#trying out a new sharpening action pls excuse me

[ginpotts]

THE LEGEND OF SHEN LI 与凤行 2024 ✧ dir. Deng Ke ✧ episode two

[laidbackmarco]

As uncomfortable as it is making art and putting yourself on display, in order to grow and improve as an artist you have to start getting familiar with that feeling. The mix of chemicals and neurons firing you experience when having awkward conversations with that girl/guy you like, before going on stage, or trying to draw something you are uncomfortable with is often described as fear or nervousness, but I’ve been trying to look at those moments when you can feel your blood pulsing through your body with a new lens. I think that feeling is actually the feeling of excitement which through social conditioning has been transformed into that of anxiousness. I think deep down people are excited to be talking to that person, performing, or learning different ways to approach art.

One thing that’s not hard for me to do,  because of my terrible self esteem, is admitting that my art is bad or needs improvement. . . actually it’s much harder for me to accept a compliment about my work then anything else. Which is also bad, because if you deny someone’s compliment it’s like telling them subconsciously that their point of view doesn’t matter, don’t devalue them just smile and say thank you. Although I do wish they would stop using the “It’s better then I could do” seriously stop saying that to your friends who do art because that doesn’t make us feel better. Back to the main point! I know I needed to improve my digital art skills, but I had no idea how to go about doing it. There are a lot of resources online that are available, but the problem was there was just so much free information out there that I had almost drowned in it. I stumbled across this website called https://www.ctrlpaint.com/ which seemed to have everything in a nice organized fashion, had a plethora of free content, and I liked the way Matt Kohr presented both his philosophy and lessons.

I began plugging my way through the lessons one step at time. Although I had taken art classes in college, I figured that like in League of Legends, Fighting Games, Basketball, and now art fundamentals are extremely important and it can never hurt to refresh and sharpen those tools. So I started from step one and worked my way through the Digital Painting 101, Traditional Drawing, And Most of the Drawing 2 segments until I reached this challenge called When In Doubt, Draw 100.  Before I watched it I thought one hundred is a pretty large number, I mean I tried to do Inktober and a thirty day original character drawing challenge and I couldn’t even manage to do those, there is no way I could manage to draw one hundred of something I’m uncomfortable illustrating.

As if the challenge itself wasn’t hard enough, I had trouble even getting started on it. What should I draw? How many drawings a day should I try to do? What medium should I use when illustrating? Were all questions were allowed me to procrastinate and satisfy the instant gratification monkey in my head with some League of Legends. It took me a couple days browsing twitter and looking at amazing art to become honest with myself and say that it doesn’t matter what I draw because I’m so bad at everything the improvement alone will be worth it. But two areas I know that every artist struggles with, even my better peers on the social networks, are hands and feet. I mean just look at some of my earlier work

The feet and legs are more like blobs and the hands are pretty much mittens, both needed to be improved, but I decided to go with drawing feet first.

And I know what you’re thinking eww feet gross, people find feet gross, and repulsive for some reason? Maybe because you walk on them all day and they are close to the ground? I  don’t know, but I’ve been looking at feet my whole life. . . my view of the world is often looking down at the ground. Most people will look at other people’s faces when communicating, which is something I’m trying to do now, but my whole life I’ve had terrible self esteem and probably some form of depression so I’ve gone through it avoiding eye contact. The easiest way to avoid eye contact and not run into everything and everything is to look down at the ground. This way you can still see where people are going and where objects are in the world. If you do make it out into a more open area looking up at the sky isn’t a bad option either, but your neck would get tired after a while of stargazing.

They say a lot of information is conveyed through the window to the soul, the beautiful eyes human beings, and that probably  is true, but for me I got my information by looking everywhere, but people’s faces. Which mostly was their feet. Which can convey feelings all by themselves. You can tell by the motions of legs and feet whether someone is excited, proud, or tired by the way they walk or tap their feet nervously during the middle of class. Even the type of shoes they wear can tell you a little about their personality. For girls you can tell who the pampered rich ones are by how often their toenails are perfectly painted or if they are chipping. I remember a  girl I was crushing on in highschool got a pair of fresh new white vans. . . still my favorite pair of shoes to this day. All the super liberal art theater kids wore toms. . . to help the world out or something. But yes feet can tell you a lot about a character, I think a big influence on me is my favorite animation studio Kyoani, where one of the animation directors Naoko Yamada uses images of feet and legs to describe human relationships and interactions on a regular basis.

Legs and feet can be cute,  should  be able to describe the whole character,  even actions and motion are able to be extrapolated by through the feet by are posed,  or be fetishised(but I mean what can’t now a days am I right?), but you have to be able to illustrate them well for that to happen. Some of my favorite illustrators and animators can draw characters performing a variety of actions and because they can draw feet well the characters appear grounded and real. Even actions such as falling and being weightless have the feet react in some way shape or form.

This drawing challenge began six months ago in march of 2017 I had begun this challenge thinking  I’ll be able to knock this out in 10 days if I draw 10 feet a day. Which doesn’t sound to hard and in a perfect world that might have happened. These are probably just excuses but it was a combination of school, waning motivation, frustration, and laziness that I hadn’t finished as fast that I had wanted to. The challenge also started out being a way for me to learn to digitally sketch better, and probably woulda paid off too if I stuck with using my wacom or my surface pen to do the drawings. One drawing was even in color, which I don’t know why I decided to draw that one in color? I think it had a pretty night background, that I couldn’t execute well because it was wet pavement and streetlights.

I used a variety of sources for the feet in this set here, some from anime still frames, twitter drawings, League of Legends fan arts, and even some pictures of real life subjects.It took another four months before I started to make more drawings towards the study, but eventually I decided to start doing them in my sketchbook, because there are so many extra steps involved when drawing in a program that my procrastinating self couldn’t be bothered to deal with. First of all as much as I love my Surface Pro, the battery life is not ideal, the pen has a battery that runs out, and I don’t think my version of the surface is powerful enough to draw at the resolutions I like to illustrate digitally at. The only program I have for illustrating on my surface is manga studio, which isn’t bad because one of my favorite artists redjuice999 uses it, but it is different than what I am used to. Also when drawing on the go, which I do a lot now, you have to create a new folder, file, choose the resolution/document size, save it then find it again. It was a hassle to say the least so with an investment of  a little under 10 dollars I saved myself all those extra steps and got a new sketchbook and some mechanical pencils because no sharpening pls. Another reason that I stopped drawing was I was just getting too frustrated with drawing things I’m not comfortable with, not getting anything out of LoL streaming, my art and music had netted nothing for all the work put in, I really was just frustrated with life and started hated everything I was and was doing.

When I picked it up again four months later I started looking at comic books I enjoyed, both american and Japanese artists I admired I looked at more closely. The two main ones being Pokan8 illustrator of the Yahari Ore No Seishun Love Come Wa Machigattiru and Hiro Illustrator of Akebi Chan’s Sailor Uniform. I did look at the illustrations of an hero I could not read being as the whole page was in Japanese, but it was a random stroke of luck that I found his image on Pinterest. An interesting thing happened to me a third of the way through the drawing challenge. At about the mid thirtyish drawing I found myself enjoying the process and having fun drawing feet. This really showed I think in the 30-40 drawings of the “Gothic Loli” shoes as they were called. I don’t know why but those ones turned out really good I think? Maybe I liked Rem more than I thought and no I’m not a Lolicon those were literally what the page called the shoes. During the later 25 Drawings I found myself frustrated again I thought it was because the overall proportion and drawings seemed to be off, but that wasn’t it. Looking at the drawings the overall shape is pretty good, but upon retrospection I had realized that I was getting angry at the smaller details of the foot that I had completely brushed off before. All the small curves and nooks of the feet were becoming something I was aware of at those moments, and because my mind couldn’t wrap my head around some of the most subtle curves I was frustrated again.

I drew some feet even without photo reference, but looking at people as they passed by downtown on the street. Something that would have been not possible for me doing this challenge I was able to take a quick glance at pedestrians walking and make a quick sketch of the shoes they were wearing. I tried to do some without any reference at all, but they turned out super bad so I stuffed that Idea real quick. My later drawings I tried to look for more challenging angles, and gave more attention to clean linework and putting down darker lines where I wanted and I think that shows. The lines are less chicken scratchy than the previous drawings. I’m glad that my final drawing in the challenge had a tiny bit of shared joy as I had a viewer on my stream while completing the final piece. Thanks Zukeyni!!

For some reason I felt when i completed this challenge I would be able to draw feet with no reference easily and that I would feel like a better artist. Like completing this would give me a noticeable stat in some sort of rpg, but sadly that didn’t happen. I think that I would still need a lot of reference to draw a foot that would count as passable to my current standards. But I did improve!! Maybe? I don’t know you be the judge. To get more value out of this drawing challenge I think next time I would include more more shots from movies, challenging obscure angles, and action poses where people are in motion. As feet change when people are doing things like in one of the drawings up there I used a drawing of Akebi’s Little sister Kao chan throwing a paper airplane, and because Hiro is a good artist he captures the excitement of a kid throwing a paper airplane all the way down to her cute sneakers with little birds on them.

What I learned: I could’ve got this done much faster, you get faster as you go, take it one step at a time, lastly I still have a long way to go!

The next challenge I will do is drawing 100 hands, but I will wait until doing some other art tutorials on CtrlPaint before doing another one of these tasking, but rewarding challenges.

  Thanks to my stream that Supports me mentally during my fiascos.

SpectralFire, Derpiestder, Lord_Vath, and DirgeofRuin,

P.S. I think They all have secret foot fetishes . . . they watched the entire time.

The Draw 100 Art Challenge Feet As uncomfortable as it is making art and putting yourself on display, in order to grow and improve as an artist you have to start getting familiar with that feeling.