CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects"

2017-06-17 01:35

http://imgur.com/a/VsMon

I am struggling very hard with this lesson, but I won't give up. Thanks for making all this knowledge accessible to us.

I included my orthographics even though those don't "count" towards the quantity criteria.

Will draw more if needed.

CaptainKong in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"

2017-05-14 21:11

Here it is: http://imgur.com/a/0KJEP

Thanks for your time.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-02 00:10

Thanks, I will try to be more confident for lesson 6. I am doing the 250 cylinder challenge because I think I will benefit from that, so I will submit that when it is done.

You are right about your 2d method, I was aware of it but wanted to experiment - I will use your 2d method from now on.

EDIT: I noticed for lesson 6 you ask for 8 pages (2 drawings per page). I like to draw bigger, so is it ok to do 16 pages with 1 drawing per page?

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-05-01 13:11

http://imgur.com/a/ZwwjR here it is. hope this is what you were looking for.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"

2017-04-05 00:06

Hey, its been a while but life's like that sometimes.

I ended up drawing more animals than required because I misread your instructions and had to go back, but that might not be a bad thing?

http://imgur.com/a/jZt3w

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2017-01-04 22:03

Thanks for the in depth critique. I'll keep my posts brief from now on:

http://imgur.com/a/N0PIW

I hope this is more like what you were looking for.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2016-12-29 02:44

Hi,

Here is my submission for lesson 4 http://imgur.com/a/Cmode. Sorry for the long post but I like to hear your opinions compared to mine after youve read them and seen the work.

Ant

Took me a few attempts to get this right. Ants have surprisingly strange body shapes; I thought it would be simple so I did this first. This is the first of the two drawings you assigned to complete without texture.

Brown Recluse

Not much to say here. This is the second of the two drawings assigned without details. The legs are so long it was difficult to match the proportion.

Grasshopper 1

This is my first attempt at drawing an insect with texture. I wasnt really feeling it so it came out sloppy. I didnt count this one as one of the assigned drawings, but Im showing it to you anyway.

Rhino Beetle

I felt like I got the form done right (too bad I didnt take a picture of it before adding texture like I did with most of the rest), but I got overwhelmed by the texture. I didnt organize it well and it just became distracting. I really dont like this one.

Blue Legged Centipede

Since this isnt an insect I think I may have broken the rules, but I enjoyed the experience. It was challenging, so I really wanted to do it. It took a few tries to get it right, I often messed up the width and proportion of the various parts.

Adding texture to this was a nightmare. I wanted to give a shiny feeling, so I used solid white and black. It took forever to do, but I like how it turned out. A problem I had was making various colors stand out. The actual centipede obviously wasnt just two colors, but I had no idea how to make an in between color to represent this. I thought about hatching but it just didnt come out right, so I filled it solid black.

Emperor Scorpion

After drawing the Centipede I wanted to convey texture without all the tedium. I noticed in some of your demos you used what I guess I could call reverse highlighting. You made the highlights black instead of white, and left the darker areas white thus saving time as the paper itself is white (Correct me if Im wrong). I feel like I had some sort of success with this here.

I tried experimenting with hatching to gradiate value, but it just came out poorly as you can see on the left claw, so I didnt us it for the rest of the body.

Grasshopper 2

I like how this came out, but again, the grasshopper was a variety of colors, yellow, green, brown, black, and varying shades of these colors. I had no idea how to convey these differences in black ink on white paper, so I did not really fill anything in here. I was stumped.

Vinegaroon

I dont really like this one either I tried some hatching again to gradiate value, but I failed again. I couldnt really capture the dirty and bumpy texture either.

Bumble Bee

The first image without texture is actually different from the second one. I messed it up and decided to start over. I saw your example on drawing fur, mostly focusing on the edges and leaving tufts in other areas to imply continuous texture. I didnt really follow it as much as I should have because I felt it was more of a hairy texture and didnt think it would come out right if I didnt draw a lot of hairs. I tried to keep a balance between drawing few hairs and drawing all of them.

Mantis

I got impatient in the middle of this drawing and kind of rushed it. This made it very disproportionate to the reference and I think I could have done better on the texture because I rushed that as well. The front arms are way too small.

Hercules Beetle

I chose this insect to redeem myself for the Rhino Beetle mess as they have similar textures and shapes. I think I did a lot better this time. I opted to do solid black and left white dots to imply a little bit of roughness on the mostly shiny surface. I tried organizing it better. The shell was yellow, so I felt like I should just leave it white rather than hatch it; although I did hatch the surfaces near the bottom of the body to help the legs stand out

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"

2016-11-22 03:26

Here it is http://imgur.com/a/byJod

 

Leaves

 

I know you said to pack it in but I felt like I had the urge to draw them fairly large, so I did 3 pages to compensate. I hope that's ok. I had some trouble getting the width to close as it reached the end of the leave as opposed to the arrows that have a consistent width.

 

Stems

 

I did my best here but I feel like I should do it again.

 

Simple Plants

 

I felt overwhelmed with details at first but I just tried to focus on one step at a time, especially for the aloe plant, and I did better than I thought I would. For the palm tree-ish kind of thing adding all the leaves felt really tedious, but I didn't know how to make it look complete if I did it more simply. How can I find the balance of detail and simplicity? I know for textures you mentioned its all about organization and focusing on where light transitions to shadow, but I'm still struggling with that concept.

 

Detailed Plants

 

Somehow I lost count of how many plants I did and did extra. Sorry for this. I tried a little experimenting on varying detail to cut down on the tedium. I feel like it really only worked on the rafflesia and even that took a long time. I tried to emphasize detail on one petal and the center, but the other petals still took some time. For the bark of the palm tree I felt like I was able to keep it simple enough, but I fell into the trap of tediously drawing each leaf again. Same with the sunflower's center. I meant to draw it at a slight angle but I realized that I had drawn the petals in a front facing perspective even though they weren't arranged in a perfect circle (or at least as close as it gets on the real thing). I had purposefully laid in an ellipse. I probably should have taken a break and tried again after I realized I wasn't looking at reference more than my actual drawing.

 

When drawing from a reference, what level of accuracy should I go for? Especially for plants, the positioning of elements can be really hard to get to match the reference perfectly, so what margin of error should I allow myself? My main goal is to learn to draw so I can make comics, so I know I'll be drawing from imagination a lot, but I still wonder how accurate I should be before moving on to trying to work from imagination. I know I should build up my visual library in general, but to what extent?

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2016-11-06 20:03

Thanks again for your time and detailed critique. I will do warm ups and work intermittently at the texture challenge while progressing.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2016-11-05 00:34

You are right... it is like that GIF of a train passing by, if you have seen it. It can appear to go either way if you focus hard enough.

Now I know why at the time it seemed right, but later it felt wrong.

Thanks.

https://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/train.gif?resize=500%2C322

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2016-11-05 00:22

http://imgur.com/a/tl20K

 

Hi, I hope these are better. I read the page and watched the video you referenced.

 

I tried to draw the ellipses more confidently. I drew them at what I'd describe a "medium speed", slower than I draw my straight lines, which I do very fast after ghosting. I tend to press harder when I draw slower to compensate for my trembling hands, so they came out significantly darker than the outlines.

I don't know where the line is between deliberate, confident action and hesitation, but I felt fairly confident when drawing them.

 

You mentioned aligning the ellipses / curves on the axis of the shape, but I felt for some of the more curving shapes I felt as if they were incompatible. What I meant with this is that I felt they didn't match up, whether the axis was wrong, or the ellipse was wrong, I could not tell. I tried varying the degree to have the shape bend through space like you said too, imagining them as cross sections.

 

Personally, I will redo this as many times as it takes to reach the next stage, my only concern is frustrating you or giving the impression that I am choosing to ignore your advice. For some things I am a slow learner which frustrates some people, but I will always appreciate your critique.

 

P.S.

 

Regarding the textures, while I did practice the textures on separate pages, I did not choose them before drawing the organic shapes. What I did was fill two pages with random organic shapes, then figure out what texture to apply, so i think you misunderstood me there. What can I do to reach the second stage of texture; that is, learning to organize it? I read the page you posted, it seems like focusing on the light to dark transition areas would benefit me most considering I think I am most guilty of "Overly dense and noisy textures". Should I put a stop on the other lessons and do the 25 texture challenge?

 

Thanks.

CaptainKong in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-30 19:53

Thanks for this insightful post. Means a lot.

I am sorry for procrastinating on submissions, I will take care of them.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"

2016-10-30 19:43

http://imgur.com/a/LKwiL

Arrows

For a few of these my eyes seemed to play tricks on me and I shaded the wrong side. I don't know why this happened. Also, even if I draw faster my lines still wobble a bit, and keeping the width consistent was tricky. I actually lost one page of this and had to do another, so I did 3 of these total.

Organic forms

In retrospect I think I should have added line weight to the outside of these to give them more of a solid feel. Lines still feel wobbly when doing the contour curves. I struggle very hard with ellipses, when I go through them they don't feel uniform, they are chaotic, wobbly and inconsistent. I think I really over did it with the shadows on the stacked organic forms... I wanted them to feel separate but I just went too far. I should have done it like your example.

Textures

I felt like I was hit and miss here. For some of these I not only looked at a photo, I looked at a drawing someone else did to get an idea of how to transfer the complex 3d images to ink on a 2 page. Is this a bad practice? Also, my textures tend to feel tedious and crowded sometimes. I can't find the balance between subtle texture and overdoing it to the point where the viewers eyes feel overwhelmed. For most of these I did practice runs on different pages, sometimes spending up to an hour just practicing, experimenting before I did one to submit to you. Is this an ok practice? I wanted to feel confident about my work and not have some textures feel significantly less believable than others on the same page, since I can't erase.

Intersections

More messy than I'd like. I struggled with spheres and ellipses again. I crumpled up many attempts at this in frustration because I'd mess up a sphere or ellipse so bad I'd feel like it was un-salvageable. I did two or three practice runs but not a lot for these. These really messed with my eyes until I added line weight.

Those are my thoughts, what advice would you give me?

CaptainKong in the post "250 Box Challenge"

2016-10-29 14:35

Hi there, here is my submission.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/grewjirnhui8p0n/AABT-qkuRZQcINQ2mv2mAuyOa?dl=0

I just became a supporter on your Partreon.

At first I dreaded this exercise but as I went on I realized how little I knew about something I thought was so simple. I still have a bit of trouble getting boxes just right though. When I place the dots they may seem fine, but after drawing a line I can see my mistake, but by then its too late - I can't erase.

Thanks for making this exercise...

I've actually procrastinated on submitting for a while and have made progress on other lessons, is there a wait period I have to go through to submit again? I know you are very busy.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2016-07-31 02:39

Thanks. Where can I submit the 250 Box challenge? I'm assuming this is a prerequisite for lesson 2.

CaptainKong in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"

2016-07-30 03:49

Hi Uncomfortable,

Ive been drawing for about a year and decided to come to this course because while I improved a lot in certain areas, I felt that I was lacking fundamentals in others. I drew almost exclusively in digital because I found it easier to draw there. I liked the instant gratification, but more importantly its because of a medicine that I take that my hands tremble. It varies in severity but it is always present. It affects me most in traditional because I cannot user stabilizers that are built into software and cant erase lines gone wrong in ink. Regardless Ive done my best to complete these exercises.

The one thing that stood out to me the most was the organic box drawing exercises. I understand the concepts of perspective, but seem to sometimes only realize my mistake when Ive drawn the box, and by then I cant erase. When I set up the points on the box, I usually see that they converge appropriately, but sometimes I mess up and dont see that they are positioned wrong until Ive drawn. I wanted to know what your opinion on that particular issue is.

http://imgur.com/a/gKrHv

Thanks for your time and consideration!