Last week wasn’t quite as bad with work, but there were a few days I had to go like mad. I think I had something like 10 meetings last week, but I missed 2 due to a fileserver acting up. Systems tip: If the system has a buggy BIOS, reset it to its defaults and see if it stops being stupid (was too worried about it to upgrade before, plus it’s always in use). Anyway, I don’t manage that system anymore, but I helped. It’s always better to have two brains working on something both are familiar with. All I got done this week was inking the previous drawing and seeing if I could still do some rudimentary coloring:
So far I’ve either just done something simple for the background mostly, but this time I painted something. As you can see, I don’t do backgrounds much :-) Anyway, I guess it is all right. It is some progress at least. I tried to fix the left hand somewhat, but it is still off.
In my last post, I said that I have to practice more. However, work has really gotten in the way. My schedule for the few weeks has been:
- Get up at around 10am and go to work.
- Attend 50 meetings, give or take 47.
- Leave work at around 8-9pm.
- Continue working at home until about 2am.
- Work for more than 8 hours a day on the weekends.
It was that bad for a few weeks, then was a little slower after that and now, but next week we’re getting into an all-out effort as a whole staff. I’m not working like I did the last few weeks though. That’s over, and should never be a regular thing anyway.
The work load has been in an effort to get into compliance with new security standards at OSU. I could go on and on about this, but I’ll spare that story.
In any case, there’s not been much time for doing anything else. This is going to have to end soon, or I’ll have to look for another job or something. I need to have a lot of free time at home to work on my other non-work related goals. As one can tell from the quality of my drawings, I need a lot of time to get better. I was looking at some of my earlier stuff where I drew copies of screenshots, etc. Of course, I took those all down a while ago, but they were so good compared to what I can do otherwise so far. In any case, I know I can redraw things well :-)
So, this is the first drawing I’ve done in at least a month and a half, other than some very quick things a few times that don’t even count as far as I am concerned:
I did use a reference for the pose and the outline of the dress, but I made up most of the rest… so I think it’s fine to post. No one would ever make a dress like that for real I think :-) The left hand is too big as well. I guess it is all right given the time lapse in any kind of real practice. It was really strange not coming home and doing any kind of practice drawings, but it’s also strange that it is hard to get back into it because work has not really gone away. There’s still this insane deadline that has to be met for over a thousand machines, over half of which we never administered in any way whatsoever and now only will share administrative access on.
I’m not sure what I was really doing with this drawing, except trying to do some blending with painting instead of cell style coloring. I just sketched this very quickly. I scanned it, thinking I might redraw it better, but it really didn’t work out that way. Anyway, here it is:
Again, I need to practice a lot more. There are numerous things wrong here… which begs the question, “Why put it here?” I don’t know. I like the face a little, but that’s about it. It is a lot easier redrawing things instead of just making something up, but I guess that’s part of the point. Maybe someday I’ll be able to go back to this post as a measure of how much I’ve improved. At this rate, that’ll be in about 10 years :-)
Now that I think about it, this pose is very similar to one I did before, except there were more clothes last time. This was better when I sketched it, but I am putting it here because it is all I’ve really worked on for a while. I’ve had some distractions, but they aren’t “winning” as far as I can tell. Anyway, here it is:
There are so many things I need to work on. The cell style image I did last time was better. I guess that should be my motivation for keeping up regular practice instead of being distracted. I’ll keep that in mind.
I took two weeks of vacation, starting last Monday. I guess I am technically half way through it, though we don’t have to work today anyway, so I get one day for “free” I suppose. I was going to go back this Wednesday, but I felt I wasn’t getting enough accomplished. I added three more days, thus pushing it into the weekend. This is the longest amount of time off I’ve ever taken at once, but even with these two weeks I have a whole month more of vacation I could take. Maybe if I ever enter a Rising Stars of Manga contest, I’ll take the time off for that. Of course, I am about a million years away from doing that. First, I have a ton to learn about drawing characters, but even after that there’s drawing scenes. When I think about it, it is kind of depressing. That’s just the way I am maybe :-) I need to work off more real life references and really work on drawing everything.
I did practice a little so far. I used a model in Poser to do the following:
It is OK maybe. I really need to work on clothing. This is the mostly unclothed version of the drawing I did of the same Poser model:
I’m not going for anything erotic here, hence the lack of certain details. I just wanted to practice drawing a body pose with shading. Of course, I wouldn’t mind that being real, but it really wasn’t what I was going for at all :-) I really like pencil shading. I like this version a little better, since I need to work on cell shading a lot more. I don’t know what I was going for with the hand positions… maybe something like an “astonished” pose, but that’s not the expression. It took me forever to get the pose setup in Poser. It’s a lot harder to do than it sounds like, but it is getting easier. Also, I need to work on drawing hands more. What don’t I need to work on :-) Anyway, I’ve got some time, so I’ll do it.
I bought an Xbox 360 Elite and a lot more anime DVDs, yet I’ve still managed to continue doing practice drawings. I almost want to sell the Xbox 360 because I feel guilty when I play it and don’t do practice drawings, but so far that’s not been a problem - except for a couple of days right off the bat :-) Tomorrow is my 33rd birthday, so I guess it’s all right for me to have bought it for myself.
Anyway, on Monday I was playing around with Poser and Lightwave, trying to make a new prop from a body part and cleaning it up with some boolean operations (at least I remember that from my old Lightwave book). I posed Miki in some stock action pose where she’s in mid-air or something, and thought I’d go ahead and try to draw that:
I actually like how her lips came out. I seem to have problems with lips that aren’t highly stylized. I kind of like that drawing. It took me until tonight to finish it because I’ve not had too much time to shade it, mainly because I was tired and napped after eating dinner one of the nights, though on that night I managed to not fall asleep except for about an hour. That made work fun, but I wasn’t too tired. I have watch this sort of thing because it makes it really hard to drive home. In any case, I wanted to get it cleaned up and posted here and in my image gallery before going to bed, but really I should have went to sleep about 2 hours ago. Oh well, off to more practice… perhaps after playing some more Xbox 360 games tomorrow :-)
Most of the drawings I’ve been doing since the last post I cannot put here because they are reproductions from various things. I am concentrating on learning more on proper anatomy, and I need such references for now. I did create this based on a pose reference I have:
As far as I am aware, a pose itself is just a pose, so this is all right. Besides the pose, it’s all mine, so this is how I consider it. I like it well enough, though it is clear I still have a lot to learn about folds in clothes. I also tried coloring in the pencil drawing using a layer in Photoshop on top of the drawing using Color Burn mode. It is somewhat similar to doing the same with colored pencils perhaps:
I also saved the original drawing, sans clothing, so that I could try some new things. However, I’ll probably move on with some new drawings using some different poses or using Poser to create some new poses and working off of that.
I’ve been playing around with Open Canvas 4 to do some quick sketches at small sizes, like 1280×1024. It has a pretty simple interface, and these aren’t anything special. After some more practice, I’ll move on to doing more with Painter. I have some custom pallets now, so I am ready to go (I guess :-). I find that when I draw characters from imagination (instead of using some reference), I draw them to rigidly. Instead I need to add more curves. Of course, it’s always obvious after the fact. I’ve also been practicing drawing figures from How to Draw Manga Volume 20 as I read along. I think I am pretty good at drawing what I see, because those always come out really well. However, I need to think more about the images I have in my head instead, and then apply the same principles. Sounds simple, yet it’s not.
I drew this yesterday, and then colored it in cell style manually - meaning I didn’t select areas and fill, since it wasn’t a large image. Obviously I need to work on clothing in general, and wrinkles, plus shading and highlights. This was just really quickly done, and my main goal was to create a body that was somewhat more accurate than some of my other practice stuff in the sketchbook:
I was just thinking the other day about how I draw mostly women. Maybe that’s because I am a huge Masamune Shirow fan, and of course he gave us Major Motoko Kusanagi… and, uh… she’s perfect :-) I guess I just want to draw what I find beautiful, and that’s the female form. Thinking of the stuff Shirow has done makes me want to be much better than I am, and I have about forever and a day to go. Man, he’s good!
I’ve been incredibly busy with work. We’ve had some people leave, and I have to fill in for certain things, but mostly for emergency situations. However, it seems there’s other stuff that needs done too. Because of that, for a while I was lazy with drawing practice. I can tell when this happens, because what I draw really sucks at those times :-) On one of those days, 8/19 to be exact, I did draw Dexter… who is my roommate’s cat:
Dexter is a good cat, but he gets into plenty of trouble… for which he sometimes gets the water spray bottle treatment. Poor Dexter :-) Ah, he’s spoiled though, so you should not worry about him getting into trouble.
I took the image I made the other day and practiced inking it in Manga Studio. Of course, this was also a chance to practice some toning. The only problem is that I don’t really know much about how to tone properly. I have some reference material to read, but I am behind on reading reference material in general unfortunately :-) Anyway, this is my new version:
I have to work on shading a lot more, and… well, everything I guess.