250 box challenge finished! Plus some figure drawings

 I feel very relieved right now. I'm finally finished with my 250 box challenge! Comparing the final pages with the Organic Perspective exercise I did, I feel very proud of my progress. My boxes feel a lot more solid and dimensional now. Onto Lesson 2 next!

 I also wanted to share a few figure drawings from Clip Studio Paint that I did this morning. I thought I would give it a try since I have been doing more traditional art lately. I downloaded a free trial and pulled out my tablet for the first time in awhile. It's a bit frustrating learning some of the new keyboard shortcuts again, but with practice I think I'll get used to it. 

Some initial thoughts about CSP is that it seems built for digital art in a way that Photoshop never was. Even though PS is the industry standard for a reason and very powerful, it always felt as though it were more geared for photo and image manipulation, rather than pure digital art. I also like that it's easy to get a lot of nice textural elements into the images quite quickly. Definitely something I want to play around with more, maybe with more color as well.

Thought I'd update a little...

I got Sculpey the other day, courtesy of Errol (hi dear!) and made some fun shapes with it. I'm going to use it to do a bunch of value studies and stuff and to get used to objects and their respective form/shapes.

Also, I decided to include a few more gesture/figure drawings. I really gotta practice not letting my drawings get cut off. Remember: composition planning is important!

Note to self: Practice midtones!

Spock and Facial Gestures

Gesture drawings of my face, done looking in my small mirror. Also... Spock! I drew him for fun. I was trying to think of a famous person with a unique facial structure and this is what I came up with. Haha.

A few things to note... one of the Spock images was drawn upside down (can you tell which one?). Truthfully, it turned out rather bad. I'll keep practicing though. Can only get better, yeah? Also, I only used one reference image really. I should've grabbed a bunch of them. Bad me. I'll remedy this the next time around. And a final note: After I drew the photo a few times, I tried my luck at turning him into a cartoon caricature. I think it was... mildly successful. Once again, something to work on for the future.

That's all for now!

Contour Drawings & A Doodle

Did some contour drawings today of my hand (you'll notice some quick gesture drawings in the corner that were used for warmups). I'm more than a little impatient so it's something that I need to practice. These were drawn much quicker than they were intended to be. I gotta learn to turn it down a notch and slow down. Overall, however, I'm happy with how they turned out. Lots more practice needed in the future.

Oh, and the doodle is something extra I threw in there for fun. :) I drew that on a note-card some weeks ago, but I was never able to share it til now. I thought the expression was cute.