24 May 2021 - Reading time: 5 minutes

Ah, this is going to be a short newsletter.  This week has been somewhat unproductive regarding art -- I've been preoccupied with non-art things, including playing Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, which was the recently released remaster of that iconic video game series.  I continued with study art, and started some fun art pieces, but haven't finished any of those unfortunately!

I'm also going to take a short hiatus from writing this Art Dispatch.  I've published it weekly for over 5 months! It's been a great record of my learning and an accountability tool, but I can feel myself getting a bit fatigued with the pace.  To avoid burning out, I'll take a break for the month of June, and resume the weekly posts when I make my Quarterly Art Review at the end of June.  I'll still be drawing fun and study art of course, and will keep posting them on Instagram and Tumblr.  At least, that's the plan!

Study Art

I didn't progress with the 50 Bird Challenge this week, but I'm slowly continuing with Lesson 5 of Drawabox, on drawing animals.  Only now are the principles of this constructional drawing method sinking in, and I'm getting more comfortable with following contour lines and drawing solid forms on other forms.  I have 2 more animals left to draw before I finish with the lesson, which should be done in time to submit for critique at the start of June.

A Bactrian camel, and an aardvark. Photo references were obtained from web search.

Fun Art

I'd started a new piece of my character, Faiye, but unfortunately didn't finish it yet -- partly because my motivation/focus was low this week, and partly because Drawfest happened this weekend.

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17 May 2021 - Reading time: 4 minutes

It's one of those weeks without any new discoveries or breakthroughs, just steady progress and consolidating what I learned last week.

Study Art

Drawabox Lesson 5 proceeds apace.  It's a challenging lesson.  I've drawn animals using construction before, but DaB's requirements are quite strict.

The two major challenges I've been facing were (a) the strong focus on construction while ignoring gesture and movement/flow, (b) the tension between construction by observation vs. bypassing any teaching on anatomy.  I found (b) the more difficult challenge.  This kind of drawing-by-construction that DaB teaches is dependent on understanding a bit of animal anatomy, but the lesson doesn't go into this at all, nor asks the student to go look for references by themselves.  This compels the student to fall back on drawing by observation while deciphering the three-dimensionality of external form -- which is challenging in itself.

That said, this Drawabox lesson isn't a bad overview on learn how to draw animals, which can be a launching pad into other comprehensive animal drawing courses.  I'm about halfway through the lesson and learning a few things -- although most of it involves trying to keep all the drawing requirements in mind while doing the drawing.

Ferret and donkey.  Photo references were obtained from web search.

The ferret still has a long neck, but I got some feedback that I had been neglecting to draw the animal's ribcage.  I included that in the donkey drawing, and its proportions are better now.

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11 May 2021 - Reading time: 8 minutes

This Dispatch is a bit late as I've been AFK for a lot of this weekend. (Amongst other things, I spent all Sunday bouldering with a friend - it was a great deal of fun, but I am a great deal unfit.  I'm still feeling the post-workout ache!)

Not as much art this week as I've been trying to juggle Drawabox homework with traditional drawing with digital art... but I made an important breakthrough.

Study Art

I resumed Lesson 5 of Drawabox this week - it's about drawing animals using dynamic sketching/construction methods.  A long time ago I learned to draw animals using construction**, so it was a matter of dusting off some very old skills, while building on drawing principles taught by Drawabox's earlier lessons.

A scrub turkey and a ferret.  The ferret has a long neck!  It's a lot harder to establish proportions through strict construction, instead of more gestural approaches which I'd otherwise use.

**Aside: As a kid, I learned how to draw using several children's how-to-draw books published by Disney, which showed how Disney's animators drew characters from The Lion King and Pocahontas for the films.  Little did I know then that I was learning constructional drawing and techniques that are actually used by professional artists.  Now I'm grateful for how those Disney how-to-draw books gave me pretty strong drawing foundations, which I'm still building on today.

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2 May 2021 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Painting timelapse of the canyon cube (Weekly Art Dispatch #19), assembled in Clip Studio Paint.
The frames were extracted from screenshots, so they varied in size.

2 May 2021 - Reading time: 9 minutes

It's the end of April, my first month of learning digital art.  How did I do?

Study Art

I did more two-value studies this week; these are proving very worthwhile.  These studies compel me to think about art in terms of shapes instead of lines, and train my eye to see a visual hierarchy of shapes from large to small.  I've drawn what is essentially "line art" for many, many years, so thinking and visualizing shapes in an image is a big paradigm shift.

These studies are tough -- I often found myself reverting back to thinking in lines and forgetting the hierarchy of shapes I was trying to paint.  But I'm enjoying it and it's a technique that I want to master, so I'll keep doing them!

Two-value study of Ruthton Valley, Washington state.  Source: © Greg Martin.

Two-value study of "Old Mill", painting by Vasily Polenov.  Source: James Gurney's blog.

Fun Art

Most of my art time this week was taken up by a drawing prompt I discovered on Twitter (via an art Discord server):

If you wanna try, it’s not that difficult to do XD https://t.co/bqHkZEs9PE pic.twitter.com/IrSH0nzO4s

— Cheryl 🇭🇰🍣🍡 (@cysketch) April 23, 2021

It's basically a small environment painting in a cube form.  The cube shape is a contained structure and the original artist's style is cute and simple to colour.  This seemed like a great way to start painting a simple environment, and learn something about image composition and developing colour palette and values.  So far all my digital paintings have been copying photo and painting references, so now I get to make my own environment!

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25 April 2021 - Reading time: 6 minutes

This week's art output was a bit haphazard as I tried to figure out a balance between learning digital art, while still creating "fun art" with my usual traditional sketches.

Study Art

I continued to practice making clean linework on a drawing tablet.  I'd been playing the video game Bayonetta, so the eponymous heroine made a good subject matter. This drawing is much cleaner than my previous sketches, and I stumbled onto some shading methods too.  But clean digital linework sure takes a long time!

Bayonetta lineart.

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