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Cat post! Cat post! Cat post!

Been doing a couple drawings of various lengths of a few friends' cats, plus The Producers of Drawfee fame.

The first image came about from an escalating joke with my friends. I'd intended to do it as a cutesy, maybe even chibi-style, version but trying to use bezier curves with no experience didn't work out! After that, I accidentally set the sparkle effect super large and the joke just grew to this: even featuring the classic "omae wa mou shindeiru" from Fist of the North Star.

Had fun using some different brushes to try shortcut fur, which worked in a few ways and didn't in others. The images are actually ordered with most recent first and I think there's a little improvement over the three. It's unrelated to any cycles or anything but I do love cats and have more friends and family's cats I want to draw in future so it's nice to see improvement!

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Pet peeve: Art tutorials that have thumbnails saying "STOP DOING THIS!!!!" and then an arrow to an absolutely incredible illustration.

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Art Thoughts #1 - Hello World

Finally caught up on my backlog of cycles and pieces from the start of my digital art journey (6th Jan!) up until now. There always seems to be somehow more and less than you'd expect when you look over everything you've managed to do.

I decided to make a Tumblr alongside Instagram for the express purpose of long rambly posts about learning digital art, as well as feeling more free to post unfinished things or less polished concepts. I figured I'd start with another intro post and a quick review of where I feel I'm at right now.

So, hello world! I'm Gray and I'm fairly new to digital art and art in general. I started off just as something to do as a hobby, as I felt I was spending all my free time with nothing to show for it, but enjoyed it more than I expected. I also have plenty of characters, fandoms, and ideas for things I want to get better to be able to draw fanart of. I'm 24 so feel a little late to the game in some ways, having not grown up drawing beyond when I was a kid, especially when I see so many talented people on here a lot younger than me! But I feel like I've been doing fairly well not to compare myself to others too much so far and instead look back at my own pieces and see the progress I'm already making as I go.

Speaking of that progress, I'm pretty happy with how it's going! Obviously getting anywhere from zero is going to feel pretty good, but it's been nice to look back and actually see consistent progress and studies paying off. Most things I've been working on have been on character, and specifically the head, so it's not surprising that there's been some improvement when I've been focusing so much on one area. The shading cycle really made a big difference I think, and I came up with some pieces I'm proud of.

Some specific things I want to address in terms of going forward are definitely branching out to more stylized pieces. I'll probably do another long post on my thoughts on getting stuck in a "realism arc". I know it's super important to get realistic proportions etc down but I feel I could probably make some more simple and effective pieces using different styles. Obviously, a big area to get to is full body pieces, gesture and posing and the like, which I have a little experience in from physical sketching a while ago but need to get back to digitally. That'll lead to a whole host of anatomy, clothing, posing, and perspective cycles in the future.

Got a few more long posts planned for things like my cycle plans, thoughts on realism, switching between studies and sketches from imagination, and probably more reviews like this sporadically. Not really expecting anyone to read them except me in the future really but if any other beginner artists want to see how another early art journey is going, I'm here!

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More fanart! One from my (probably) favourite anime; Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist.

Went for a slightly less realistic style to match the character, but couldn't quite shake it fully. I had to go for the "eyes-closed-in-grin" expression because my couple of attempts at manga-style eyes just didn't work out. Thinking I might move my style-focused study cycle closer to help branch out soon. I am happy with the clothing shading and how the hand came out from the reference, though.

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Birth from Stone.

Been loving @samcarr_ 's Eternal Ruins worldbuilding project, and have been having a ton of fun in the discord too. I actually started this before the discord was up but there's been lots of cool fan art in there to inspire future pieces too! They also helpfully reminded me that the wanderers emerge without hair so, oops.

This piece was a good excuse to practice some more lighting, but did illustrate the need for the current hair cycle. I also added materials studies to my ever-growing list of future cycles to go through. I'll probably do a longer post about planned cycles once my queue is cleared!

Slowly catching up to the present day!

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During my shading studies, I'd been using flat colours a lot to get the idea of where shadow and highlights fall and decided to take it further with up to 7 different tones in this piece and focus on more details, too. Not sure what the actual name of this type of shading is though, cel shading doesn't seem quite right from what I've looked up, even though it uses hard-edged shadows. Also, it was my first time trying to draw tightly coiled hair for the left piece and I think my solution wasn't terrible for how quick it was. These are probably my best pieces so far in my art journey, although I couldn't recreate anything like this without a reference. You can tell I was (and am!) proud of these since they're the first pieces I signed at the bottom! I also made them both by building up one tone at a time, trying to make them look complete for those tones at each stage, and made some reels on Instagram where they're built up one by one.

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Finally, most recently, I finished a cycle on basic shading, shadow, and value. I enjoyed this cycle so much! I hadn't had this much fun in any of the others and felt this much progress since the first head cycle. As a quick review of how I studied: I started with some basic tutorial videos on terminology and techniques, then went on to do some still-life studies in flat unblended colours. I moved on to faces to make use of existing skills, starting with tutorials and the low poly face from some lighting references. Over the rest of the cycle, I went over some existing sketches from the head cycle and did some longer pieces too using the flat shading style and trying out smoother shading. Most recently, I've been working on some fan art with more pronounced light and shadow.

As I mentioned, I really enjoyed this cycle and felt like I've been able to make some things I'm quite proud of. Beyond the shading techniques, I've learned more about drawing and taking inspiration from references, taking more time on full pieces, and trusting the process of building up the final result.

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So... I may already hate this piece. It's not terrible but following my shading cycle, I know I can do a lot better. I also used zero references because I didn't just want to draw someone, but I've learned a lot about using references just for specific parts and help without just trying to recreate them.

Anyway, this was done at the end of February and the idea is I'll try to do a kind of "milestone" piece at the end of every couple of months. This way I'll have a record of progress over the year and I can try to incorporate what I've learned in each one. The Yor piece from my first post also serves as a milestone piece for the start of the year.

So the next one will be at the end of April, and with the shading cycle I've already done as well as the other cycles planned for before then I'm hoping I can come up with something I'm a lot happier with!

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Next up is the eye cycle! Wanted to go back to aspects of drawing people/characters after perspective and eyes helped round out the face after my head cycle. It was a shorter cycle and I mainly worked on some up close studies and then more practice on doing the whole head from my sketches. I threw in a bit of anime-style practice but I know I'm leaning semi-realistic to start with so didn't do too much. A full cycle of examining some different styles is definitely upcoming, along with a starter cycle on hair to fully round off the head before moving on to gesture and full body.

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The next cycle up was on basic perspective! Overall, I went through the basics of 1, 2, and 3-point perspective, as well as techniques including grids, duplication, mirroring, and simple rotation. This cycle included a lot more tutorials rather than studies and from the many I went through, I'd recommend the "Rudiments of Linear Perspective" videos from The Drawing Database-NKU on Youtube for the absolute basics, and the many amazing videos by @danbeardshaw for more techniques and advanced topics.

Overall this cycle was a lot rougher than the previous. It was harder to motivate myself to go through exercises when the outcome was just boxes rather than seeing progress toward drawing characters etc. Luckily I pushed on and can start to see the use, especially in backgrounds, plus I know it'll be useful in a variety of situations beyond that as it is a base concept. In a few cycles time, I'll try to apply it to more complex objects and basic mannequin poses in perspective.

The top image is a concept album art (I'm not making music!) that came about from wanting to make a full piece in perspective and an attempted cityscape quickly going wrong. The grid wasn't right for what I'd planned, so I turned it into the kind of wave effect and went from there! It was good practice on a few of the techniques and I was happy with how it turned out in the end.

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A collection of fan art done during/just after my head cycle, and also as a way of trying out some new techniques.

The Percy Jackson headshot was done during the cycle and alongside the last episode of the show, although it's a book canon interpretation. It was my first time using digital brushes and following some skin painting tutorials and I was fairly happy for the first attempt.

The Daredevil piece used a lot more flat colors and Gaussian blurs, and I think came out better since more of the head is covered by the helmet. I also played around with overlays for the cloth texture, even if it wasn't really obvious, which was interesting.

Finally, my first ever gif of the man himself; Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. A semi fanon-typical interpretation of the character's looks, although he came out as a bit more "pretty" than the usual scruffy looks. I was mainly playing around with level corrections and inverting gradients for this one, and found an article on creating the chromatic aberration and glitch effect which I think came out pretty cool. My first dabble with the in-built CSP animation builder, but obviously just touched upon for this piece.

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My first real cycle of studies was on heads! Figured I could start with some heads and faces so I could at least get going with a few fanarts and stuff. I'd done a decent amount of practice on face and head shape back when I did more physical sketches but needed a good refresher coming back. Also an added bonus of gaining confidence with using the drawing tablet.

I've counted up I think 155 head studies from across real, anime, and Western animation references from a variety of angles and facial shapes. The first image contains sketches from scratch with no reference across the cycle, and I think shows how this cycle has vastly improved where I'm at in terms of the face structure and from different angles, starting from my out-of-practice initial sketches.

I included a couple of other examples of my study sketches; early real reference sketches that I touched up in blue later to correct noticeable errors, real reference studies without initial sketches over the images, sketches from real references in profile, and some sketches from anime references.

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Like I mentioned in my first post, I've been working in cycles of studies to improve various areas of my art. I got the idea from @goblish_sensei 's (on IG) video about methods of practicing art and decided to take my time on certain aspects rather than flit back and forth too much. I've been going back and forth between absolute basics and character/figure aspects and in general have been doing around 2 weeks for each as I have a lot of topics to get through. Once I'm caught up maybe I'll do a post about my current list and the order of future cycles.

I started off with a few days of looking at very basic forms, with a little shading and a tiny bit of perspective (I'll be back to those properly later!). I'd had a day away coming and this seemed like a good mini-cycle to start with to fill the days beforehand and then start a proper cycle once I got back.

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Time for re-introductions! Starting a Tumblr as an even more free-form art journal than the Instagram (@graylightsart there too!) I started back in January. Figured I could post more here, including more text posts, thoughts, and WIPs!

To start, figured I'd do a recap and speedrun of some of my Instagram content and my art journey so far! I decided on a whim to start drawing around September last year, starting as many do with a pencil on notepad paper. I dabbled in digital soon after with a free trial of CSP and getting a cheap UGEE S640 Pen Tablet but didn't get to do much toward the end of the year. I got a year's subscription to CSP on the 6th of January with a view to see how far I can get this year. I drew the Yor art on this post first as a kind of "baseline" piece; something that I can look back on throughout the year and do a comparison to at various points. Already feels super old but putting it up for the sake of looking back!

The Charlie Morningstar and Elias Bouchard/Alastor fanart were some other early pieces I did in my first week or so, learning early concepts. See my Instagram posts for a little more detail, although these seem super old already too!

I've mainly been learning through ~2 week cycles of studies on different topics, and I'll go through what I've done so far in the next few posts to catch up. Got some fanart pieces and others that I'll put up too!