Pushing further in Art

Art is my first love. Before there was programming, before there was any other hobby, there was me sitting and losing hours in doodles at the back of the books I was supposed to be doing my homework in. Sadly, art was never something I truly had support in growing up, and over time I lost interest in developing myself as well. Truth be told, I was so arrogant as a child, I'm not sure how well I would have taken to formal classes anyway. But the past is the past, and these days I try my best to keep training myself in art.

It's a long slog, but over the last few years I've made meaningful progress.

The progress timeline can be best viewed in that Twitter thread. I wanted to share a couple of different things today.

The first is that I'm trying to make meaningful consistent progress with my art now. This isn't the first time. And it's not like I haven't made meaningful progress. I'm just frustrated by the stop start nature of it all. I'm also frustrated that despite having made meaningful progress, I also feel like I have been educating myself in a decidedly unstructured manner. If you were to plot my progress on a radar chart, you'd get a very very spiky looking one back. I've made progress in draftsmanship. In perspective. In colour theory. In animation. In figure and gesture drawing. And it's all so broad and shallow. I need to fix that.

In my case, I think the best way to do this though, is to have projects. I never seem to learn well unless I have an end goal. I think the only thing I've learnt by using tutorials is security engineering and that's probably because it's all steeped in real world application from the get go. Point is, I need to be working towards something concrete.

So today, I started working on creating actual finished images. Rather than practicing more and more theory of perspective and drawing boxes, or simply working off more and more reference, I tried to compose a bunch of shapes together to create my own original drawing. Before I knew it, I had come up with my first ever original character. She doesn't have a name, but she's been named Hotu, Leila, and various other things by people I asked for input from. The best I've got so far has come from my wife: "Enya". And assuming that's the name I keep, I'd love to show Enya.

Ignore the 6's here. Just teaching my son how to write the number.

And that's it! Enya in a variety of scenarios. From just talking to flying, to sitting down to tell a story.

But that's not all

I also have been working on a little comic for my son and for that I've created characters from him and his cousins. Nothing much, but also worth sharing as something that I'm going for as a final product. Here's a couple of pics including the face designs.

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Posted on May 17 2021 by Adnan Issadeen