Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects (new 30min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-23 14:40
I mean, if you can make the real world do the work for you... ;) Tried it out yesterday -- works well enough but my flashlight sucks. Or, rather, my flashlight is the kind with 9 little LEDs instead of one bulb in a paraboloid, and consequently can't cast a sharp shadow to save its life. Sunlight works, though. I'll take some pictures later.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects (new 30min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-22 22:44
It'd be easy enough to rig something up with a couple pins and a variable-length string, but without some sort of "nice" handle/holder it would probably be too annoying to use. Might give it a shot until I can get some of the stencil kind.
I was thinking of also trying something like a coin with a toothpick taped across it, back-illuminated by a flashlight. Then, with some combo of rotating the toothpick and adjusting the distance to your paper, you could project an ellipse of any size and degree. You'd still have to draw the thing freehand, but at least you could have more than 4 guide-dots.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects (new 30min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-22 22:31
I always find it amusing how, when I do the homeworks over a handful of sessions with a handful of drawings in each, it's always VERY VERY OBVIOUS in retrospect exactly when in each set I started losing focus and tried to sneak in some halfassery. ;) Damn you and your halfassery detector I will aspire to your instructorly patience! --or maybe just take breaks sooner. xD
What exactly is an "ellipse guide" with respect to physical drawings? Are we talking about those stencil things with some finite set of predefined ellipses? Or is there an equivalent of a compass for ellipses? Seems like there should be, since they're defined by the same sort of mathematical constraint as a circle, but I can't recall ever seeing one and I think I'm missing the word to ask google.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects (new 30min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-21 10:52
omfg whoever invented drawing ellipses should be sent to a special ellipse of hell. Seriously, screw ellipses. WHY ARE THEY EVERYWHERE
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-19 15:25
On the one hand, I'm short too, so I feel ya. On the other...OWWW.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-19 14:03
Whoa... Oh hey, once I went to northern Finland and there were all these herds of reindeer in the road and they would just NOT CARE about the part where cars were trying to drive through them. I bet it's an ungulate thing. Damn ungulates.
P.S. "Ungulate" is a word I learned this lesson while wikipediaing how the fuck animal legs work. Did you know ungulates are called unguligrade because they WALK ON THEIR FINGERNAILS? I just, I don't even, OWWWW. OW.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-19 12:16
If I had to choose a spirit animal, it'd be the blue footed booby. No question.
Maybe I should give those antelopes booby feet. That'd show them. ;)
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-10-17 10:53
Still battling the old chicken-scratch habit, with varying success. CONSTANT VIGILANCE O.O
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "The Future of Free Critiques on /r/ArtFundamentals"
2016-09-29 03:34
Aww...course you are.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "The Future of Free Critiques on /r/ArtFundamentals"
2016-09-29 02:45
...and you delight in making poor sods draw YOUR FACE 250 times over!? You probably wallpaper your house with them too! You utter megalomaniac!
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "The Future of Free Critiques on /r/ArtFundamentals"
2016-09-29 02:40
Oh wait! I got all distracted by my own cleverness (WHAT) and forgot to put the actual comment part, which is: dude, if you ever want a real live vacation -- as in, n days/weeks/months without any critiques at all, not even for a million ice creams -- dude, take the vacation. Don't even think about not.
You have a huge fanboi happy subscriber base at this point, and I'm pretty damn sure that nobody will begrudge you some for real time off. We know you're (mostly?) human. And you/the subreddit/drawabox are so unique, and so uniquely suitable for your particular demographic audience, that we'll wait while you go on a worldwide tour of crunchy-thing gastronomy.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "The Future of Free Critiques on /r/ArtFundamentals"
2016-09-27 04:14
I'm trying really hard not to make a "texture challenge" joke right now.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "The Future of Free Critiques on /r/ArtFundamentals"
2016-09-26 20:18
Holy shit, ow. Your poor mouth. You doing ok?
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "25 Texture Challenge - fleshed out into an actual challenge for those of you struggling with how to render different materials"
2016-09-13 01:10
Thanks, evil friend! It's kind of fascinating, figuring out how ink works (and doesn't). And it's a medium I'd really like to keep working on. I've always loved the look of ink drawings.
I notice you get a lot of questions from people about the shades of difference between texture and color and form, which is something I too was getting tangled up, so eventually I came up with a sort of rule of thumb. Maybe it'll help others:
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Take your object and dip it in chocolate. That's it's form.
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Take your object and magically turn it to stone. Now look at its surface. That's (the form aspect of) texture.
The exceptions, of course, are things that depend heavily on reflection, like metal or water... but it's a start!
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "25 Texture Challenge - fleshed out into an actual challenge for those of you struggling with how to render different materials"
2016-09-12 05:20
Can confirm, you were not kidding about making us cry.
I gotta say, I've gone from being totally texture-happy in lesson 2 to mostly ignoring it in homework now, just because there's something really satisfying about a simple construction that works...but knowing how to use the skill better can't hurt, right?
Except my hand. That can hurt. And my eyes. And my poor weepy heart. xD
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-09-06 20:35
I have a bunch of odd habits I picked up in grade school art classes! But, well, I'll do some experimenting in the downtime before animals. I've noticed that I have a much easier time positioning sharp/flat forms in 3d space than their blobby counterparts: box before cylinder, plane before leaf... pointy thorax before rounded thorax. Is it easier to chisel a blob, or loosen an edge? If a vertex falls inside a blob, does anyone hear?
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-09-06 20:15
Aha! Thanks for the critique, and especially for the grasshopper bit -- it was bugging bothering me that the studies seemed more convincing than the final guy, but I couldn't figure out exactly why.
On the matter of proportions, I do agree that mine could use work, but I'm a bit conflicted on how to approach that work. My usual strategy would be the old tricks of what I think you call "observational drawing" -- I'd sort of find a handful of 1d or 2d landmarks on the 2d reference image, and then go about marking them on paper as 30-degree angle here, little more than 90 there, this line looks three times that one, etc...which works, if I do it right, but leaves me bound to that exact reference image FOR LIFE AND FOREVER with no understanding of how a bug is actually built or how to draw one with slightly different pose/lighting/perspective. And I HATE that. So now, anytime I catch myself checking out 2d angles, I kinda freak out and throw things and stop looking at the reference entirely. Which...is also bad. So, where's the balance?
I was looking at your airplane demo, where you've got almost a CAD-drawing approach to getting proportions. Is that something I can apply to these bendier forms? Maybe in stages, like cross-section-standing-bee --> cross-section-flowerhugging-bee -->perspective-flowerhugging-bee?
Well, I cannot say I've ever been accused of too much subtlety, in lineweights or elsewhere. ;) But I will try very hard to PUT THE PEN DOWN before the cartoony hits! Sticky note on the forehead, maybe. Hmm.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-09-05 22:14
Just realized that "8 pages" isn't the same as "8 bugs"... so here are 10 pages with 6 different bugs? And many experiments.
No rush, k?
imgur dammit formatting
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-09-03 19:46
Awright, thank you! I'm really glad you had me do the boxes & cylinders before this one. Made all the difference (in my head, anyway).
Naively, I'd have thought the bugs & such would be more difficult than the lesson 6 objects, because at least you can trust a spray bottle not to go all bendy at its joints and wave its nozzle in any arbitrary direction. Guess I'll find out when I get there!
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants (new 40min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2016-09-02 04:23
THE IMPORTANT PART: Please don't feel any rush to critique this submission, which I am submitting on the very first day of your vacation like some horrible nightmare monster. I've got the texture challenge going alongside the lessons, and that could more than keep me occupied for the entire month, but since the homework is finished I suppose I might as well get it in.
THE LESS IMPORTANT PART: Actually, this one took much less time than I'd expected, which worries me a little...I mean. I guess there's some difference between 8 and 250, even with all the extra thinking?
I ignored textures completely, for most of the plants. At least, I didn't consciously consider them, and my goal was certainly to draw the form, but in some sense it's all just smaller and smaller form, right? Aside from color and reflectivity? WHOA WAIT is that my scheduled texture epiphany?! WHOA. Anyway, #5 has some texture tests, and in #8 I thought that maybe, being as a palm leaf is sort of "hatched" by nature, if I put a bunch of texture in some of the leaves I could push them into the background but still keep them relevant? Results, uh, variable.
Tried a couple things from real life plants.. I think I understand those plants much better, in terms of how they work and how their various masses interact -- like, the olive tree I was looking at had this cool thing going on with its leaf-blobs, where there's a fight between the stems wanting to grow upwards but their combined weight being too much for the branch, and you end up with these very distinctive large leaf-and-branch masses that look like hook-shaped water balloons. Actually drawing the tree was harder, though. I included some attempts/notes as #4.5.
I'm still working on thinking through marks before putting them on paper. Results...also variable. I've taken to playing SELF POP QUIZ where I have to point to an arbitrary mark and justify its existence. Someday I will pass this quiz. SOMEDAY.
Edit: forgot to say -- thanks to /u/davidmelhart for the planty pinterest board
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"
2016-08-30 20:04
Woo! Thanks for the tips. I've noticed my lineweights getting heavier and heavier, too, so I'll keep an eye on them.
Here's a different question: I keep having stupid hand-achey/tendinitis issues, which mean week+ pauses in drawing. Ugh. Bah. Do not like. But I noticed that lesson 14 switches over to digital, and leans more towards analysis than the actual detail of making marks on a paper. I have an ipad, and a ("dumb") stylus, and even when my hand hurts I can manage to fingerpaint if nothing else. Could I work on lesson 3 (in ink) and lesson 14 (ipad) in parallel? You advise against buying the cintiq-style tablets in the lesson, but I'm not clear as to whether that's for reasons of pestilence & villainy beyond their cost. (I do have a normal tablet-style intuos tablet, too, but holding that pen isn't less hand-achey than holding an ink pen.)
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"
2016-08-30 19:44
Alright, so, I gave it a shot. And, you know what, it's all true and you're a lifesaver. Handsaver! Something. I had a hell of a time at first trying to even judge where the paper was -- like, my ghosts would accidentally touch down, or I'd try to touch down and the paper wouldn't be where I thought it was -- but once I got used to that part, things got better. Plus, I think there's some half-subconscious effect where having the 2D paper and clipboard free in 3D space, instead of constrained to a 2D desktop, makes me more aware of 3D-ness. Huh. Fascinating...
Anyway, thank you (from me and my boobs)
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge"
2016-08-30 05:16
Welp... imgur
I am slooowly coming to kind of love linework -- which feeling is entirely independent of the quality of mine :D but still. Not that I don't also rage and scream at it, ofc, but at least... sometimes I have a glimpse of what it could be. Someday. Many ellipses from now.
That said, I could use some advice on lineweights, both in using them and in putting them there. I cannot seem to superimpose curves to save my life. Is there some trick to it, beyond more swirly lines like the first part of lesson 1? Should I be adding successive passes in a single stroke per line, like they were drawn to start with, or is it ok to go about it as with drawing plant stems and have several sections? Do I ghost the whole ellipse and then only touch down for half? ...and how terrible is it to sometimes give in and cheat with a brush pen for the thickest bits? And then, am I getting too fancypants with my experiments? 150+ have a lot of WHAT IF I DO THIS with lineweights, but I don't have the eye to evaluate the results. Which, I guess, is why you're the teacher and not me. ;)
As always: thanks, internet dude. You're the best. Happy almost September!
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"
2016-08-28 23:06
Hmm. At one point I did get an extra large clipboard... I'll give it a shot!
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"
2016-08-28 21:27
Ahaha, well, ideas I can do for days...you get the lovely task of sorting/evaluating/implementing. I can't say I envy you that. I feel you on the aversion to making videos, though if it's any consolation none of that comes through in your videos themselves. They're chill af.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"
2016-08-28 21:20
Aha! Thank you for the tips! I think my current best (tho still imperfect) solution is similar to yours -- I do the angled paper and the sideways offset, so, like, if my desk were a map of the US, I draw most of my lines going Ohio Kentucky Tennessee. Or something. And sit on an extra cushion all curled over the page, which I think is effectively equal to the clipboard?
I still have this weird thing with large circles/ wide ellipses where they end up vaguely triangular in a very consistent way, which I think may be more down to arm mechanics than course correction (i.e., the pointy bits are at some kind of inflection points of shoulder rotation). Stupid ellipses. >:[
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"
2016-08-26 23:16
There are a bunch of different ways you can reduce your own workload, while still keeping things accessible. Some:
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Limit the number of critiques you give
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Limit the effort & time expended per critique
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Change the way critiquing/the whole system works?!
Here follows a lot of thoughts! Which I warn you are very brainstorm, little coherence.
Limiting number of critiques you give
Easiest to implement, certainly. Although...may I suggest you avoid a lottery-type system, because shit, man, there is no drama like RNG drama and holy hell but that is DRAMA. Maybe just a signup? As in, you give 10 critiques per week; all of us students get placed in some ordered list and are allowed, in order, to sign up for a slot in the upcoming month. Once we get critiqued we go to the end of the line. Newcomers join the queue.
Good: gives us time to prepare. Gives you a way to control the rate of critiques along with the overall number. Discourages frivolous/half-assed submissions, maybe?
Bad: logistics could get gross.
Limiting your time/effort per critique
Ideally, of course, this means changing the students' work instead of your critiquing habits. XD
So...what about expanding the self-critique aspect of early lessons? I found those bits really helpful when I was going through, and I still look at them now and again.
Also, there's this disconnect between "/u/Uncomfortable's comically over-the-top intentionally shitty line with extra shittiness" and "some poor sod's unintentionally shitty line with subtler shit in it". We look at your Ultimate Wobbly Line that you drew to show us what not to do, and ours doesn't look like that, so we think we're good -- but actually, no, even if we only have two wobbles instead of 83, we have wobbles. It's...the continuum of shittiness. Yeah.
There are a few things I think could help here. First, more, um, codification? of things like line quality into objective criteria. What constitutes wobbliness? How many excursions from straightitude are ok? And make these explicit enough that even those of us blinded by our own sheer glory can sort the okayish from the not. Maybe: for every line on your page, check that it a) consists of only one stroke, b) starts exactly at its intended start, c) doesn't make any abrupt course corrections because yes those are wobbles, d) has no gappy bits in the ink flow, e) has no blobby bits in the ink flow. Or: each single box is made of exactly 12 single linear marks for edges (assuming you draw see-thru, and prior to lineweights). Count & make sure. Each ellipse has at least two go-rounds at every point on its circumference. Etc...
Second, what about a "curated" gallery of other students' homework, with your comments? Reason being, because so many of us come to this entirely new to drawing, we (well, I, anyway) can get confused by things that are idiosyncratic to your personal style, or happen because you do the demos digitally (which, frex, doesn't show gappy bits in the ink when one is too timid), or which you simply can't manage to do without exaggerating because you've so well trained yourself not to. But we, otoh! We do horrible shitty linework in spades, and with all manner of subtleties and snowflake specialness. It's easier to extract general principles from seeing your reaction to lots of different people's attempts than from only seeing your good set. And reviewing past threads, while hella fun, is hit-and-miss as to whether you catch a particularly good/bad/useful/instructive batch. But "here are some examples of wobblers" "here's a bunch with perspective flaws" "these are different approaches to lineweights" "here's that one dude with the sweet elephant skin texture"...
Good: helps with the goal of being as useful as possible to as widespread an audience, while lessening the handholding you have to do. Hammers principles into heads a bit more, maybe.
Bad: doesn't necessarily cut down on your workload! and requires a bunch of effort at the outset
Some other random ideas, aka Change All The Things:
What if you eliminated critiques on the first two lessons completely, but instead made a sort of entrance exam for the other lessons? So the homeworks would be really homeworks -- we'd have to complete them + self-correct in colored pen + redo until we satisfied some criteria (no more than x bad lines per y boxes, or some such) + submit to prove we actually did, plus, in order to be inducted into the hallowed ranks of Those Who May Have Their Leaves Critiqued, we'd submit a shorter version for your inspection and approval.
Good: means you're only critiquing people who are serious about improving/trying to learn the constructional part, but doesn't put up a barrier to entry for people attempting the early stuff and self-evaluating their own work
Bad: lots of time for them to develop the old pestilence and villainy before you can intervene?
or...
What if you divided each month up thematically, so that each week had a focus on one particular skill -- maybe week 1 you'd only critique lesson 1 submissions, and week 3 you'd only critique lesson 2, and the other weeks no lesson 1/2 at all? That doesn't necessarily lessen the workload, of course, but turns it into several short sprints instead of a single marathon kind of thing.
Good: would alleviate tedium of doing the same thing all the time, which, I am totally projecting here because I'm hella prone to getting bored/distracted/frustrated in the absence of structured variety. I suspect, given this whole endeavor, that you are unlike me in this regard. But, you know. Ideas might lead to better ideas, and whatnot.
Bad: could be you hate sprinting.
or...
What about cutting back on the written critiques, but doing a weekly video review or chat thingy where you go over submissions?
Good: You could say a thing once to multiple people, instead of typing it out 18 times. Do you speak faster than you type? Could be more interactive, I guess, if you wanted.
Bad: Less individualized. Also there are people like me who kind of hate having to watch videos. Because I can read faster than you speak. :D
or...
Or what about "workshop" threads, where you schedule something a bit like an AMA and make people bring their linework, or toasters, or whatever preset topic?
Good: could work I dunno
Bad: Wandering farther away from your current style of working -- which may or may not be a thing you're open to.
And I'll stop there. But yeah. Thanks for exhausting yourself on our behalf. :D
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "State of the Union - September vacation, and dealing with the overwhelming number of homework submissions"
2016-08-26 08:50
Hm...lessee.
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Every single time I load up this sub, I take a moment to boggle at the amount of content you put out there, the evident thought you give to every question we ask and crappy ellipse we didn't draw through, and the sheer number of days you've consistently been doing this for free on the internet. Every single time. I'm scatterbrained as hell to begin with, but I can't even imagine doing anything of this sort, on this scale, for this long.
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And then I'm like, well hell, if the dude can do all that then surely I can just draw through the damn ellipse this time. Right? Right. See, you're all inspirational and shit.
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Once I had a dream that you (cartoon-you, you know, the stubbly dude :-3 like that) and Scott McCloud (cartoon-him too 8-] of course) were giving some sort of lecture thing. It was pretty sweet. You told me I should ghost my lines more (you were right). McCloud didn't say much.
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All that is to say, you yourself are the thing that makes drawabox unique -- even more than the constructional drawing approach, though that's what got me here in the first place. I have hella bookmarks of drawing videos and forums and teacherless lessons, and I have had those hella bookmarks for literally figuratively forever and not gone through a single set of lessons. The difference is, none of those other places (least, none that I can afford) will draft me up an outline of my very own shittiness, with diagrams, and make me go fix it.
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So thanks. <3 You're the best.
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Speaking of constructional drawing: I just drew a made-up leaf on a piece of paper and for one of the first times ever I, like, believed in the leaf and now it's like, even the leaf believes it's a leaf and so will everyone else in the world. No, I'm not high.
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But I suddenly get the difference between drawing what something looks like and what something is. Never done that before. Never been able to draw much of anything believably without exactly copying a reference. Cannot stop drawing referenceless leaves. HOLY SHIT LEAVES.
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Of course I'm hoping like hell you keep some version of homework-with-feedback going, to whatever extent you decide is best for you. However! I do like the idea of a place for discussion amongst students to offload some of the smaller questions. I think I'd feel odd giving actual critique -- I only sometimes catch even half of what you see, when I look at other people's homeworks -- but some things we can surely manage on our own.
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You know... those weird personal tricks we come up with to check geometry (like the pitchfork shape the parallel edges of a box make) or make pens last longer (fridge, maybe). Or the mantras we chant to ourselves in times of chicken-scratchy distress (THINKING BEFORE INKING). Or things I haven't asked you because afaik you don't have personal experience with them, like, in the event that one is female what is the optimal positioning of boobs relative to table and shoulder, because I still haven't figured it out wtf. Life is complicated.
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Here's my attempt to actually be helpful: what specific aspects of running the site/subreddit are the most overwhelming? Like, is it purely the volume of submissions? Is it that they're all the first lessons, and the repetitiveness gets to you? Or, conversely, is it the other lessons that take up more of your effort because you can deliver a monologue on ghosting lines in your sleep? Or you're just sick of all these damn kids and their damn wobbly lines and you want to go work on your dream project SingACylinder? I ask because there are different flavors of solutions for each of those, and different ways we the peeps can help you out.
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The flip side of the question is, what do you find most rewarding, or what would you like to put more time into? Demos, new students, old students, anything but this...? I mean, it's reddit. Pretty sure someone's got a pillar in the desert you can go live on, if that's what you need. Whatever it takes! ;)
editz: formatting hard I'm gonna go draw leaves
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"
2016-08-25 06:40
On the flowing-through-space note, is it ok to actually draw a ribbon a la lesson 2 as the basis for the leaf? Sort of analogous to starting off a cylinder with a box. I find it easier to trick myself into 3d-ness with it there, but, you know, it could be a breeding ground for PESTILENCE and VILLAINY and all manner of bad habits?! Don't need those.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2016-06-19 13:23
I do feel a bit sheepish for submitting during your vacation...but not sheepish enough not to. (I have some long flights coming up that'd be prime for cylinder-drawing. Controlled linework or bust!)
Thanks for all your work, as always!
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Peter Han's Dynamic Bible - The legendary dynamic sketching instructor's finally launched the kickstarter for his personal notes and lectures!"
2016-06-17 04:42
Depending on how impatient/trusting you are, I live in the states and can be an address launderer forward you a package.
Tis_Unfortunate in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals (new 50min intro video, 3 new demos)"
2017-02-22 20:13
You are too kind -- but thank you! Work has been hella busy lately, so I haven't had time for much actual lesson progress...which just means I've been churning out pages upon pages of ellipses. Can't go wrong with a quick ellipse break. ;)