Series of Small Setbacks

Art and memes, mostly made to follow friends.

[justasetback]

Well, that was an unfortunately long break from learning to draw 😅

I went back to Blender and Miniature painting for a second there, which are fun and all, but I do want to keep on these lessons!

Tried two different approaches for the dice on the second page with the rounded edges. I think it worked better focusing on the edges first and filling in details instead of starting with a cube and trying to chisel it down.

[justasetback]

I’ve decided “Boy Band Demon Hunters” is going to be the next big thing.

I will not be taking questions.

[justasetback]

I got distracted for a bit with other aspects of life (some creative, some stressful) but it’s cool I guess that I have enough basic skills to make frustrated art now 😅

I can see why people do that, it’s therapeutic somehow…

(Also just going over the lines with pen and lightly erasing does *tons* to hide the guide shapes, which is really cool)

[justasetback]

I forgot to upload my last lesson, and this one I did today on lunch. The last one was a still life deal about starting with basic shapes and refining them into what you want.

Today’s lesson was about trying to draw boxes so that you can properly orient non-box shapes to help with perspective. I think I messed up the perspective with the boxes and had some unintended downstream effects, but practice practice practice

[bonnieventure]

'art is pain' and this is what they're painting with smh

[justasetback]

[justasetback]

Forgot to post earlier, but I did another art lesson on lunch.

It’s interesting how the structural shapes end up connecting, and how you need to fill in some gaps. It’s still not as good as the book examples, but I feel like I’m at least building up some of the skills I need to honestly do some drawing :)

[justasetback]

Next lesson was about combining shapes, building form, and drawing through. I still have 1 more example to work through on this one, but I’m noticing I’m still having trouble on proportions (and in some cases, basic shaping 😅)

Making the chicken fuzzy was fun tho :)

Oh well, nobody ever got better by *not* practicing 😅

[justasetback]

Last of the “basics” section! One last negative space exercise, and I re-tested how the different pencils worked with the kneaded eraser. 6B is obviously the darkest and the most contrasting, but needs more scrubbing to get rid of the existing marks. The exercise was about sketching out something and filling in the other side of the space.

Next time we’re onto shapes and finishing sketches! 😁

[justasetback]

A couple more lessons on lunch. One for conveying motion with pressure on the pencil, and one for working with negative space.

I need to see about how other pencils erase. Everyone says kneaded erasers are where it’s at, but they’re not great at erasing my 2B pencil strokes. That or I’m doing it wrong 😅

[justasetback]

Did two lessons on lunch for drawing practice, since the first one was fast (it was about faking depth using the side of a pencil for things like fur or hair or foliage) so I did another one about blocking things out from a physical reference.

The poor ranger ran out of headroom, so I may give this another shot soonish.

[justasetback]

Me: “Art is so hard, what if I can’t do it? 🥺”

My very understanding beginner’s art book: “Try scribbling some clouds with the side of a soft B lead pencil!”

[justasetback]

Ngl, got a little intimidated by my last art attempt, so had to force myself to do the next one on lunch today. Turns out, it wasn’t scary at all!

This one was just about using light, circular shapes to really quickly figure out shapes and shadows. Not too bad at all lol

[justasetback]

For tonight’s drawing practice, I did the rest of the practice action line tutorials from the book. I don’t want to dwell too long on concepts (if I do I’ll never move on 😅) but felt like doing the other two examples would be helpful.

[justasetback]

Today’s art. Been putting this one off because it’s about “action lines” which is something that both intimidates me (capturing action in perspective sounds so difficult!) and I feel I should already be at least decent in (I’ve painted miniatures before, and we use similar kinda lines to draw the eye to specific parts of the model)

Alas, procrastination helps no one, so I copied this one out of the book just to get some momentum 😅

[justasetback]

Today’s attempt was.. not great, but trusting the process 😅 The exercise was to “train your eye to observe action so you can draw quickly” and I thought the semi-dynamic pose from one of my wife’s D&D minis would be a good model.

Even the “drawing quickly” part isn’t as quickly as I would like, but if drawing is like other art, you get good before you get fast. I’m hanging onto that thought 😅

[justasetback]

So didn’t post my practice yesterday. Still got to figure out this Tumblr app 😅

This challenge/tutorial thing from my book was to draw something without letting your pencil leaving the page. The middle section was way too short, so I’m excited to learn more about like, how much of the page to use (composition sounds like the right term but from a different medium 😅)

[justasetback]

I must learn… 2026 shall be my learning year! I will have skills of a sort.