January 2024, Week 2, Day 11 -- Shapes and Volume

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

2. Shape Exploration (10 minutes)
* Using a brush of your choice, experiment with creating dynamic shapes.
* Vary the size, positions, and orientations on the canvas

3. Expressive Lines on Forms (10 minutes)
* Select a form or object with interesting contours
* Use expressive lines to outline and define the form
* Experiment with varying line weight for emphasis

4. Volume Building (5 minutes)
* Choose a simple object or form
* Use shading techniques to quickly build volume and convey three dimensionality
* Focus on key shadow areas

5. Reflection (5 minutes)
* Reflect on today's exercises
* consider what you enjoyed, any challenges
* Note areas for improvement

---

Reflection

Imma keep it short today. I've been busy all day and I'm eager to play the pokemon dlc epilogue

For the warm up I sketched a lucario from reference. I'm unhappy with the proportions, and as per usual, my face was the part I was least happy with. What I did differently is that I tried to do the quick-line sketch instead of a full construction sketcch like I did in yesterday's exercises. I wanted to see if I could get a full lucario down in just 5 minutes. In the end, I got everything but the tail and hair thingys... so close

For the shapes, I wasn't really sure what exactly the exercise wanted from me or what I was expecting to get out of doing this. I put a bunch of random shapes -- some curved and some angular. After the page was filled, I felt like I didn't really get any benefit from doing this, and I ran out of space to do much more, so I cut the exercise short at 7 minutes

For the line weight variation, I do appreciate that I had a chance to work on this. I went over the general shapes again on a new layer, and tried to be intentional about the thickness. I found it significantly easier to go from thin to thick instead of thick to thin with longer lines. I had enough time left over from outlining all the shapes that I ended up doing lucario too. I found that I didn't necessarily have a lot of deliberate control when trying to intentionally apply a varied thickness mid-curve/line, but when I just drew lines down, it happened pretty naturally. Only problem is for things with smaller details like lucario. I felt the lines just couldn't do it right. Especially in the face, the "heavy" lines were too thick for how tightly-detailed the face was. I found that when being deliberate, I could only ever consistently do the super thin and the heaviest lines. Not any in-between pressure consistently

For the volume practice I picked that one fire shape and I'm pretty happy with my airbrush shading for it. I then decided to try three different flat-shading techniques on other shapes. The blue one was geometric, giving each flat surface a different shade based on apparent shadow, adding interior angles when needed to turn it into a 3d shape instead (kinda cheating IMO, but it has the cleanest shade of the flat shading). The other red one was a topographical style shading, using 5 levels of light and shadow, starting from the base color, and working out/in to add highlight and shadow -- I am not the happiest with it at a distance, but when zoomed out to a thumbnail view, that looks the realistic of all the flat shading approaches when zoomed out. I think 5 levels might be a bit too much though, and that the 5th should be saved just for shine in extra reflective surfaces. Finally, I was curious to see how it would look if I added the shade as if I was using the airbrush, just wihtout the smooth blending/gradient. I think I'm the least happy with this one out of the three falt shading approaches

Aright, peace y'all. Pokemon time