Semester 3 Work Part 3: MA Break

 In between my Pakistani research I did a few impromptu sketches to practise sketching poses quickly and try concepting quicker (I am still timing myself so I can do sketches in 10 mins). I used Pinterest as reference for the following poses. I thought it would also help with my understanding of how to draw clothes on a person and general anatomy of the human body:

I tried to go for variance in poses, styles and ethnicities. These poses took me about 15 mins each to complete which I would say is a plus for me as I wasn't stressing about time and it felt naturally done. I'm not sure when I've not been stressed out about everything during lockdown but it was nice to know I achieved this small victory for myself. I hope I can concept quick sketches like this in the future in under 15 mins and hopefully with some colour too! I just have to keep practising!! Also as a way to relax I decided to draw some fanart (I remember Jim advising this to me last time I was overwhelmed after I had a skin infection due to a bad eczema flare up). I had recently read the manga Blue Exorcist during the holidays in August (I went on a bit of a book buying splurge at Waterstone's and ordered a lot....) and I really liked Amaimon's character design. Especially his clothing style but also hair and personality appealed to me a lot as Amaimon is like the kind of character I would want to design? All credit to Kazue Kato for coming up with a cool story like Blue Exorcist especially with the characters who I feel emotionally invested in by how good they are written. I usually don't care for fictional characters to this extent but yeah just wanted to show some Amaimon appreciation. I used a model photo with the chair as reference but changed his pose so he would cover his eye as that's kinda Amaimon's thing: 

So I only got as far as the line art sketch but I just couldn't make myself do the colouring. I feel like my drawing is best left as it is as it was only an exercise to relieve stress and sort of take tension away from the MA. At this point my eczema was all over the place so I just drew when I could and stopped when it was too much.

Character ref (Amaimon from Blue Exorcist):

I also did some fail drawings below. I wanted to leave them out but I know that it's important to include what you do as progress so I tried to concept fantasy warrior women which were unrelated to my research at the time but I was again trying to take a break from MA stuff during this time. I don't know what to say really I was trying to go for the armoured look but I also wasn't being super focused whilst doing these so a lesson learned was that due to a lack of proper references my concepting is bad haha. Also my imagination is 100x better than drawing from imagination. I hope one day I can google 'South Asian fantasy' and not be given a page of Chinese women. Another lesson learned is that I have to search in the most random places to find references that I want. Again, I guess this is just motivation to keep drawing what I want to see. Hopefully it one day becomes normalised and I can google easily to my heart's content.

References used:

Below is another mistake but lessons were learned as always! I tried a self portrait but it was really bad. I was trying to do something with the palette but tbh it became too much effort for me and the end result didn't seem worth it. I mean, I was just gonna have a picture of me staring at me so....yeah. My lesson here was that if I want to draw successfully I have to think less and just paint (digitally) more. Here I was so nitpicky about the colour position and shading that it wasn't turning out like a normal face and then I remembered that I've drawn plenty of faces before and the trick is to keep it super simple like limit myself to 1 colour first, then add a 2nd one and 3rd (if required but after 2 I should just stop). I think this is also why when it comes to drawing faces I keep the colours flat because I end up overthinking it and try to become that person who was obsessed with realism (when I was doing traditional art). But it's all part of the learning process so this is here as my reminder of what not to do:

It's kinda funny looking back on it now though as I always prided myself for my realistic portrait traditional drawings and couldn't draw bodies at all but now with digital art I've become a lot better with poses and bodies and am terrible at portraits. Guess I should stick to traditional for portraits and digital for bodies!

To make things easier to read I will break the post here and write the next (and hopefully final) part in the next post.