January 2024, Week 2, Day 12 -- Intro to Composition

1. Warm-Up (5 minutes)
* Quick dynamic sketches or doodle sot warm up your hand and creativity

2. Composition Challenge (15 minutes)
* Create a composition using dynamic shapes, expressive lines, and any other elements you've explored this week.
* Pay attention to the arrangement and balance of your elements

3. Quick Composition Analysis (5 minutes)
* After creating your composition, take a moment to analyze it
* Consider the placement of shapes, use of lines, and overall balance
* Identify what works well and areas for improvement

4. Reflection & Goal setting (5 minutes)
* Reflect on your artistic journey for the past 2 weeks
* What did you discover about yor preferences, strengths, and/or areas for growth?
* Set a goal or focus for your future practice

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So, today's lesson was closer to a weekly showcase without being a Saturday showcase. I haven't ever taken the time to properly try a full composition, so in addition to the rest of the exercises, I spent about 5-10 minutes mentally planning it and learning what the rule of thirds and the basics of what "negative space" is

My initial doodle isn't shown. I just took one of the commissions I have bought in the past for my main OC and did a rough composition sketch, focusing on the shapes and proportions of the body. Nothing really to say other than that I probably shoulda sketched with the pencil brush instead of the g pen -- stabilization was high and threw off my attention until I thought to slow it down

(covering the composition analysis here too) For the composition challenge, I did what pretty much everyone does for their first composition art -- a mountain sunset. Honestly, you'd think for someone living near a mountain range, I'd be better at drawing them. The basic breakdown for why everything was placed where it is:
- I started using two horizontal and two vertical lines to divide the canvas into 9 roughly-equal sized squares. I freehanded the grid, so it won't necessarily be perfect
- For emphasizing the rule of thirds, the points of interest in the composition should lie along the grid lines, with particular emphasis around the grid's intersections
- I put the center of the sun at the center of the bottom horizontal
- the sun's radius was 1 grid, so the top, left, and right of the sun touched grid lines, and the bottom of the sun touched the bottom of the canvas
- I sketched in two triangles for the mountains (generally unhappy with how they became "wobbly triangles", but for the time I had and the intention of the exercise, it's passable. I placed the peaks in the center of their respective "thirds" aligned on the top horizontal (same with the top of the sun)
- I didn't want to have the mountains on the same plane, so to add abit of depth/volume, I had one slightly in front of the other. Unfortunately, this caused the biggest "point of interest" in the piece to be in the middle of the bottom-senter square instead of along any of the grid lines, causing probems for the composition as a whole. In hindsight, I should've made the mountains wider, so that they'd intersect at the center of the sun (center of he bottom horizontal) instead. Maybe in another exercise, I'll try to recreate the composition with this change
- I also tried to make the sun's "starburst" follow the grid too. The orangey-red ring's radius goes right through the parts where the grid intersected with the edge of the canvas
- On the downside, the gradient from the sun to the orangey-red ring ends up causing the main shape of the sun to be stretched outside the original focal point I had planned. If I do this again, I'd want to adjust the gradients so that the shape of the sun is more obviously aligned with the grid, even after blending
* on a complete side note, I'm super happy with how the sunset gradient turned out, even if it breaks the rule of thirds with the yellows
* I also added faint gradients to the two mountains at slightly different light levels to convey depth and volume while still keeping them mostly as negative space to draw the attention back toward the sun itself
* Admittedly, I didn't do anything with lines this time, but that was intentional. I'd made notice in the past several pieces that I'd been doing super thick lines that made everything feel disjointed and "clunky". I wanted to try a technique where the image is created without the use of lines, so that the shapes make up the details of teh illustration instead -- my lines were "no lines" or lines created with the use of the shapes I chose instead.

I think for a first-attempt, that wasn't too bad (lemme know if the sketch for my warm up is worth showing in scraps. If I don't get a response, I'll just leave it -- but be happy knowing there's an nsfw pinup sketch of my girl on a hidden layer below everything else :P

For the past two weeks, I've been working on building up the basic muscle memory of the tablet and the software I'm using. Of all the exercises I've done, my biggest strengths are (1) gesture drawings. Sure I've only done basic ones of eeveelutions with reference, but of everything I've made so far, those are some of my favorites (2) 3d shading renders using airbrush gradients. I have the most fun with blending the gradients together personally. My biggest weaknesses at this point are (1) I don't really have any experience doing anatomy/proportions yet, so getting bodies to llook right is still a bit of a struggle, just relying on things I've learned a long time ago instead. My biggest areas of improvement so far are probably my lines. Though it is also one of my more recent areas of work, the recent changes to playing with brush stability and to yesterday's decision to start using a smaller brush for lineart (I've also watched a few more videos affirming the things I was thinking about the linework to improve, I have a feeling of everything I've done so far, those will show the most improvement during my showcase "homework" tomorrow). Especially compared to the drawing I did on the first day.

I think the areas I want to focus on the most for the next week would be either more work toward speed -- I still end up spending close to 15-20 minutes longer on the daily work and would like to get to a point where I could get a sketch and linework down by the end of these exercies, and maybe basic color/rendering if I really rush. I know the next element of illustration that I'd like to build upon for the next week is anatomy. I'm personally not picky whether to start with the face, or the body proportions, but I'm getting antsy to start delving into actually drawing anthros for the exercises more consistently soon. I know I often mention that my faces are the part I'm least happy with in my work, but I think that may be an issue with scale more than anything -- back when I did traditional art, one of my fortes was drawing fanart portraits. Either way, I'm either bad or rusty and need to work on faces. But the body is another "impressive feature" that will at least feel better to get i place. since it affects a larger portion of most illustrations. Though I'd like to do hair eventually, I feel like that should come after facial anatomy.

I'm probably going to construct next week's lessons around anatomy/figure drawing, gesture drawing, and/or facial anatomy/expressions (with a furry focus, but may need to switch to humans if I just don't see any progress). Unless my showcase piece tomorrow ends up taking way longer than I'd like, then maybe I'll take a week to just focus on getting faster. I'll be winging it once I have a sense of how I do tomorrow.