A little art, a little look back

Posted by Mega on Feb. 24, 2017, 3:28 p.m.

So, I decided to do something that's actually pretty difficult: Write a focused blog.

I've had this tendency in the last couple of years to write these big monolithic blogs about anything and everything going on in my life.

The bigger the gap between blogs, the more I have to write about, the longer the blogs get stretched out, and readability goes out the window.

Here's an art blog.


I went digging back through my early blogs, and the second blog I ever posted on this site was an art blog.

The image I posted was this:

This is, I remember, one of the pieces I recall feeling proudest of at the time. I spent ages on it, over a span of a few days, using nothing but a cheap shitty mouse and GIMP.

It was also one of the few pieces I actually enjoyed working on, because I was doing it purely out of a sense of fun.

From there, a lot of what I created was just because I felt obligated to put something up on my DeviantArt page once in a while. Most of my focus moved to pixel art and away from the more complex pieces I was really wanting to work on.

Art for the sake of art, not art for some benefit or other.

These days, I'm drawing way more just because I feel like it. My technical excuse is that my doctor recommended I take up a hobby like art or music to relax with (I took up both).

I also feel way more confident in my initial setup work. Construction lines and scene composition, which I admit I'm still crap at, I'm getting better at working through.

(Some of the stuff I've done in the past couple of days)

These are all 'scraps' from my practice sheets. I've started a habit of filling a sheet of paper and a canvas in SAI/Krita with doodles every day. Some of them I fill out a bit and 'finish', others I just leave. This is, I'm finding, the best way to get better at specific things faster.

A friend told me I can't draw people. I think I 100% without fail captured the look on his face over the next 2-3 minutes.

My family adopted a puppy a couple of months back. A Border-Collie crossed with a Ridgeback… he's 5 months old and already huge.

He's also an excellent reference, when the little bugger decides to sit still. My canines look better than my befuddled attempts from the past.

A quick 10-minute self-portrait from memory using the big mirror in the living room and a bit of imagination. Yes I have that much beard, I swear. Less hair on top though.

I also don't own a 64Digits shirt.

And yes, my primary monitor is suspended on that protrusion. It's actually the side-panel of an ancient steel computer case that I riveted into the top of this wobbly old homemade desk (Desk used to be a standup cabinet for a flat IBM Pentium around 20 years ago, my grandfather and I turned it on its side, gave it legs and basically extended its usable lifespan by those 20 years).

While drawing random 3D objects, this happened. I tried drawing the tent-flap, and a friend sitting next to me said it looked like a person. Couldn't unsee, so I made it so.

Of course that's not all, but it's most of the stuff anybody here will want to see anyway. :P

I used to draw almost every day of my life as a kid (Age Can-Grab-Crayon 'til 12), but that petered out when I started getting into programming.

Eventually it fizzled completely when I decided to "get into" game development, thinking that the game art I'd be doing was a completely different discipline.

I still kick myself for not getting back into drawing sooner.

I'm making up for it now, but I have at least 7 years worth of catchup to do (2010 was when I started getting into pixel-art, and really had no excuse to not get back into traditional drawing again).

Now I've got myself a table full of drawing supplies. Pencils, paper and clipboard. If anything sits still for five minutes, it gets drawn.

If I can ever be arsed to plug the Canon printer/scanner combo I have lying around here somewhere again, I'll scan some of the stuff I've done. Or I'll borrow somebodies phone that has a decent camera.

I'll end this here before I start rambling. This has already stretched on long enough.

TL;DR: Expect more art from me this year, and not just pixel art/'finished' pieces.

Comments

twisterghost 7 years, 1 month ago

Quote:
My technical excuse is that my doctor recommended I take up a hobby like art or music to relax with (I took up both).

Similar situation here, doctor recommended taking up something that doesn't involve a screen to help with the insomnia I've been dealing with. I used to do creative writing by hand, so I'm picking that back up in the form of writing a section of my D&D campaign by hand.

It is a lot.

Also please do post more art regularly. Love it, even the dragon from your early posts makes me smile!

Nopykon 7 years, 1 month ago

That dragon is cute.