DrawABox Finale...!?

After several days hard at work on this box challenge thing and managing to get to 60 (the last one is cut off and the file size is so small because the actual file size was WAY to big for blogger).  I asked jkevinyu if he thinks it would be a good idea if I he thinks it would be ok to just jump into Michael Hampton.

He said yes.

I am SO ready to start Hampton.  I've heard so many good things about him and his lessons.  If I can keep a level head and steady on focus I cant wait to see what his lessons can do for me!

I'M READY LETS ROLL!!!

Next stop.  Hampton!!



Closing thoughts on drawabox.  I'm really glad i took the time to do these lessons.  It really opened my eyes to the importance of perspective and some of my weaknesses I need to work on in the future.  I've been told by a number of people that the later drawabox lessons are very complex and that it's not really needed for what i want to learn, but I might one day check them out.  Thanks again boxman.

www.drawabox.com

DrawABox Lesson 1 Part 3 - Boxes

Interesting mix of these.  The first part of this lesson definitely felt like I basically have it down pretty solidly.  DrawABox man made some really good points in this lesson though that completely turned what i thought about the box on it's head.  I was always a bit confused on exactly how the vanishing point worked and always thought it had to ALWAYS fall on the horizon.  That's not the case. That's not the case at all.  Years of repeating very similar perspective lessons but all of them always made it sound that the vanishing points were always on the horizon.  It's gonna take me a while to gain a better understanding of what's going on with proper perspective, but this was by far the best lesson I've ever had on the topic.  Much more studying will have to be done.  But this was a great lesson.  Very good stuff.

First portion of this was to do a simple ruler study.  Boxman talked said not to get too comfortable with this method, that we'll be doing more freehand work in the future.  How it will help your understanding of perspective far more if you do it free hand.

And that's exactly what this next bit was
Free hand lesson:

The idea was to draw the boxes in 3d and try to eyeball the lines to the vanishing point.  After we drew our boxes we were to take a line and double check how close we got to the vp.  Very interesting study.  I have so much to learn in this area...  A very humbling lesson on where exactly i stand on the perspective meter.

Stupid Sphere:
This one we focused on trying to draw cubes around the surface of a sphere.  He gave a good explanation on how to do it and a great example in a video.  Im actually really happy with how this one turned out.  He said how he didnt expect first timers to do very well on this one that it's more of a test in pushing yourself out of your comfort zone to actually do the lesson and get things done.  Very good stuff.

Then the last one was to draw a cube flipping in space.

Man i really loved this lesson.  It really opened my eyes to a lot of different aspects and areas that I need to work on.  Ofcourse it sucks that Im not better than i actually am...  But hey, at least i know areas i need to work on in the future. 

Thanks a bunch boxman!

Next stop, 250 box challenge!!!!

Spyro Elora!

Elora from spyro!!

What an adorable character!!!  I'm not familiar with spyro the dragon, but then I saw a commercial for the remastered and this character was in it.   What a cute character!!  I had to draw her haha!

I'd never really colored or even really drawn a character quite like her before.  I'm really happy with how it turned out though!

DrawABox Lesson 1 Part 2 ELLIPSES

Working on the 2nd day of DrawAbox.  Had a bit of trouble on these.  A bit more trouble than i thought I would have had.  Drawing Ellipses.  hmmm...  It kinda feels like one of those things where you THINK you know something but then you actually try it and it's a bit more complicated than you thought you knew.

That's me with ellipses.  It feels a bit like a slap in the face to be honest.

But...  what can I say.  Not a lot really.  Other than I know another one of my weak spots that I need to work on.


First part of this was to imagine a flipping coin.  The funnel represents the angle in which you can see the coin.

Next one was to take the plane exercise from the last lesson and and draw a circle in it.  Again, much harder than i thought it would be.  But i felt the gears turning.  Lots of learning took place in this one.

Last one was to just draw Ellipses in a pastern similar to this.  I think this might be the weaker of the lessons, but I still think I learned a good deal from it.

Then I finished on some of these quick poses.

Overall a very productive day I'd say.  Learned a lot!

Draw a box Starts... & Summer Nona!!

Over the last few days i've been poking around random streamers on twitch and I ran into a user by the name of "jkevinyu" He was doing some amazing art studies of his own and we got to talking a bit about anatomy and a fellow by the name of Michael Hampton.  Michael hampton does amazing breakdowns on the human form and has a book called "Figure Drawing: Design and Invention"  We talked a bit more and he suggested that I should do the first lesson on a website called www.DrawaBox.com to help prepare me for Hampton...  So that's what this is!!  Draw a box supersizes from lesson 1 part 1!!!

Super imposed lines.  Drawing the line over and over a few times to i guess build muscle memory? 

Line Ghosting:
Moving your hands over one point to another point over and over before actually putting the line down:

Then Plane exercises:
Putting 4 dots then drawing lines to connect them in a plane.

These lessons were very interesting.  Of-course they kind of felt as though they are below my level a bit...  But Im taking these as serious as I can.  If there's one thing I want more than anything else int he world, it's to make this whole art thing work.  So it's good practice to get these lessons done.  and done correctly.  I kinda feel that there is a lot of backdoor learning to all of these lessons.  I kinda felt that way about the line ghosting, but even more so about the planes.  It's teaching something different.  Something I'm not quite used to nor can i really put my finger on just yet.   Fascinating stuff though!!






Then our summertime Nona!

Another one I did on steam for the fun of it.  Kinda felt bad I didnt do this one during summer.  But hey ya can never be too late right? :D

Something about the proportions on this one just feel a little off.  Im not super happy with it, but I'm glad it's done.  It's not super bad.

8-26-18

A nice long night in studies!!  Started out with some 1 min studies.

Then I did some of these 3 pose studies where I trace the first image, draw the 2nd image by looking at it, then drew the 3rd by removing all the reference.

Had this little guy show up randomly...  He got pretty upset about a shopping list.

Then somebody stopped by wanting me to draw this character.  So i did.  but he disappeared.  hahaha  Dont even remember the characters name XD  But I did it!

Really liking this streaming thing so far.  A huge reason I wanted to start streaming was to help with the focus.  Many many streamers I've seen insist that streaming has drastically helped their drawing focus.  And I can say that throughout the few days I've been doing it; that's certainly the case!!

Tinkerbot

Tinkerbot!

First colored picture I did in the stream.

First colored picture I've done in a while actually.  Really happy with how this one turned out haha.  It started as a random pose, a buddy of mine said it looked a bit like tinkerbell.  I kinda wanted to draw a robot, so I made it Tinkerbot instead!! 

8-25-18

Had another successful stream!  Still just trying to get the hang of things so we're just focusing on some figure drawings.

Then after we did those, some silly pictures came out.  My buddy Grayvs in the chat suggested the dabbing pose. 

Then silly things happened haha.
I took the same image and resized them and moved them around a bit but wanted to keep the original.

Was a good night.

First Art Stream!!

After some days of testing, finally got my first art stream in!!

Just did a few figures.
I'm still trying to figure out how I want to do everything.  I have a pretty good idea on what I want to do.  But exactly how I do that I'm not too sure haha.  I really hope this is something that I can maintain.  And I figured out how to save the streams!

My Depersonalization Story

My journey so far.  I've made some pretty massive steps in the mental side of things.  I don't remember how much I've mentioned it here but It's almost unreal that I've been able to come to these realizations.  These are things I've been piecing together for many years...  running into brick wall after brick wall.  BUT...  I think the video says it all.  I put a lot of work into it.  It's taken weeks to finally finalize my thoughts into a video....  but here it is!

This is a big deal.  This is a real big deal.  There's so much going on in my mind.  Being able to know the name to this thing.  Let alone being able to share it with people.

Streaming on Twitch??

Finally trying to stretch my legs with this streaming stuff!

My end goal is really take the concept of this art blog and put it in streaming form.  Share as much of the art process as possible.  Of-course I dont now how much of this can translate to a stream type setup.  But I'll never know until I try!

https://www.twitch.tv/doggyzart

Not a whole lot going on there just yet.  Still really early in trying to figure out just what exactly I'm doing.  But I'm sure I'll get there.

NEW (replaced) TABLET!??

So the new tablet I got last year about this time kinda sucked.

It was a good tablet but it always had this problem where the drivers would randomly stop, seemingly for no reason, and the only way to fix the problem was to completely restart the computer.  Which of-course ruined work flow especially with [sometimes] having to restart multiple time if I wanted to draw something particularly large.

I thought it was just a little issue I could live with until i hopefully one day upgraded to a cintiq...  but as of late the problem became so monumentally annoying.  I couldn't do anything without it completely messing up.

So I decided to return it to at least get my money back or maybe a replacement to fix the problem.

Welp, unfortunately the normal warranty went out literally days before all this frustration just got to me.  I sent some messages back and forth with both Amazon and the XP Pen people and yea sure enough I couldn't return it normally.  Which wasn't that big a problem, That's why I had the extended warranty from some 3rd party company...  When I went to use the extended warranty I ACCIDENTALLY REFUNDED THE EXTENDED WARRANTY??  How on earth is that even possible.  After some frustrating messages back and forth with the 3rd party warranty people they were sure to inform me that "Yes you're warranty has been refunded to your account."

So after a few frustrating moments later I sent them a uhh  let's just say "less than happy" message about the entire situation.  But somehow or another that message ended up in XP Pen's inbox??

Then unexpectedly I got this message in my inbox:

""Dear valued customer,

Thanks for your quick reply.

Acctually, we provide one-year warranty on the product, not three years, like I have mentioned in the last mail, Our product itself has a one-year warranty. But we do not sell additional product warranty time. What you said should be a warranty service for all electronic products sold by a third-party company. In fact, these companies did not cooperate with us, we also do not know how they perform warranty service. 

As we take responsible to our customer, our faith is to provide affordable excellent digital drawing tablet as well as excellent customer service, even your tablet is already over due, but we still like to help you to get a brand new replacement which will be the updated version of Artist16, Artist16 Pro performance more professional. 

Depending on our replacement policy, you may need to first help us return the Artist16 to our return address first. And please tell us the tracking number, once we can track the tracking information we will immediately re-send a new product which is Artist16 Pro to you.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation!

Best regards,
Jessica ""

Needless to say, I didn't expect this at all haha!

I shipped off the tablet, and the new tablet just came in a moment ago.  I got it all set up and so far it seems that the problem isn't there anymore.  I am absolutely blown away by XP Pen.  I can even fully express my gratitude for how much of a headache they saved me from for not returning the product sooner.  XP Pen, quality company.  Like wow.  Huge props.

It's nothing special but here are the first sketches I did on the tablet.

then mom did a few lines as well haha

What a nice turn of events.  ♥