Back To Basics - Tedious Drawing Drills

     Two weeks ago, I started taking a short class in digital head drawing. First week's assignment was about proportion, using a modified Reilly head construction method. It's all about measuring, grids, and careful constructions. A very tedious type of drawing, but an important drill if one desires mastery of  drawing the human head from memory.

   

 

    But before I even began drawing these heads, I found that I was unable to do a good circle freehand.  The circle was important as it would serve as the basis of measurement for the whole head. Not a loosely-drawn circle but a well-proportioned ones drawn in a more controlled way. As an animator, it was taught and drilled into our heads to draw loosely from the shoulders and not the wrist to get that nice sweeping strokes you'll see in most of our drawings. This drawing habit made most of my drawings rough and loose. But in this instance, drawing a basic circle, unsurprisingly, became an endless struggle.   So for the first week, I did nothing else but draw circles until I managed to do it well enough before starting the assignment..

First few attempts in drawing circles.

Kept at it, but still loose and inaccurate

      

     I modified the way I draw the circle, that instead of one sweeping stroke, I drew point marks that served as guides to help keep the circles in correct proportion, then drew four shorter arcs to complete the shape.

Carefully-drawn circles

Surprisingly good results after a week

       After a week of this tediousness, I was quite pleased with my improvement. Tackling the first crucial step of the assignment wasn't  much of a struggle anymore after that.   One lesson learned that week, don't underestimate the effectiveness of those boring, tedious drawing drills. They're like eating veggies and working out.  I'm most always than not, surprised with how much improvement I managed to achieve in just a short time for doing such. 

Back To Basics - Izzy's Three Simple Rules of Light

 Unlike drawing, where lines are used to delineate shapes and forms, painting uses light and shadows to describe an object or surface.  Very basic idea it seems. But the challenge is to be able to visualize how light is affecting a surface correctly. It's a fundamental skill an artist needs to master, if being able to paint without copying from reference is the goal.   One amazing concept artist/illustrator who explained the concept of light and shadow really well is Izzy Medrano in his YouTube videos, which are found here & here.

My 3 Rules Of Light painting exercises toggled with Izzy's paint-over critques,  plus his red number indicators for his notes as enumerated below.

  He breaks down those fundamental principles in three simple rules, that seemed deceptively easy. This is how he  breaks it down: (Watch his full explanations from here and here)
1. Objects most perpendicular to the light gets the most light.
2  Light's power gets weaker on more distant objects.
3. If something solid is between your object and your light source, the object gets NO light.
  - Every object that is lit by the light source, itself becomes another light source.
  - The light being bounced cannot be as bright as the original light source.

  To completely understand Izzy's 3 simple rules, I did some painting studies, using black and white photo references. Then I analyzed the photo reference's lighting, by transferring the lighting info unto a light sphere, showing the direction of the light source.  Then apply those lighting information onto a completely new surface forms.   To determine if I did a good job, I submitted this study to Izzy in his Patreon page for his critique.

   
   He did some paint-overs and gave me a few notes, which  were very helpful.   Here are his notes: (Please refer to the images with numbers as indicated in red.)

1. Your light sphere is almost  directly overhead. The specular and hot spots on the cheeks and nose tell us that the light source is closer to us on this side of the picture plane.
2. There is no reflected light in your origin image.
3. The cat is half-lit according to the rules of the image with the same lighting as the image though the object shouldn't catch light the same way.  Reference would help you figure out your planes, so that you can tell which surfaces are more likely to face up to the light source. A cat doesn't have the same planes as a human does. So a cats nose can't cast a shadow like a persons, and that's why you have a big black streak on the second image's face.
4. These eyes look flat. The overall face needs more reference in the same way 3 does.

  With this exercise, it is humbling to say that my main difficulty was in visualizing correctly the many subtle planar shifts of the surface form, and how light would affect them correctly. Also, good references for my studies should have been used, to correctly understand and render the different subtle form and plane changes.  With these new insights, I need to do more of these and have them reviewed and critiqued again, which would help solidify those three simple rules of light into my brain, and then hopefully, would serve as a good foundation as I develop my skills to become an artist who is not a reference slave. 

  If any artist is interested in learning and understanding the logic of light and color, I highly recommend Izzy Medrano's tutorials that can be found in his Gumroad page.  And perhaps be a patron of his and get critiques of your work.  You can check him out in  his Patreon page.

  So, if you've watched and did the Izzy's 3 Simple Rules assignment practice also, how did you find the exercise? How did your study turned out?  Love to hear and see what you've done.

 

Five Dogs Painting

This five dogs painting was a request by my sister.  It took a few days to capture good photos of these dogs, as they don't sit still and were quite an unruly bunch.  So I would wait patiently for each to sit still and look my way, only then would I quickly snap a lot of  continuous shots from my phone. Luckily, out of many useless shots, I managed to find some good shots that showed each of their distinct personalities.

    I started sketching them in my Artrage app and laid them out in a horizontal format.  Since there's five of them and I wanted to finish it before Christmas, I decided to just draw their heads, 

 For the painting, Instead of using Artrage app which is my go to app, I decided to use Clip Studio Paint Ex to familiarize myself  more with that app.    I'm still trying to learn and understand values, so I painted them in greyscale first.   To get the correct values, I  converted their photos to black and white first.  It was so enlightening to see what the real values of their colors really are.   Choco was a surprise to me because her brownish color was very light when seen in greyscale. I thought she would be a bit darker than Snowy, Creamy and Brownie. 

One of the basic painting skills I'm  learning is understanding the correct value structure. I'm no way near understanding that concept yet. But I know getting the correct values would make adding colors easier.   Below is the final version in color.