January 2024, Week 3, Day 16 -- Speedy Figures

1. Warm-Up (5 minutes)
* Begin with a 5 minute warm-up to prepare for the upcoming exercises

2. Quick gesture sketches (10 minutes)
* Set a timer for 10 minutes
* Create another set of quick gesture sketches
* Choose diverse references and focus on capturing movement and energy

3. Linework Speed (10 minutes)
* Set a timer for 10 minutes
* Choose a subject for the linework (character, object, scene, or one of the gesture sketches from 2)
* Emphasize swift and confident strokes while maintaining clarity. Avoid overthinking the details

4. Reflect and Review (5 minutes)
* Take 5 minutes to review both the gesture sketches and linework
* Note areas where you feel improvement and areas that might need attention
* Consider how you can carry these lessons forward to enhance your overall speed

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So again, still sick. Therefore, quick and speedy practice is about all I can handle. I'm feeling just as bad, if not worse than I felt during my practice yesterday, and it feels like that was showing through. I was getting sloppy. In fact, I think tomorrow's gonna be an identical set of practices to today, since I didn't get as far in either as I'd have liked today

For the warm up, I repeated what I did yesterday -- some heads, a bunch of squiggles, and hid the layer. Nothing noteworthy

For the gesture sketches, I only managed 3 yet-again. On one hand, I felt like I spent less time wasting effort on unnecessary details, but more time on each individual part. I ended up referencing more art I've commissioned in the past. Imma be honest though, I don't necessarily feel the need to link references for sketched gesture drawings tbh. If someone's interested, I'll find them, but rn all I wanna do is nap. Just know I didn't come up with any of them.
I drew the three sketches of 1, 2, and 3. I started simple with a more static "resting weight on one leg" pose with the other leg out as more of a warm up. I felt like this one took a majority of the overall time. just getting a sense of how big I wanted it and the proportions I planned to give it. I struggled more with getting anything down for it. For 2, I wanted to try again with a swimming pose, since I know they're hard for me to visualize the "free floating" posture. Now it just ends up looking like the same one as yesterday's. For 3, I decided to do the sitting pose (referencing the same image I used for the week 2 showcase). Overall, I feel like I spent a lot of time focusing on getting the proportions right, only to end up feeling like my proportions were way more off than yesterday (probably because I was focusing on them more today, since that was a pain point from yesterday... gonna need even more practice).

I decided to start with 3 as the lineart one since I felt most confident detailing that one (since I'd already done similar for the week 2 showcase). I ended up leaving a bunch of excess lines that I'd normally delete, and probably spent a lot more time on the eyes than anything else in the drawing. Time ran out before I could do the feet/hands/tail, but since I fumbled around with losing my cursor while trying to scroll my reference images, I decided to give myself an extra 90s to finish those (30s each). Though it's lacking in a lot of the fine detail, I'm relatively satisfied with the linework. For some reason, the varied thick-thin tapering of the G-Pen didn't seem to be working. IDK if the pen was just too small to notice or the fact that I tried to do it on a vector layer this time, but I pretty much completely lost my line weight variation. I also ended up cranking-up the stabilization beyond what I normally use, to 40 so that I'd spend less time undoing wobbly lines

Notes to self: either use a bigger size pen, or use the raster layer next time I try this. getting line weight variation quickly is supposed to be part of the practice. I think I may also have been better-off speed-wise if I just left the drawings undetailed, and did linework for only what I had sketched. Leaving less to the imagination (it's faster to add the final line to a sketch than to plan out the line in your head as you go).

I'm sure there's more analysis to be done, but I'm at my limit for today. Night y'all