January 2024, Week 2, Day 10 -- Practicing Speed and Confidence

The intent of this set of exercises is to introduce a couple new elements while continuing to focus on dynamic and quick art exploration (designed in response to my bad habit of going overtime on these exercises -- been getting sick of spending 2hrs on a 30min exercise when including making the post)

1. Warm-Up (5 minutes)
* Quick, dynamic doodles to warm up your hand and creativity

2. Rapid Line sketching (10 minutes)
* Using a pen brush, create rapid line sketches (pen-only with minimal undo/erase)of various objects or scenes.
* Aim for loose and expressive lines

3. Speedy Textue Application (5 minutes)
* Select a texture brush or the G-pen with added texture
* Apply this brush to add texture to a small area, focusing on speed and spontaneity

4. Gesture Drawings (5 minutes)
* Set a timer for 5 minutes
* create quick gesture drawings of poses or scenes. Capture the movement and flow without getting into the intricate details

5. Quick Shading Challenge (5 minutes)
* Choose a simple object
* Shade it quickly, emphhasizing key shadow areas within the time limit

6. Reflection (5 minutes)
* Reflect on todays exercises
* Consider how the emphasis on speed influenced your approach and the results

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What I did -- what worked, and what didn't

For the warm-up, I had Monster Hunter on the brain, so I wanted to try doing a rough sketch of a Rathalos head. Unfortunately, details got away from me way too quick to really follow my references any longer, but since this exercise was just a warmup, I started to just freehand details, deviating from the original. I used the pencil brush for this sketch, but it ended up blurring the lines and just making the upper left corner more smeary than I'd like. Definitely not a fan of drawing/detailing wen I'm not working from any sort of guiding sketch to help make sure things end up roughly where I want them.

For the Rapid-Line sketches, I wanted to draw the original three eeveelutions while referencing the official Ken Sugimori artwork of them. I only managed to get through Flareon and Vaporeon in the time I had though. I think I ended up spending a bit too much time detailing. Though I'm overall happy with flareon, I started to slip once I started vaporeon. The only part I'm really happy with for vaporeon is the end of it's tail -- I think it turned out wonderfully. I'm also a little thrown off by flareon's mouth placement, but I tried to work with the mindset "only erase if your line is in completely the wrong spot (like the back leg didn't connect to the rest of the body on the first attempt). I had similar struggles with the warm up sketch, having difficulty visualizing the finished piece when adding lines that don't have a guiding sketch. That being said, I am still impressed with being able to have two servicably-detailed eeveelutions at just five minutes apiece. Though I'll admit, I just CANNOT seem to get vaporeon's head/face right. Every time it either ends up looking alien or it gives off creepy teletubbies vibes for some reason. Sorry for that mental image

For the rapid texture, I tried to do a similar thing to yesterday, but instead of a cross-hatch, I tried to add lots of individual strands in the tail, following the direction I thought the fur was going. Personally, I'm not super happy with this technique. Maybe it's because I'm picking subjects that are too flat and texture looks out-of-place, or maybe it's because I'm trying to apply texture on black-and-white. Maybe the simplicity of my subjects just doesn't lend themselves to heavy texturing. I think the initial swoops and poofs I added to its mane are much more appropriate than whatever happened to teh tail.

For the gesture drawings, I recreated the espeon one from the other day from memory. I was so proud of it before that I wanted to try doing it again. I struggled a bit with the placement of the back legs, and I think I made the tail a little bit stumpy, but overall, I'm satisfied with the results, having the overall pose and a basic sketch of an espeon in a "jumping down" pose. With my remaining time, I wanted to give one of my favorite pokemon some love too, by doing the same thing for Umbreon. This time, in a wide battle-stance, as if it's ready to either bracing to take a hit, or leap forward in a strike of its own. I did this pose entirely freehand with no references, and I think I'm extremely proud of the results for what it is. I've found that by adding no details to the face other than the cross to indicate what direction the head is facing, I'm about to get out of my own head about the head details, and focus more on the overall shape of the pose/body, especially when I leave wonky proportions alone as long as the rough position is int he right spot (like umbreon's front leg, one of them looks way too skinny relative to the other legs, or that the head was unintentionally an egg shape and the back hips are a little too far away from the shoulders

For the quick shading exercise, I wanted to do more of a 2d shade again, since I felt I could achieve this more quickly than an airbrush 3d shade. I still was slower at this than I'd like, but for five minutes, I think I got decently far. I decided to render Flareon since I was more happy with its lines overall than with vaporeon's, and nothing else had finished linework I could use for quick shading. I learned from yesterday, and instead of struggling to get a bucket to work on a clipping layer, I started with the fill bucket on a layer underneath the lineart, then once I had the base colors down I locked transparent pixels. I then used a 100% opacity g-pen to draw the edges of the shadow, and switched back to the fill-bucket to finish. I added a second darkness level for the shading of the back leg after seeing that was done on my reference image. I ran out of time at this point. I wasted a little too much time trying to find gaps in the outline so that the fill bucket wouldn't flood the entire canvas. I missed out on adding highlights to the body, and doing anything with the eyes/mouth/ears, or the fluff, but I can definitely tell I managed to render the shadows significantly faster than yesterday (even though yesterday's was supposed to be 10 minutes to render, I ended up spending closer to 30-45). In the future though, even on a time-crunch, it's probably worth splitting each separate flat color into its own layer. I lost a good amount of time to certain shadow lines that I kept needing to redo. That probably cost me as much time as it would've taken to simply add two more layers and switch between them for the other colors. Overall, even though I only got maybe 40% done with the render, I did that in about 10-15% of the time I did end up doing the shadows completely freehand. In hindsight, it'd probably have benefitted more from glancing at my reference a bit more, but the results are still passable, I'd say

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Reflection

How did the emphasis on speed influence my approach and the results

By emphasizing speed, I found I was "getting out of my own way" with it a lot more. I was overthinking my line placement a lot less, and "eh just roll with it" a lot more. Sure, it meant I ended up with things like vaporeon's face that look bad but I woulda spent the entire time trying to fix it and never gotten to the tail. But I also ended up getting things like the espeon and umbreon, which I'm super happy with. I now faces are my main weakness in this exercise, so by being able to omit them, I was able to be much more fluid and "generic" with the rest of my lines, letting things turn out much more "dynamic" as the instructions suggested.

I did still struggle with fumbling around and creating some sizeable time sinks any time I actually did need to undo/erase something (I did give vaporeon's face a couple tries because the first ones were even worse). Re-doing a line always ended up taking a couple times longer than the initial, especially the more times I re-did it. I'd get increasingly more deliberate as I struggled to get a line that I felt was sufficient, and it always ended up being a time sink.

I do actually like these speed-oriented exercises overall I think that it'll help me be able to put more effort toward other exercises when I can get sketches/lines down relatively fast. Plus, I'm sure it'll help get my weekly illustration/showcase work down to reasonable amounts of time for someone who really doesn't have the time-budget to be spending 4hrs of a Saturday drawing like I've done the past two times (because of this, maybe expect a slight quality dip this weekend as showcasing speed/confidence will be a part of it)