Drawing Tablet adventures 1.0 - Rex
Look ma, I drawred a thing today!
I wanted to practice using the new XP Pen tablet I just got, so I thought I would try drawing Rex, a new charactater who recently moved to my Animal Crossing island.
Rex from Animal Crossing
After some sketching around, I ended up with this:
It came out kinda ok! Just don't zoom in. You'll see all the corners I've cut and other sloppy details. 🤫
Fakin it til I make it
Yeah so I don't actually have any formal training in drawing. I drew a ton as a child (what kid didn't), but I can tell my hand muscles have atrophied over the years of never needing to use a pen for anything anymore.
I have been an active user of Photosohp and other graphics programs for some designy work, and quick production work for a variety of OMQ creatives throughout the years. But I've always been frustrated with myself with never being able to create anything from scratch myself. I can manipulate graphics all day and make them look pretty ok; I can add color to b&w comics and trace some lines.
But overall I have a hard time drawing with my own hands. I also have a very hard time drawing with Bezier curves, so I keep resorting to producing something in the easisest way I can find.
Like Rex, above. At one point I tried using the Pen tool to create clean outlines, but I kept messing up, and felt it would take me longer to figure out how to get the damn beziers correct than to draw it myself. But when I went back to straight drawing, where I struggled with positioning shapes in the right place. I had a hard time with symmetry and my lines are all jittery.
I've been watching all sorts of YouTube videos lately on how to draw, trying to pick up what style, what methods might be right for me.
I initially started off with one of the suggestions, of wanting to outline Rex 20 times to build the muscle memory of drawing shapes, but I really had no idea what I was doing, and I devolved into coloring him within some jittyery shapes instead (something I already know how to do). Perhaps Rex was too complex to start with? My discipline for practice is pretty bad.
I'm still not sure what style of "art" I want to or can do. Am I a sketcher? Do I want to make comics-like things? I know I want to do more than just average production work.
In the meantime I've figured out that I need to do the following things.
- Improve Bezier skillz. (I really like clean line styles! But really doesn't need a tablet to practice.)
- Improve shading techniques
- Improve penchant for discipline just a little bit, so I can keep practicing.
- Learn to draw bodies, positioning/posture (either realistic or cartoony)
- Explore facial expressions (either realistic or cartoony)
#drawing#animal crossing