gandalfsdrawingblog

[gandalfsdrawingblog]

Some of my early undirectioned stuff

This is just a simple post to show some of the early drawings I made before I decided to try taking a course. The images are not in a particular order, and there's a lot of stuff I don't have here that I ended up deleting as I didn't see value in keeping.

First is a painting I titled "Sunrise by Imil"

This started as a perspective practice with the usual "draw a box on 1, 2 and 3 point perspective"; but then slowly evolved into something that I wanted to see detailed, finished and such. I wanted to have a wintery landscape to show my players a vision of the world they inhabit. They visited Mercury Lighthouse a long while ago, and was a place that I don't feel like I left the impression on how eerie and out of place, yet absurdly natural felt. I would've loved to have this ilustration back then, to show my players a visual of where they were going, rather than a simple explanation of the area.

I also used this piece to get familiar with the brushes and customization tools that Krita offers. I learned a lot about texturing, layers, brush packs and other things with this piece. I'm happy about how it turned out, but feel like there's a lot of things that can definitely be improved.

Second we have a Chikorita fan art.

I wanted to draw something for my GF, and use that as a excuse to practice shaping and sketching. Chikorita was her starter when we played Pokemon HG/SS on a dual run, and she remembers fondly her "Kory", as she nicknamed it. I started strong with the sketch and felt like the shape was pretty much nailed, but as I got to detailing the line art, I found it hard to make the lines not feel wobbly. I need to practice more on my line smoothness.

Then we have Untitled piece #1, a shape practice sheet.

I actually had a lot more of these back when I first plugged the tablet to my PC. I used these sheets to practice lines, shapes and circles (you can see a lot of the circles). I was also trying to practice some shape forming into faces, as some video I saw taught me how. I don't really like the results, and feel like there's a lot of room to improve, but as this was literally 24 hours into my drawing hyperfixation, I think it has a place here. You can also see some early concept for the Lighthouse on the center of the sheet, which in turn came to be fully fledged on the first image of this post.

And that's all I have available to export now. I thought I had more pieces to show, but I guess those will come with time.

Will certainly upload more as I continue the course.

[gandalfsdrawingblog]

Why I decided to start drawing.

I'm a programmer by profession. I spent the last 6 years learning about computers, programming languages and such. I never considered myself a creative person, which is why any attempt at art I made before was either botched, I didn't like it, or has most of the process already done for me (as in, papercraft, where I just need to assemble the model and that's it).

Things changed a bit on April 2023, when I decided it would be fun to try and host a DnD campaing for my friends. I got to think for a while, and decided that ripping off the story line for Golden Sun, a relatively obscure game that none of my friends had played by then, could make for a good plot. It went great overall. Some more people joined with time, others left, but we're doing fine.

Last month the party finally reached Venus Lighthouse, and I was designing some encounters for the dungeon, drawing some maps and planning some puzzles. You know, the usual stuff.

I wanted to use one of the, in my opinion, most iconic monsters of the dungeon, which is the Stone Soldier (pic below). However, no such thing exists in official DnD material, which is why I resorted to homebrew something similar.

It wasn't the first time I did a homebrew monster, and it will certainly not be the last. I have the process outlined by now: conceptualize the idea of the monster (what it does, its abilities etc); translate that to a DnD statblock borrowing from other monsters with similar abilities, and then find an image to use as a token for the monster in the VTT.

It was the last part that got me. I couldn't just place the sprite from the games in the token, it would look awful having a 29x36 pixels image along my high resolution maps. It would suck. So the next step is to find a similar image, but how to do so when the god damn monster is a spiky ball with some long ass legs and a pair of angry eyes?

Google didn't help. Perhaps I couldn't find the proper terms to place in the search bar, but the results weren't to my liking. I then spent a while trying to use AI to generate a creature (which, I know it's bad, but then again, it's free and quick, I didn't want to bother), but the results were bad, the models didn't understand my petitions, and it felt soulless tbh.

Not having the time nor the willingness to commission someone for a silly drawing of a rock with feet, I gave up and decided that if internet couldn't draw the rock as good as I wanted, I would do it myself then.

I went and ordered a cheap tablet (Huion Inspiroy, for anyone interested), downloaded a drawing software and started playing around with tutorials to get myself used to it. When the tablet arrived, I got to follow some basics tutorials, drew some sketches and got comfortable with it.

After trying a while doing different stuff, I realized that if I wanted to learn to draw, I needed a more structured process than following 10 random "LEARN TO DRAW GOOD FAST NOW NOW NOW" youtube tutorials, and that's when I stumbled on the Drawabox online course.

I'm only really starting the course, I haven't even finished all of Lesson 0 yet, but the metodology of it and the fact that it encourages practice and play alongside actual homework and lessons sounded cool to me (that's what they call the 50% method). Also, the promise to be tasked with doing stuff that would feel way above my skill level sounded cool, which is why I decided to give it a try. Worst that can happen is I get bored and give up on it by week 2.

But who knows?

[gandalfsdrawingblog]

About me and this blog

Hi, I'm Jhon, aka Gandalf (GandalfELZ, Gandalf_elzarcco, etc). I'm a 23 y/o programmer from Colombia that wanted to start drawing. I bought a digital drawing pad and started sketching on Krita.

I didn't really like my art at first, which is why I decided to follow some tutorials and courses, and I thought it would be cool to document my process in this blog, just for the hell of it. I also think that this blog can be a reference for those who, like me, want to start making art and don't know what to do; as well as a log to compare myself with how much I've grown.

I will try to add context and other things that make sense to me in the context of the post. Also I would like to apologize beforehand if this blog ever dies out or goes without updates for a while. I tend to forget things, and I'm sure this won't be the exception, but I'll make my best effort.

Hope you have fun here!