January 2024, Week 2, Day 8 -- Simple Practice

As a quick preface, this was not the original lesson plan for today, but I ended up heavily reworking today's plan into something significantly simpler. I caught an awful cold and I'm running on 3 hours of sleep at the moment. Knowing I'm not going to retain anything "learned" today, I decided to just run through a short brush-up on last week's lessons and build muscle-memory, even if I'm not gonna be doing anything significantly new today. Doing something is better than doing nothing while I'm still trying to build the routine.

1. Warm-Up (5 minutes)
* Engage in quick, loose doodles or sketches to warm up your hand and creative flow

2. Pen Pressure Sensitivity Drill (5 minutes)
* Use a simple brush
* Practice varying the line thickness and opacity based on pen pressure
* Draw quick strokes with different levels of pressure

3. Brush Variety Exploration (10 minutes)
* Experiment with at least three different brushes in Clip Studio Paint
* Use each brush to draw a quick sketch or doodle

4. Shading with Pressure (5 minutes)
* Choose a simple object or shape
* Practice shading with pen pressure sensitivity, focusing on smooth transitions

5. Gesture Drawing (5 minutes)
* Set a timer for 5 minutes
* Quickly sketch poses or gestures, focusing on capturing the overall movement

6. Reflection (5 minutes)
* Take a moment to reflect on the exercises
* Identify any areas where you felt comfortable or faced challenges

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My reflections:

For everything I did today, I was referencing the artwork here: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/90156695

For the warm-up, I tried to sketch the Eevee and Leafeon heads. I can definitely feel myself struggling to do anything today. Between the two, I'm happier with the Leafeon than the eevee, but both were very rough around the edges today. Still running into similar issues where the cheek shapes end up giving the head wonky proportions despite trying to replicate what was done in the reference illustrations. Something for me to figure out better when I feel better

For the pressure sensitivity, I used a basic "brush pen" to draw a bunch of lines, scribbles, and zigzags. I eventually got bored and tried to ink Leafeon with the brush pen at varying pressures. Still need to develop a sense of which lines are better suited being thick/thin, but I'm getting better at deliberately choosing thickness of the lines. I just feel like my choices may still be wrong. I ended up hiding the part of the canvas with the scribbles to make room for the rest

For the brush variation, I started with a sketch of jolteon using the mechanical pencil brush. After that I decided to try using some brushes I'm not as familiar with. I ended up doing glaceon with a charcoal pen and deciding that I heavily dislike charcoal. I then finished sylveon with the use of one of the pen brushes. I can't remember the exact name, but I think it was something like "mango pen". I liked how fluid the pen liens were, but I definitely was not happy with any of the sketches I made with this. Faces are still a big struggle for me, so I'm gonna need to take a lot more time to practice them going forward

For the shading with pressure, I started with a solidpink circle, used the airbrush to shade with pressure only, which was fine, but it only ended up being very subtle. Pressing harder didn't get any darker. I think pressure shading isn't the technique I like for shading. With a couple minutes left and no ability to refine the shading any more, I decided to shift hue and tone to add more satisfying shadows. I'm glad I did. I think of everything I've done so far (not just today), shading is my strength so far. At this point, I had to shrink everythign and move it away to make room for the final exercise.

Finally, for the gesture drawings, I just took the basic pencil to do some gesture drawings in the lower right corner of Vaporeon, Flareon, and Espeon. Even though there wasn't a lot of space, and I ended up overlapping the drawings in the end, I'm actually super happy with what I did for these. I found that by not adding the face, I was able to stop worring about how wonky it looked, and get a "pretty good" pose sketch without much effort. Even though I was still referencing the other illustrations, I spent less time trying to follow it precisely, and a bit more time freehanding the "flow" of the pose. I was actually pleasantly surprised with how naturally these came to me compared to everything else. I had the most fun doing these, with Espeon being my favorite of the three.

Looking forward to feeling better (or at least getting a good night's sleep) so that I can start having better practice again