January ‘21 Check-in: Sketchdump and Studying
I thought it might be a good idea to start doing little monthly check-in posts on here - just to keep myself accountable and reflect on where I am, more than anything. Besides, I feel like I spend all my time drawing & painting and never actually have much to show, since a lot of it doesn’t feel interesting or polished enough to post on the usual channels - so this’ll be a nice way to share all the stuff that accumulates but never feels worthy of a post of its own!
I’ve been making a habit of sketching more; my sketchbooks get heavily neglected when I get busy at work, and I always regret slipping out of the habit. In a super-inspiring Karl Kopinski interview I recently re-watched, he talks about filling up five-or-six sketchbooks a year, which is nuts - I started my current sketchbook over a year ago and I’m still not even a quarter of the way through! Five sketchbooks a year is definitely an unattainable goal for me, but I can at least aim to finish my current sketchbook by the end of 2021. It works out as filling a full page spread per week (I checked) and so far I’m on track for that (more or less…)
So here’s the first few pages… (Click to enlarge if you wanna see ‘em better!)
Lots of studying too! So I’ve been unhappy with my general artistic ability level for a while now, and though I know that’s pretty much a hazard of the job - you're always your own worst critic and all that - lately (i.e., the past year or so) it’s been taking all the joy out of making anything, and been holding me back more than it should. I figured lockdown was a pretty good time to go back to studying the basics! Figure out gaps and discrepancies in my knowledge and build myself back from the ground up. I’ve been revising facial structure - lots of note-taking and drill-style studies!
And some observational studies from life - just trying to get better at understanding form, value, light and shadow. Basic stuff, that I very quickly found out I didn’t know as well as I thought I did. I definitely need to do more of these!
(All done in Procreate.)
(Also, I’ve learnt not to sit down and start one of these half an hour before sunset; the sheer frustration of painting and re-painting fast changing shadows and light! Hence the unfinished mushroom one…)
More observational studies…
Last November, I bought a sketchbook for the express purpose of drawing things from life more often. I try to draw at least one thing in it every day. Some days I don’t manage anything, sometimes it’s just a little thing, sometimes I fill a full page… It’s gotten harder in a cold lockdown, cause I have a tiny apartment and quickly run out of interesting things to draw! But it’s warming up a bit - enough that I can draw outside without freezing my fingers off - so I’m looking forward to taking advantage of more of Liverpool’s sights soon. Maybe I’ll share more from this sketchbook next month - for now, here’s a statue from St John’s Gardens in Liverpool that I really enjoyed making a quick doodle of.
And a third sketchbook I have on the go - hey, maybe I can fill multiple sketchbooks a year after all! - This one’s just for head studies. They’re my go-to warm-up if I feel like I need one, or something that I just find generally therapeutic to do. Haven’t really been using it much lately - what with me studying individual facial features so heavily this month instead - but I think these four are all from this month?
More value studies - this time focusing on simplifying value into three tones (light, mid-range, dark). Studying from TV show/movie screencaps is one of my favourite things to do - kudos to anyone that can guess which one this was referenced from!
I have a huge weakness for focusing on little details to the detriment of the bigger picture, or losing sight of what I set out to do - so I kept myself to a strict 30min time limit for each of these. Done in gouache, which was challenging in the best way - definitely wanna paint more in this lockdown!
And you might have seen these ladies go up on the available projects page! Playing around with different things, I had a lot of fun with these! I just wish I didn’t have to wait so long to tattoo them, I’m so excited for how they’d look on skin…
That wraps up this month! It actually felt fairly unproductive, so it’s cool to see everything laid out like this, feels a bit more substantial. Think I’ve found my feet a bit more now and picked up some momentum, so February should be a good month!
Thanks for reading if you got this far - and congrats for making it through the first month of the year!