I decided to do two more, one from yusuke murata again, the other from someone called makoto yukimura. I have definitely felt a lot of frustrations doing this project, mostly coming from not being able to copy the drawings with a hundred percent succes, but I should get rid of that mind set, as I would never get a perfect copy, and that is okay since I am not actually these people. Something I also noticed is that hatching with a mechanical pencil is pretty hard, since I cant get that sharp line sometimes, causing it to be a little crowded and the lines ending up larger than I initially wanted. Smearing with my hand is also very infuriating haha, Sometimes I sacrifice placing a well put line because I am turning my arm and hand is such a way not to smear, but in the end causing my lines to turn out worse. This also got in my way for some of the proportions, but that is of course not the main cause for that particular problem, since I definitely lack here and there with my proportions. Regardless of all that, I still like some aspects here and there, but I have a long way too go, which I am excited for!

Tl;dr personal art discovery essay + great opportunity to draw some Totoro. I seek advice on how to break out 'line work' from illustrations, or whether it's the intention do also include shading/hatching as part of the line study. This was quite exploratory and revealing in my personal journey. The whole thinking about art parents, influences, inspirations, art styles I'd like to 'ascend' towards... I found some great references in https://characterdesignreferences.com/artist-of-the-week and https://characterdesignreferences.com/visual-library, where I discovered art that speaks to me (and art that doesn't, even by great artists...). I've always been very impressed with the art for Final Fantasy (Yoshitaka Amano, Akihiki Yoshida, and the FFXIV era Kazuya Takahashi), and I was very happy to find them there. However, with these and others, as they are more full fledged illustrations, I found it hard to focus just on the lines! A lot of illustrations have the consistent lines and use color and shape to make things interesting. Or use colored lines, which for me is beyond the scope of the exercise, or too advanced for my first attempts anyhow... I browsed a lot. Tried Kentaro Miura (RIP 😔) but again, the shading is such a large part of the inking (lots of just black areas). (maybe that's a large problem, how can I offset the shading from the line studies? Or just don't care and combine them?). Landed on Hayao Miyazaki's watercolors for Totoro. I adore the character designs and the sketches. As I want to improve my watercolor sketching as well, these seem to be a good reference. I like the variation between more gestural loose lines (I've tried to emulate by drawing loose lines, forgoing copying the stroke but copying the idea) and the focused lines where it matters, the lines aid the contour and details of the watercolor, but they work together.

Done with the level 1 assignments! Wanted to focus on the head and horns but now I see zoomed out that the thick line on the rhino butt sabotages that.

Wanted to try another penguin after watching demo and critiques…

Finally found the time to finish up this assignment. I learned so much about (ghost) crabs, who knew! My final sketch of the happy ghost crab is quite messy, I tried not to fall into refining it but I hope it's readable. The page seemed saturated with graphite from my palm going all over the drawing... Now, onwards and upwards! Fun aside: The Indiana Jones crab pulling the lever was doodled together while I was working on a local multiplayer game with a friend. This assignment actually caused the game to include a lot of crabs! I added the pixelart menu art I made as the last image (yay crabs!) and you can play it here: https://all-in-development.itch.io/hobo-jones-and-the-crab-temple

Finished the level 1 project in one sitting, I like the assignment, and I really loved drawing the VR girl’s chonky legs! 🤩 What do you think I should focus on to improve? As with the skull from the previous lvl 2 assingment, I’m struggling to get nice line weight variation going instinctively while drawing these more organic subjects.

Finished up Skelly! Ready to move on. I’m not sure where to add or reduce line weight if I had to move this piece forward, anyone who can give me some tips/ideas?

Watched the level 1 demo and made the level 2 camel! The legs are so fun to draw! Skelly tomorrow 💀

Had a lot of fun here but I noticed (and join a lot of other voices in the comments) that the shoelaces were a lot of work. For the second shoe, I made the mental switch to consider each lace as its own mini CSI exercise, as tension translates nicely to C + I in the lace… The laces also provided a good check on proportions, through which I noticed the shoes were a bit too high. Noticed on the snail that I was lured into trying to render it better with simple shading and so didn’t shade the shoes, but couldn’t resist refining the line weight a bit 😅

It occurred to me that the shell kinda looks like a set of twisted boxes, so drew those in for reference.