2-years drawing progress

This is the journey of practicing for one hour everyday.

With no guidance, it started exactly as you'd expect: a dogs breakfast.

So I started watching tutorials. Mostly Proko (free youtube), as well as his paid course: Figure Drawing Fundamentals.

I also took his portrait drawing course, and created these with charcoal.

Then I switched to digital following tutorials from ctrlpaint. And while these look miles better than previous attempts, it involved a lot of tracing and color picking. Not a lot of learning happened here.

I knew I wanted to create stylizations, so that was my next focus. But with little foundations to pull from, they were a bit all over the place.

At this point I took a 3 year break from drawing. And this was my first fully shaded piece when I returned.

Due to my inexperience, I thought the problem was that I needed to learn likeness through caricatures. So I took a 6 month detour into focusing solely on caricatures.

After failing to capture Kanye’s likeness 50 times in a row (I’m not kidding) I realized I wasn’t learning. This was because I wasn't familiar enough with the average face to know what to exaggerate.

Tried a fully shaded caricature and since I was good at neither, it looked like a hodgepodge of ideas.

I made the right choice to abandon caricatures after 6 months of trying, switching to learn the fundamentals of perspective and facial structure. This was boring, but it really helped me understand the form of the subject.

Applying what I'd learned to a few fully shaded face. "Jessica" from the movie 'Parasite'

And since I just watched it, Gosling from Blade Runner 2049

I had an epiphany when I realized I could create my own feedback loop with reference. Sketch once, overlay directly with reference, note the discrepancies then repeat.

My proportions improved a lot by doing this repeatedly.

At some point though I realized that even if a drawing had perfect proportions, it could still be boring. And on the flipside, flawed proportions could look interesting. So I decided to try a more gesture based approach.

It would be dishonest if I didn't also show the failures (or which there were many more). Some days nothing came together and it felt wasted. But often it was these days that woke me up to changing my learning direction.

I also failed at stylization more than once. I still don't really understand how to do it without it look like weird clipart.

I realized that stills from movies often had drastically easier to read lighting than soft-lit instagram shots, so I switched to them.

I was nervous about trying colour as I thought it to be one more thing to get wrong, but in some ways it was actually easier. Hue and saturation made it easier to understand what I was drawing from reference.

It started great (because the reference had hard shadows) then ended terribly, because I tried to simplify and stylize a soft-lit reference (which is like a beginners starting on an expert ski slope).

I decided it was time to revisit proportions, and shading. So I went back to B&W sketches. In these attempts I tried to maintain good proportions, while achieving more gesture driven strokes.

Someone on instagram suggested I do timed facial sketches. I was skeptical, since I thought this exercise was only valuable for full figure gesture sketches, but it worked just as well for faces!

In an effort not to get burned out, I then spent a week trying to understanding simplified shading, using some hard surface objects. In this case a planar head and a fire hydrant.

This was another painful learning experience. The value differences across the face were so subtle that it was far too challenging.
This was due to picking the wrong subject for my experience level: Feminine, soft-lit faces are the expert ski slope.

So I switched to some hard lit frames from movies and shows. And in this case, I did so many from Breaking Bad I put them all into one composition.

Then finally it was time for some full color movie references!

I had a lot of fun with these, because while focused on realism, I got to emphasize small differences in value, or subsurface scattering.

And finally, my most popular piece (according to Instagram likes): GORLAMI.

I learned too much to include it all here, so click the link in the description to read it on my site.
Thanks for reading.