We’ll start with my baseline. My skills at drawing before I began actually trying to learn. We’ll end with a teaser for my progress, but for the most part, this will be talking about the beginning and my first few attempts at learning.
I briefly mentioned this in my previous post, but in November 2022 I was diagnosed with ADHD. Around mid December I began taking Ritalin. At that point, the following was roughly the extent of my abilities.
These sketches were made around November-December, before I began practicing. The way I’d practiced in the past was mainly every few months picking up my drawing tablet, drawing for an hour or so a day a few days a week, not using references or practicing fundamentals, and getting frustrated that it wasn’t good enough, but still unwilling to go through the actual work. To put it in other words, I liked taking shortcuts, without knowing what paths I was avoiding. Breaking the rules without caring to know what they were.
Of note, while I can now already point to specific things I did wrong, I can now also see the things I like about these that I couldn’t see back then. While the facial proportions and feature positions of the man on the left are wrong, the skull is roughly correctly constructed. For the goblin face on the sketch set on the right, the nose is strange, the eyes are too far up, but I did an okay job with showing the expression, which can often be more important than anatomical correctness.
When I started on my medication, and noticed that I was actually able to work on things without losing focus constantly, and could actually stick to my art, I decided to get to work on what I assumed were the fundamentals. Again I was avoiding looking at actual courses and references, instead I did what I thought were the things I should be doing. To a degree, that worked.
Here we see some of the things I worked on in december. Attempts at learning proportions (without using a reference) at the top, where I tried to effectively pose a mannequin and make a fighting pose that’d seem natural. While this wasn’t an awful attempt, I should have been using references to get more correct proportions and a more natural pose.
Image 2, the hands, were for similar reasons. I wanted to practice drawing hands, something I’ve always struggled with. Here I was mainly using my own hand as a reference (Good job, me!), posing it in different ways, and somewhat simplifying the forms, making the fingers more square/cubic in shape, learning where roughly the thumb sits and how the fingers bend, and finding the shape of the hand.
Image 3, the eyes, was my first go at attacking what I saw as a core problem I had. My art style. I hated my style at this point. I’m only now starting to accept my old ‘style’ for what it was – it was an amalgamation of shortcuts and tricks I’d learned, with a visual library that wasn’t developed to know what to focus on.
Here I wanted to try out different ways of drawing eyes. Again, I kind of did the right thing here. I started with the base shape of an eye. I should have used a reference instead of free-handing it completely, but still, better than going right to stylizing shapes. After I’d gotten a bit of a feel for them, I started working on more stylized eye shapes. They’re not awful, but feel a bit too unnatural, for reasons I realized later, which I’ll (likely) state in future posts.
This brings me to the last set of drawings for this post. Allow me to introduce Twig.
Here’s four different interpretations of Twig. They started out as a sketch I did on the same day as the man from the start of this post. Back then I had no intention of them becoming a staple for me to draw, but they did. Twig is a goblin, formerly with a side-shave, with purple hair, green skin, and yellow eyes.
I hated that first drawing. I hated that it showed that there was an estimation of correctness there, but I couldn’t extract it. I couldn’t make it *correct* despite trying, and I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
The second one is from January. I used a reference photo for this, changing the proportions somewhat and attempting some shading. Overall, while It’s not up to my standards now, I can see improvements. As an artist friend of mine stated, “[I’m] clearly searching in [my] drawing”, though this is more obvious in the sketching I did beforehand, which I might show at some later point.
The third is from February. This one I’ll say I’m still happy with. My main issue is probably more to do with the shading, and the eye shape, than anything else, but even then they’re not awful.
Finally, we have one that was finished at the start of April. I was hoping it’d be done by the end of March but it’s okay that it wasn’t. This one, I stuck a lot closer to the proportions of the reference photo I used. I like my attempts at using line thickness to denote shadows rather than using actual shading, though I could use a bit more clear lighting rather than the very vague lighting I do use.
With that I’ll end this post as it’s already gotten plenty rambly. The next few art-related posts will be showing more of my actual learning process and progress, which will hopefully be helpful to some!
Folio and Foliage 