Finally, I decided to learn Procreate.

Mini iPad, + Procreate.

DAY 1

The best time for me was during my daily 60-mile commute. This is day 1 of Michelangelo's human anatomy studies. I like the size of the mini iPad. I have special nibs for drawing for the pen and the paper-like filter, but....it feels digital. The mediums are and will always be different and never really compete. I will always go to my pen and paper kit whenever I can.

DAY 2

I got tired of working on the face, so I started on the back.

DAY 3..

So, during my last vacation of 2020, I decided to refresh my Zbrush skills by exploring more its render presets. I am looking for a lithography line.

While testing at different stages I noticed that sculpting plays a significant part. The render is making sense of the lines and it must be a coherence between what you sculpt for and the render settings. You can't just sculpt and hope for the best. You need to sculpt for the render...kind of thing.

Below are the mesh and a render. Far from being done. I am still exploring the character design as I go without a sketch to follow. I am hoping to find inspiration in Zbrush's tools.

The render preset used is Zhelong_Ink with no adjustments, only the defaults.

Tools: iPad Pro 4th gen 12.9”

Project: drawing for comic books

It’s been a while since the last time I drew. I split my time between science and design nowadays. Human figure was never my strength. I am a fine arts graduate but in school I was fascinated only by portraits and I dedicated all my 5 years of academic training obsessively almost, just to..portraits. So, many, many years later, I started to feel comfortable exploring other things and styles and here I am learning again, from the perspective of an adult, the art of figure drawing for comics. This is an ongoing project and I am going to post my work in progress best pieces from my self training. If I see noticeable results I may put my adventure into a course. For now, I will happily embrace my forever student status.

• Day 1

The sketch from above took me almost my entire ‘day’. Feeling very tired and wanting to give up...then something happened and I wanted to push myself to do more.

Encouraged by a few likes on my instagram account (InTheLowLight.art) I decided to try to follow a daily drawing routine for 100 days and document the progress religiously.

• Day 2

A bit confused by the perspective but, good enough for a day 2 post.

• Day 3

Simple but hard.

• Day 4
  Figure drawing for comics is like another language. Each pose is actually an entire phrase, a complete and direct visual way of communicating between the artist and the audience. There are no subtle interpretations like in fine art. Just a raw stream of data. Just as any language it can be perfected endlessly. There are no good or bad drawings. They are just different. If sometimes they don’t match one to one what others learned religiously in school this doesn’t mean much on the public scale...art supplies should be distributed freely...and art critique should stop serve small groups agendas. Art is for everyone. Just as the sky is for everyone. What do you think?

• Day 5

This is for the first time when I noticed a significant improvement on the speed. The below took me a few minutes comparing with the first one that took me the entire day. Not sure about the quality yet but the speed to sketch up something very quickly gives me more time to refine it. I am going to use that once the new speed gets a routine.

• Day 6

Super tired today. The dog didn’t let me sleep last night. I still pushed to get this done. It took 6 min per frame. Meaning I should allocate for the entire activity including posting, maybe 1 hour a day. I found today incredibly difficult the static postures and incredibly easy the dynamic poses. I really don’t know why. But I will have to come back to this issue after the 100 days if things don’t get better.

• Day 7

Discovered a new toy in Procreate today...and I left this daily sketch to the end of the day. Very tired and bored of my stick-man. However, I am very far away from my desired drawing fluidity. So, I’ll not give up. It will be just so boring...gosh. Some days are hard.

• Day 8

First scene sketch ever. Terrible but less boring at least.

Tools: Photoshop, Wacom Intuos Pro S, MacBook Pro 13", iPad Pro 12.9”, 4th generation, Procreate.

Project: Panoramic Digital Painting.

July 4th, 2020, I started a panoramic landscape large size print. 115 x 36 cm at 300 DPI. 

For the first stage, I focused on the colors, composition, and light.

The next stage is starting to add the details. I am still researching on foliage brushes and deciding what kind of trees we're having here...stay tuned for updates.

July 8th, 2020, after experiencing a lot of problems with my hardware (Wacom Intuos Pro decided to break its windows 10 drivers leaving me without a pen indefinitely cause there is no support available ) I finally purchased the last iPad Pro 4th génération from Ontario...it sold like cupcakes apparently and the only one left was a cellular version...anyway. I got it because I had a painting to finish. So, after I installed the paper like screen and got the artist glove in my size after 3 returns, I finally started to paint. This is far away from a real update but I wanted to point here how absolutely wonderful the drawing experience is. Below is a pic with the new toys and a small fragment of the panoramic. I think this experience is the best in my entire art career.

Stay tuned for next step....

...and it’s a wrap! This is a few weeks project now...since the foliage is still not solved. Getting there slowly. Tomorrow will bring a new light.

July 10th and we have some reed. I am not sure where I’ll go on the other side yet. The light changed with the details and I’ll have to readjust soon  for today I think that’s all.