#theme months

[art-deco-shrimp]

Is Nino-vember a thing? If not, I think it really should be.

(...run by someone who is not me, I’m terrible at running things.)

[antialiart]

Hand month postmortem

So, how did my first theme month go?

Well, I think I did accomplish a bit of what I set out to do: get better at drawing hands. I don’t think I’ve seen much of a noticeable improvement in the hands I’ve drawn during the month - the amount of effort put into them is too inconsistent - but as the month went on I feel that I got a much better sense of what I was doing and picked up particular details and methods that helped me do it better, at least when I put the time in. Little things like perspective on fingers and fingernails in particular, etc. I did a lot of very quick sketches this month, but I feel pretty confident that my best effort at a hand in any kind of nontrivial pose today would be significantly better than my best effort at a hand last month.

This particular theme was probably a bit too restrictive. Drawing hands gets old fairly quickly; part of the reason I did so many kind of half-assed sketches here is that it’s hard to be motivated to put a lot of effort into the twentieth hand I’ve drawn this month. The plan was to mitigate this sort of boredom by allowing for drawings that merely include hands, but in practice, that didn’t really inspire me enough - humans are pretty hard to draw, so I was ultimately reluctant to commit to drawing a whole human including hands most days. Thus, I’ve decided to err on the other side with the next theme month.

[bryanthebomb]

I shared this on my DeviantArt page, so I want to share it here too. These are the “theme months” that I will be making art about on DA.

Each month is a story that I’ve bee working on, with the early months being projects that I’ve worked on since the 2010s, and the rest being projects that I’ve developed last year. I think it’ll be a good way to share all of the stories I’ve come up with since starting in 2013.

Hope you can come along for the ride. ^^

[detroitbecomeyandere]

Oh yeah I forgot to announce this month's theme, this month is all about AUs! So let's all jump through the au portal and have some fun!

[antialiart]

I’m thinking about doing a new thing with the artblog, namely theme months. I’ve read that to learn to draw a thing, you need to draw it at least thirty or so times; how about I try spending a month just practicing the same thing and see if I notice myself making more tangible incremental progress?

The rules would go something like this:

- Each month, I pick a thing that I want to draw better. July might be hands, say, and then August could be realistic human faces, and if by the time September rolls around I’ve got cats on the brain or whatever, September can be cat month.

- Each day of that month, I try to draw the theme in some capacity (but I’d vary angles, poses, expressions, etc. whenever applicable, so I don’t get bored). I’m allowed to do something else if I’m super-inspired to do something high-effort; otherwise I stick with the theme. I may draw something theme-related and also an unrelated drawing if I feel like it. If I only have the time or energy for a low-effort doodle, it’ll be a low-effort doodle of the theme.

- Maybe after each month I write something on what I feel like I learned?

This may unfortunately mean the blog gets less interesting to follow - a month’s worth of hand drawings probably aren’t super-exciting to the average viewer - but hopefully it also means I’ll be doing better drawings in the future, so hey.

If you’ve got any comments or suggestions on the idea, please give them. I’d start in July, so there’s time to make your opinion known.

[natalunasans]

low-pressure version of theme months

because associating anxiety with hobbies is, in my experience, a way to completely lose the fun of them and maybe stop doing them for years

so i did the keep-drawing-october and i drew... 4 more things than i would in a normal month

algo es algo

but so far i am failing miserably at the keep-writing-november, as i have not written at all. oops

[alphynix]

Will you eventually do a Mesozoic mammal month? There's a lot to chose from.

That’s definitely an idea I'll consider doing at some point.