Poetry's drawings and stuff

Reworking an earlier painting with a proper drawing underneath.

Done(?)

Got a lot of good advice from /ic/. Realized my overeliance of brush with blending activated and restraint with colours (from still life practice last year) has made a lot of my work very low contrast and dull.

overwatch has been taking up a lot of my time. this is the only thing ive properly painted this year so far ._.

i've just been trying to keep my skills from going completely in the shi'tter by sketchbook drawing and some redlines for anons on /ic/.

study of painting I love


application of that study to something from imagination


paintover for anon

I'm dying bro


Sketchbook


Redlines

 Spoiler

hello frens

i am not ded but i srsly regret not applying for medicine fuk optom is hard

paintover for an anonfren



edit: incase its not obvious i made the one on the left

redrew a friend of a friend's comission to make a point

i should be studying for finals

danika is 2nd best maple-fu


unfinished redline i never posted


sadturnip


some realtalk tiem

if you're browsing this thead youll notice in maybe page2-3 or something i mention optometry school or medicine school

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i made a mistake

i shouldve done medicine, i had the marks for it, i wouldve gone interstate

i wouldve had f U n

i would've graduated and not have become a refraction drone, a machine for big coporations to sell glasses with

i wouldve been fuccccccccckiiiiiiiiing fulfilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeed

i didnt want it at the time becuase of the 'stress'
because i didnt want to ever say anything 'bad' to a patient

thats fuuuucking duumb

im fuuuucking dumb

i wanted the free time of drawing. optom was so easy to get into for me so i thought itd be easy to study but obviously nothing in univerisity is ever easy

iii wasted my time on overwatch


sooo much f'ucking time. hundreds of hours thats so stupid

thats hundreds of paintings aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

and now its either graduate at 22 as an optometrist and have an /ok/ life but possibly hate my job and deal with feelings of inadequacy for the rest of my life

or graduate at 26 as a med student (at best) and get sh'it on for years and hate my job possibly for the rest of my life


whaaaaat the fuccccccck happened to my plansssss



the extra depressing reality is that one day. im never going to post in this thread again, and god-forbid a database wipe at this rate itll just exist as an archive of someones dreams being crushed/derailed

bruh. b r U H

haha ecksdee not ded yet



detail

 Spoiler

Jesus I forgot about the last post I made.

I passed my exams so far and I don't feel that same despair about my degree.
I haven't been doing much drawing but I think I'm still getting better, its just so slow.
Sometimes I reread my posts from years ago just for the nostalgia trip, I was so determined, I had such a fire and drive for it.

When I started I used to read sketchbook threads on some now-long-dead site called ConceptArt.Org. I always skipped from their very first noobie sketch pages to the latest ones 4-5 years later, it just made improvement seem so real and the dream so possible. I just saw their work in a bubble as it magically improved, I never saw that those guys all had lives outside it and that things for them probably changed over time.

My degree is going to get me a well paying job with enough spare time to pursue this. I'm not going to worry about the prestige of it, med is suicide and even 16yearold me knew that, he just didn't know how terrible optometry would be LUL.

I guess the main thing is that I'm just lost. I love drawing, especially painting but I don't know if I want it to be something I'd want to get paid for. I'll reread this thread again to find out.

the extra depressing reality is that one day. im never going to post in this thread again, and god-forbid a database wipe at this rate itll just exist as an archive of someones dreams being crushed/derailed

bruh. b r U H

not 2day brUH

Photostudy to learn how to handle a basic round brush because Ive been too reliant on my custom one. Also to practice endurance and learning to render and give a shi't about the clothing as well.

Its making me want to tear my eyes out holy fu'ck the amount of jewelry detail then having to find out a way to simplify it so im not trying for a 1:1 copy or ill want to blow my brains out while still giving the same feeling from afar of detailed metal and jems. WHen i squint and observe closely i just see more garbo in the shadows to add in and its tilting me




how the fU'K do people have the patience for this crap i have always hated photostudies FUUU

Done for now, couple of notes made as well for it:

• Accuracy: I was off from the reference by quite a bit in terms of skull structure and scale of the relative components of the body. My issue is that in the initial line drawing I didnt take into account big masses and moved left to right referencing the headscarf to the wall, the right eye socket to the headscarf, the nose to the right eye socket etc. This lead to compounding mistakes of measurement which resulted in a differently shaped skull. Instead I should've blocked in the entire thing first, made sure the big shapes were correct and then moving in with detail. I also have a tendency to magnify or draw-too-large anything I'm looking at (e.g. the gems at first). Color accuracy was much better but tbh its one of my stronger points.
  
  
• Edges: The concept of a line lay in is interesting to me. I realised when trying to convert the photoreference to a line drawing, when I focus on any "line" im really just choosing an edge of the original to keep in my drawing. When I squint I can see other edges, i.e. other choices, such as shadows within shadows and finer detail. This same concept of edge priority, or what lines matter the most relate really closely with the painting stage. Not only do edges form the demarcations of light and dark, but also colour, texture, I can represent so many different edges with the same line. This also explains to me just why those charcoal figure drawings with the blocked in shadows appeal to me so much. The edge of the shadow is exaggerated, but the artist has chosen the most important edge and as such it reads really clearly to me even though the shadow itself is flat; the lower priority edges arent included.
  
  
• Detail Priority: The reference was aids. I chose it because I wanted to push myself into detailed work and being more accurate with photostudies. I tend to not do them because I get discouraged by them as I rarely match the reference. As its such a complex painting, when I was done I realised that if I turned it to BW and bumped the contrast to max, I could get a sense of where the areas of greatest light/dark contrast were, which as I know from Optom school is one of the biggest draws to our visual system and something we very heavily rely on to process visual imagery. The comparison is attached. Looking at the jaw jewelry just highlights to me how important the dark areas are as well as the actual metal. Painting the jewelry was probably the hardest part of the whole painting as everything I did felt wrong until I realized that I had to paint with almost black and put heavy dark shadows between the gems and glitns and then blend the shadows out. It then became a measure of making the actual metal pop by using lighter colors and very bright glints. The execution is sloppy in a lot of points but I think the best examples would be the around the all the blue gems, as well as the right jaw-green gem's silver petals/wings. Everything else looks tacky and plastic in comparison.
  
  
• New Tools: Instead of the standard flat brush I use with pressure dependent blending and variable texture. I used 3 main brushes, a 100% opacity pen with pressure dependent size to lay down blocks of colour, the standard sai brush at 100% to "push" colour from one side to another and manual painting of textures stroke by stroke, and a standard sai watercolor brush at 100% for soft blending that you can see in the background and cloth. I found this setup a really good return to basics because I actually had to think more instead of going on autopilot with the one brush, there was a different approach to every main material and it felt more like I had to manipulate colours on a page and plan my strokes ahead instead of my normal process of spamming the brush til it clicks and then varying colour over the top. The skull especially was difficult to get from the block in stage(3) to its current texture, I ended up using hatching brush strokes to easily build a roughed up appearance and then focused on using the hard pen tool to nail in larger bumps. The water tool was also dank as I used it a lot to sort of, draw out shadows, or give them this soft while still varying detail. I think I'll be using these tools more as they feel like less of a crutch.
  
  

Comfy Quick Doodles:


Sketchbook Pages:

80% now. Final year begins.

Work in progress. The red turtleneck might be a placeholder idk. I just want to compare this to the piece at the top of the page and see if I've grown much in the last 2 years.
Honestly, I don't really think I have in as big of a step as the very start, but thats with most artists I think, plus my lack of dedication to practice definitely played a factor.
I'm trying to apply the same painting techniques I got a feel for in the previous study of the skull, as well as use more sparingly my favorite chalk brush that I had too great of a reliance on.


edit: doneskis

pepega

Some streamers OC who got bullied by someone else for their art. Kinda reminded me a lot of how I started drawing. You never forget the first time you get told you're terrible LUL. Took me 2.5hours too only which is pretty efficient I reckon.


Mates pathfinder,


General life news; Im almost done with my optometry agree like I was so keen on 4-5 years ago in this thread. I've been job hunting and have almost secured a comfy 9-5 jobbo in my area and yea...

Looking back; eh. I think I'd be happy with where Im at now. But I'm lazy and dont do any studies, I've just been rarely painting for the past months and grinding away in small sketchbooks.

Rotating figures

Figures from imagination

Scenery Painting

hsc results came out

• 90 economics (i did it accelerated, last year)
  91 extension 2 maths
  97 extension 1 maths
  94 physics
  92 english advanced
  ...
  82 business studies (it wont count towards my ATAR)

estimated ATAR 99.40~

I could've gotten a medicine interview with these marks but I applied too late HAHA. My heart wasn't fully in it anyway, who gets medicine degree as a "backup" for freelance illustration?

Optometry school here I come!

I realized I'm never going to make it as a professional artist.
I realized I'll always wonder what-if if I don't see if I can make it as a doctor.
I grew up during my Optometry degree, that cushy job with low stress and free time and no one dying on me or being sick. Thats not what I want anymore.
The patient I remember the most was a guy who came in just for glasses, he was happy and on the routine check I picked up a retinal tear and sent him off for surgery so he wouldnt lose sight.

He came back the next day thanking me for saving his vision. Not for the glasses I prescribed, but for the difference I made in his life. I've never felt happier and I realize more and more that its the medical side of it that has the greatest draw to me. Every optometrist has a highlight reel of things they spot during their career or people they treat, but if you work corporate thats just grains of gold in a sea of sand. What if I want to make a real difference for patients every day? What if I just want to try? The moments of my life I'm most proud of have been the times where I didn't let things just happen to me. I didn't let the UMAT discourage me from optometry, I didn't let those two pricks shi't on my art and breaking me. But I've just been surviving my degree and if I don't do anything I'll just be surviving the rest of my life in regret.

I'm applying to med school. I'll always be drawing. I'll always have this but if I don't start giving a shi't I'll always have regret as well. I don't care if it takes one or two or three or five years to get in. I'll make it.

Comfy old paintings





Uncomfy pushing a painting to the limit and realising I've lost all edge control and colour nuance which made me love the original. WIP. It was really awesome to see it critiqued and painted over on a livestream.
Main points noted by MR Professional artist were:

• Using overlay, control focal points of the image from thumbnail form with darks and lights
  Macro contrast -> overall blocking away of non-focal reas
  Micro contrast -> greater detail, rendering and contrast at focal points
  Push shadows and Push foreground light
  Topleft block/shadow/image/component is required to fix composition
  "Its going places"
  "Eyes draw to hand too much"
  "Flow hair away, use it compositonally"
  "Dont stray from THIS area circles"
  "What the pineapple is going on here -gestures to dark blotch of legs and arm-"
  "-its really cool-"
  "asian feel to it"
  

General diary entry is I still despair for the last 5 years of my degree and want out but realize that that might not be possible and I dont know. I just reread old thread entries with nostalgia and bitterness.

LOOMIS


AnoTHER SKETCH

Took me 3-4hours in one sitting with no ref


Done for now


i still dont have an active art blog, my tumblrs dead with like 20 followers kek

i AM goIng to Be a GreAt IllUstraTor and FunD my mId 20s eXistence ThrU meD schOOl bY locuMing as OptOmeTrist and DrAWing Anime griLLS