Contemplating from afar

Time to start the series of article on my project to learn drawing. I’m currently stuck at the 15th days sadly. It’s time consuming, and I don’t have much time thanks to college. But I will write the articles on my progression. The article might not follow the chronological order or my drawing. I decided to split them into subject which are relevant to my training. I will also provide the experience I learned. It’s the point of view of someone who is slowly progressing. My advice aren’t one of a pro, and in fact, might not be the best solution, but at my level, it’s the best I can do.

I think that everyone started from that point. Every artist copied someone else before. In art college, people copy as well. Copying is the first step in learning drawing I think. The aim is not to perfectly draw, but understand the line and construction of the drawing. Moreover, it’s an easy way to improve since as an exercise, there is already the correction available. For this exercise, I started first by using a lightbox, but then, I just drew side by side.

So the first 3 days were copies of several drawing I had in stocks, mostly from my collection of Dengeki Hime. I encountered several problem while doing so. The first one is the fact that they were in color, and I’m begining with lineart, so it has been quite hard. Second things is proportion, which is not easy to retain.

On the other hand, I learned hair design, and I also learned the basic proportion for the face. Hair are usually drawn as bangs, and on the face, it covers at least half of the front, and can overlay the eyes. For long hair, there is 2 layers for the hair, one around the head, and another one for the long hair.

After the copy of the magazine, I decided to try to copy another lineart, and I tried one of Tinkle, Shuna from Magical Tail, a new drawing which was in the a small booklet bundled with Byakuya Chakai. By copying this one, I learned some new things by auto criticizing myself.

I failed the face, sadly. The shape is too long, and so is the eyes. Tinkle’s eyes are much rounder. On the other hand, I did adopt partly the ways they draw the eyes in black and white. It just needs to be rounder, and that’s what I did on the day 4. Also, I got some basics at shading. When you don’t have screentone, you can colorize like you would do with color pencil, but here I learned the hashing technique, which use interval between line to set the tone. I quite like this, and it’s possible to cross hashes, but it’s harder.