#thats right i have to break into a different sketchbook to finish this series

[itsjusteds]

I can only think of the spies. I have an all consuming hunger to draw every character in hopes that it will quiet the voices. So that's what I'm doing.

Today's character is Heidi, Laurens n@zi henchman :D Day 28/55

[cgpaints]

Monthly review, January 2017

Everyone who has read my “RIP 2016″ Post at the end of last year probably knows that that year ended on a rather bleak note for me. I really do not want to keep it at that though and I want to try to pull all the motivation to better myself out of the situation I seem to be a little bit stuck in right now.

So in order to do that I want to do a kind of “monthly review” thing just to force myself to look back at the last few weeks and see what I’ve been able to accomplish both art wise as well as freelance wise, or even life wise more generally speaking. So let’s just start it off and see where we are at:

Art:

The image shows every single bit of painting and drawing I made over the course of January. It includes every study and every drawing, doodle, experiment and finished piece I made last month. What it does not include of course is client work, which I am not allowed to show. You can download a huge version of the image heeeere: 

http://www.mediafire.com/file/3ngijvyy1kibk3a/full.jpg

I started the month off by wanting to focus on composition. It’s a subject I’ve been neglecting throughout all my years of painting and it really shows in my past work I think. I ended up learning a LOT about composition, value and color structure, which just felt awesome simply because I felt a great deal of control of direction when I painted my own images to apply all the things I’ve learned. Doing these studies and (I think) understanding a lot of the principles behind them cut out SO MUCH guesswork out of my own work. As a result I think I painted two of my strongest pieces thus far. Where I would try to render a painting to death in the past to make up for the lack of structure, having a clear composition actually opened up a lot of “artistic freedom” when it comes to painting and the act of applying paint(or pixels). This is a huge achievement for me as I never liked the aesthetic of super highly rendered digital art, it looks very boring to me and creating it feels very boring as well. I will definitely delve deeper into that in the future and I am looking forward to what’s coming

I also started to get back into watercolors. In the first place it is something that I always wanted to do just for myself but I always stopped mostly because of frustration and stupid excuses. This time, however, I managed to sit my ass down and just suffer through it. As a result finally a few things clicked into place I feel, I was actually able to create some small things that I’ve been fairly happy with and more importantly I am not fighting with the medium so much anymore so that I can finally focus on improving rather than ripping my hair out. Another reason why I started doing watercolors again was the hope that I would one day be able to actually sell some small originals, maybe in form of a little fanart series or something like that. As it is now, however, I don’t think that the quality qualifies me to ask for money for that stuff, so I’ll put that on hold for now.

This leads me to the last part wich is that I fiiiiiiinally picket up those pencils again!!! When you try to paint with watercolors you will probably notice that there is not much room for guesswork as far as the structure of your drawing is concerned. At least I noticed this LIKE HELL. I kept on thinking that my drawing was pretty tight and thought through just to notice in the middle of painting how off it actually was, which is super devestating because even a little undead warrior thingy can take up to a day until it’s finished. You don’t want to spend that time on something thats just crappy at it’s core.

So back to pencils and sketchbooks it was for me. All the pencil drawings are focusing on basic structure in 3D space, I desperately need to get more accurate with that. It’s weird how drawing is different when you use a pencil on paper. I use a cintiq for my digital work so one might think that it’s basically the same as drawing on paper and in a lot of cases it IS but for some reason that is beyond me it totally isn’t for studies. My brain just seems to work differently and more “thoughtfully” when I put stuff down on paper. It’s as if my brain has decided to detach itself from any kind of “seriousness” as soon as the thing I paint is digital, as if it was shutting itself down knowing that it is possible to bullshit a lot in photoshop. It’s interesting to me :)

So yea after struggling a bit with these pencils I think that I got used to it pretty well again and I will definitely keep at it!

Freelance/Life:

Freelance keeps being weird and very unsteady. The amount of clients are enough to get by somehow but it’s nothing to build on to be completely honest. I need to figure out better ways to get more consistent work and I do have some ideas in mind, I guess we will see in the next month(s) how everything works out. But yea it’s tough. For now “take care of your art and your art will take care of you” is something that I would really love to be true (and I live by that every day) but there also needs to be the business side of it, at wich I am not very good at the moment.

I was thinking about something along the lines of sharing my monthly progress in a way that might be financially helpful for me in some way. I made a little gumroad thingy for my composition studies this month. It was basically just a breakdown of my process and a little documentation of what I have been picking up during the time I painted them as well as a demonstration of how I break down the process. I would not want to call it a tutorial because it really wasn’t and calling it such would feel a bit arrogent to me. I shared this thing for free online and the response was great, people liked it and it was acutally helpful for some, which was great for me. Some people even donated a few bucks, which felt great as well.

You can still download it here btw: https://gumroad.com/l/JtIV

So I was thinking of maybe including some kind of study pack into these monthly reviews where I go over everything I made with little step by steps, video recordings and stuff like that and just share if for a buck or two at the end of the month. I’ll sleep a few nights on it first though. Also feel free to give your feedback on that idea. Would you care to spent a buck on something like that?

As far as financial stuff goes, I mentioned in my RIP 2016 post that things were a little hard but thanks to my amazing family I was able to take care of a few things which took an ENORMOUS burden off of my chest (Being able to sleep again is great!!)

There is still a lot of “existential anxiety” going on for sure but fortunately there is nothing there that can not be fixed in some way or the other, I jsut need to figure out how.

So yeaaaaaaaaa this is it for this month. I will keep pushing through february and we will see what I will have to talk about then!!