3D I, Week 7, Part 1: Self-evaluation

This week in 3D we had a lecture on human anatomy and musculature to prepare for character modeling. At the end of the lecture, we sat down in groups and evaluated each other’s strengths and weaknesses in anatomy.

This blog post is a reflection on my 2D art skills.

I’m heavily influenced by animation and comics, and I usually draw character art. I studied animation in high school, and one particular skill I consciously try to develop is effective use of line of action, and clear silhouettes.

I take a lot of shortcuts when sketching and draw humans in a very simplified style. I often draw out limbs as a single line, then add triangle-like shapes onto the line to flesh out the shape.

I mainly draw digitally nowadays, and lately I’ve been trying to push my use of colors. I practice a lot with limited palettes, and try to assemble my own color combinations for different moods.

My biggest problem that’s hindering development is that I’ve gotten too comfortable with this simplistic style. I’ve got a smooth workflow down, and I stick to it without pushing myself to improve or experiment.

Some recent character illustrations.

During the group critique in class, my classmates mainly thought I need variety in what I draw. I mainly draw young female characters with relatively standard hourglass figures. Looking at my sketches, they pointed out that I exaggerate proportions in anatomy a lot, such as hip to waist to shoulder ratio. This works fine for certain character designs, but I put huge disproportion in upper body anatomy on nearly every human I draw.

These are observations I’ve made myself. I need to incorporate more variety in body fat, muscle and age in the characters I draw. I cite animation as one of my influences, but I don’t utilize variety in character silhouettes to its full potential. Character designs in comics and animation have a huge variety in silhouettes, exaggerating physical traits to push character, and I shy away from that.

An old draft of the character I designed for assignment 3, which was later made younger and heavily simplified for ease of modeling.

I’ve also gotten far too used to my simplistic style, I don’t try for realism unless I’m studying life models. I need to push myself to learn more about the human anatomy, it would make even my simple drawings better. More knowledge and experience would help me push my poses further and draw a wider variety of people. Thin, fat, frail, strong, young and old.

Of course, I also need to train myself in drawing things other than humans. I very rarely draw animals and environments, and I need to study those things more to truly shine as an artist.

I really want to push my 2D drawings further. In the future, I’d love to go to more life drawing classes, and take it up as a regular past-time after school. I’ve also gotten far too reliant on digital tools over the past year, I should get back into practicing with regular pencils.

In the instructions for this blog post, we were told to plan out 3 goals over the next 6 months to improve our 2D skills.

Firstly, I’d like to study human anatomy more intensely. I really want to sit down and properly study one of our course books, Art Fundamentals: Color, Light, Composition, Anatomy, Perspective, and Depth. The way this book is written and laid out works really well with my learning methods, and I want to get as much out of this book as I can. With more knowledge on human anatomy, I want to introduce more variety in the figures I draw, and push expressiveness in my poses and faces.

Secondly, I want to learn to draw animals. At the very least, I want to familiarize myself with the basic anatomy of felines and canines. I’ve had the book The Art of Animal Drawing recommended to me, and from what I’ve seen of it, it seems very useful. I’m not sure it would be enough though, and I want to look up more literature on the subject.

I’m not quite sure what I would put as my third goal. My main interests in art is drawing characters, and my other two goals address two important areas I’m not skilled enough at yet. I think as my third goal, I want to get better at environment. It feels a bit general to just say I want to get better at human anatomy, animal anatomy, and backgrounds, but I really want to push myself in all these fields. I love speedpainting environments, but I do it so rarely. Ideally, I want to get into regular, maybe even daily environment practices with speedpainting. If I can make myself more comfortable with drawing environments, maybe I’ll stop drawing so many characters floating in white space.