Month: April 2025

This card is from SVS Magic of Color.

This lesson is about doing a paint swatch from dark to light. The light color of the base green is really hard for this exercise. The green is already at a very light greyscale value, that it makes it hard to tell the levels of white to add. It goes to very light very quickly. I like the lower value end of the scale. This is the pure RBG green, so it was good to work with, but it took me even longer than usual because I had to keep going back and redoing sections.

Next time I will work with a non-primary color, maybe a purple, just to have more to work with.

Photoshop using Huion tablet.

I did about 60 minutes to complete this image.

This card is from SVS Freaky Friday Draw Along.

This session was a mix of things from Lee. I’m now starting to learn about why you need to warm up and what warmups even mean. It took me 2 drawings to loosen up and get comfortable. Then, on the 3rd drawing, I really hit my groove and started having fun with things. One thing Anthony mentioned is that if we have a passion project, go ahead and relate everything to that. It’s funny because I started doing that by drawing my character instead of the given design, but felt like that would be bad. But then I felt like it was ok to keep drawing myself into things and really relaxed. I had a lot of fun!

Next time I will warm up with a few quick drawings BEFORE class.

Photoshop using Huion tablet.

We did a 90 minute session to complete this image.

This card is from SVS Intro to Prop Design.

This lesson is about rendering the prop to finish the project we have been working on. What’s nice is that this lesson reinforces the others regarding a good process to render. As a beginner, it’s nice to have process steps to follow. I feel like my rendering skills are so lacking. I struggle with color, light and shadow, and now surface material design. I’m just making it up for now, and I know there are classes coming up to work on that more. I also made a HUGE error in how I approached this – if I have light coming in from the side, like I started with this, then I don’t want to also add a glowing light source in the lamp, the lighting would get too complicated. But, I still need to figure that out. Someday. So it’s an empty lamp without the magical glowing orb inside, for now. I feel like this was successful, but with a lot more to learn.

Next time I will work on the next prop in the ensemble. I also need to work on rendering skills, but those will come.

Photoshop using Huion tablet.

I did about 60 minutes to redo the linework and render this image.

This card is from SVS Basic Perspective.

This lesson is about ellipses in perspective. I went through the lessons again looking at setting up a 2 point perspective grid, then drawing ellipses in perspective. The class gets into a lot more technical details. What I want to apply it to is wheels and tires. I have such a hard time drawing tires on cars. They always look wonky, the tires themselves and how they sit on the car. So I re-took the class thinking about how to work with tires. Then I grabbed a bunch of photos of vehicles and traced over the tires to get more practice with all the planes and overlapping circles. Finally, I drew a little car and worked really hard on the tires. It took me several tries, but they look pretty good. It seems like such a simple concept, but I have a really hard time getting tires to look correct.

Next time I will work from life and draw cars outside just for more practice.

Photoshop using Huion tablet.

I did 50 minutes practice and then 20 minutes to complete this image.

This card is from SVS Intro to Prop Design.

This lesson is about a taking your design sketch and making a more structural drawing of the prop. Since this is something a character can interact with, there’s more detail on how it can be used with a lid and how the light source can fit into the piece. I moved to a rounded square design just to give it more interest and have it fit in with Minecraft a little more. I feel like my drawing is much stiffer than the sketches. The sketches are meant to be looser, but this feels so stiff to me, I’m not sure how to loosen it up. I know there’s a materials class coming up that will hopefully help with the material design too. I don’t feel like I’m representing wood and stone well. This is all a very simple design, but that’s what I was looking for with this project.

Next time I will look at how other artists I like are handling things like wood and stone to see if I can make things look a little better and less stiff.

Photoshop using Huion tablet.

I did 20 minutes sketching and then 40 minutes to complete this image.