• thegiddystitcher@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    5 months ago

    Really good work on all the different textures! How long have you been practising to be at this sort of level?

    • maegul@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      Thank you!

      I don’t want to get into the details of I’ve been drawing for X time etc … seems to me like it could get too much into flexing or feeling bad about ourselves territory.

      My path though has been:

      • watched a couple of YT vids … from which I took away:
        • Just practice by drawing any simple thing around you
        • Sketching is drawing lots of small lines so that your image evolves into what you want (I didn’t know this!)
        • Spheres and other simple shapes with directed light are a great thing to practice (kinda obvious, of course, but I would have jumped straight into mountains and stuff without that advice).
      • Every couple of days, I try to draw a sphere with directed light and shading.
      • Something that really made it work for me was discovering how much those paper blending stump tools can do for shading and texture
      • Once I could kinda reliably draw something decent I thought I’d try the pyramids as they’re still very geometrical but more interesting and details (plus I love the pyramids).

      The main thing I’m learning so far, I think, is the whole “learning how to see” thing … and picking up on the details or effects that are part of the image which I can recreate to some extent with what I know how to do with the pencils (so far: lines, shading and blending).

      With the pyramids, once I noticed I could use small dots and scratches for the ruinous blocky look of the closer pyramid and then back that off to a more blended/soft shading for the more distant pyramid … this more or less drew itself. The only tricky part was getting the values to be consistent with each other across the image … which I find hard and unintuitive to do and really only get by through patience.

      Since this pyramid sketch, I’ve tried doing an eye. I wasn’t too happy with it but it was ok … I’ll try it again but try to do some soft shading first and then add fine texture details on top … I’m hoping that will give it a greater sense of depth.

      I’ve written all this just in case its helpful to anyone also learning (and in the hope its good advice too).

      Thanks so much for the complements again!!