sketchbook

Dat dragon.

I don’t really wanna keep going on this because I… don’t like working on it. The initial sketch was far too ambiguous (maybe except for the building); I watch a tonne of speedpaints on youtube and such and those guys work from super rough sketches, but I keep forgetting that they are (usually) professionals, while I literally started painting digitally in January. So. Yeah.

Anyway because this part of Improvement Hell has been holding me up for too long I’m still gonna count it.

12. Look out a window. Draw what you see. Bonus points for adding something interesting.

Waaay too tired to finish it now. Still counts for this though:

11. Draw a BG with 2pt Perspective.

On another note, I just noticed that my monitors show greenish blues VERY differently. On my HDTV (which is the one I have SAI on), the background/sky/hill colour shows up correctly, i.e. as a turquoise-y blue. On my computer monitor however, it’s a lot more green and looks downright ugly along with the orange and yellow. Not sure which monitor is “wrong” so to speak, so I’ll have to look into that.

Ok, smoothed it out a bit more. Need to add detail and such, though.

In case I don’t get around to that, this counts for both today’s r/SketchDaily prompt and:

10. Draw a BG with 1pt Perspective. Negative points if it’s a railroad or an empty street.

9. Draw a landscape of a place you’ve never been or drawn.

So this is not very good obviously, but I’ve always sucked at landscapes, and it’s slightly better than whatever the hell I’ve done before. Maybe I’ll revisit it some day.

I also learnt some cool things from it, and it gave me an excuse to read up on colour theory again and actually practise with it. So yeah.

Also, now I’ve tried two different ways of starting a landscape: sketch/line drawing -> colour underneath -> merge and use as underpainting, and b&w lineless sketch -> colour overlay -> merge and use as underpainting.

For some reason I really dislike the idea of starting in b&w and then adding colours, but it seems to work better for composition (in terms of value, at least), and it was FAR easier to test/figure out a decent colour scheme than when I started in colour. So there’s that.

8. Find 2-3 objects, make a scene with them. Draw it. Bonus points for creativity. Double points for dramatic lighting.

No bonus points for me! I was gonna use this as an exercise on using spot blacks (as I really wanna learn traditional inking; I have brush pens and everything), but ehhh. Eeeehhhh.

The objects are: my camera charger, my Japanese grammar reference book (which uses roumaji which annoys the hell out of me but it’s literally pocket-sized so), and one of my mala bracelets (which has the incorrect number of beads, but oh well).

I’m just gonna say I’m done because wow I just keep finding things I want to fix/add/etc and it’s driving me nuts. I already spent far too long on this. So, there it is I guess.