learning flow courses. So in addition to simply modelling or working in Blender for at least thirty minutes a day, my target is to complete at least one of these courses (or at least thirty minutes of one) each day. If I have additional time to play around and practice after that I may sidetrack into outside tutorials or techniques, play around with other aspects of the program, or other modeling methods, but I want to get through as much of their structured learning as possible. Doing so should give me a pretty firm understanding of the program, and modeling in general.