#left-hand practice

Focused on doing more circles and strokes since I'm totally re-learning how to draw >.<

It's seriously going to be the majority of my time the next few months, afaict, but it'll be worth it. And I can pepper exercises to help contextualise and focus those sessions, so... It's good, I'm happy about it.

And without further ado... CIRCLES!

Okay, those aren't great, but I found something REALLY neat as I went. This is at 50% zoom on the doc, but the next few are between 270% and 310% zoom and the difference in quality is HUGE.

This makes me think that my general hand movements have improved, but it's the finer movements that I'm struggling with. What a cool find!

Back to 50% zoom and... I didn't need to tell ya, huh?

On to strokes!

Weirdly, the zoom thing didn't help with the strokes... Just gonna have to muscle through that one.

It's funny how strokes going top-right to bottom-left are so much better than strokes going in the opposite direction.

I've decided I'm going to have to practice my shading and thatching with actual exercises, because I'm not sure I can see improvements in this as much as I should like.

So I gave myself this extra bit of stroke practice!

I figure if I'm learning at the level of a toddler, I'm going to style it that way. BUT WITH RULES!

This was done using 25px brush on a 1080p canvas. No eraser allowed, just brush. This was actually fun and forced me to practice my strokes more than you might expect at first blush. Lots of tracing colours back and forth over each other, colouring inside the lines, etc...

I did my next two based off of this amazing work by X_XASM

This top one was 25px brush

The second used an 18pt brush. Was just curious what differences that gives me

I definitely like the 25pt more because it has the right kind of affect for the style of the cartoon, but it may be slightly too thick. I'll keep messing around.

As a bit of homework I was tasked to recreated a barrel (in broad shape) in Maya. It was a reasonably easy bit of homework, but good fun and I figured I'd break it down a bit here.

Firstly, the source material:

Knowing just enough about 3D modelling I figured out some rough ideas of edge loops from the jump, knowing that otherwise things could get rough.

Starting with a polygon primitive, then, was the way to go. Since the barrel has quite a cute, cartoony affect I figured it should be quite stumpy. I decided on 80 cm diameter, 60 cm height, 24 faces around, 10 edge loops vertically and a loop on the cap ready to go.

Next up I moved some edgeloops to make the distinctly spaced metal bands.

I could have made those separate objects, but this felt pretty efficient in terms of polygons, and also a pretty trivial difference.

Selecting the faces of both bands I scaled them out uniformly, then selected each band's faces and scaled in down vertically again, that way the bands would come out exactly the same.

I then selected the top and bottom caps, extruded them towards each other evenly.

Next up I wanted to develop the overall, rounded nature of the barrel, so I selected the very top and bottom vertices as rings turned on soft-selection and increased the area of effect.

With that selection made, I scaled all the vertices along the X and Z axes, which curved the whole body nicely inward and giving me a nice round form.

Next I selected the middle faces which were out of reach of the previous soft-selection scaling, and just scaled them out to give the barrel a nice, chubby feel, as well as a continuous, consistent profile.

With the body looking right I created new objects to be the bolts that live on the metal bands of the barrel. I used polygon spheres but with a largely turned down face count.

I scaled these spheres down so as to flatten them, then rotated and embedded them in ways that made sense for the source.

Selecting two of the spheres I then duplicated them and put them on the opposite side, largely mirroring their placement (at least well enough at a glance). To complete the form I would need another set of four spheres, so I selected my four, duplicated them, grouped them and rotated them 90 degrees. This fairly trivially allowed me to have a complete set of spheres and in the right positions even on close examination.

Looking over the barrel again I found the shape of the metal bands didn't stand out enough and decided to bevel them to make them stand out more sharply and distinctly.

Finally, the form looked pretty much how I was hoping it would.

And here is the final result:

In contrast with the original asset you can see a few differences.

Firstly, the concept has a lot of splits in the wood that mine don't, but that would largely be addressed using normal maps and textures, more than it would modifying the topology.

More importantly, the source image of the barrel has a much cuter shape. I notice now that the metal bands stick out even further than mine do, the spheres are larger and more bulbous, and the barrel itself is bottom-heavy, whereas mine quite symmetrical.

Finally, my asset came out at a total of 1376 faces. This is actually much higher than I should like and I'll need to work on bringing that down, but that's an alright result for the moment.

If I was optimising for a fixed-rotation camera perspective like Diablo 3 I would be able to cut every underside face, as well as almost the entire back half of the barrel... But I would like to know how I might have lowered the poly count from the start without compromising too hard on feel.

Some thoughts that came out of this:

When performing operations in Maya how can I ensure that those operations are precise? (such as when scaling using the gizmo. I can do that to a grid, but what if I want an exact scaling of 69.69?

Last week a cop killed two queer men a few kilometres from where I live and go to school, in the fanciest, richiest part of Sydney, and today in class I was asked to draw a cartoon cop.

So fuck that, I went with a woman of the Queer Communist future instead.

The idea was sound, as was the pose (I actually the casual holding the flag pose is really badass and really jives with Socialist Realism), but it didn't come together. So much so that I abandoned even giving her a face in favour of just practicing my lines and hatching.

Lastly, I thought I should try another drawing of Steven (of Steven Universe fame), but this time from memory to see what I'd retained from the last time. The result was actually pretty good! A stark improvement on last time in term of proportions and features. A lot of the appeal was restored.

The eyes in particular are much improved, as he's looking passed you, but I did use the wrong nose entirely, as well as some other small mistakes.

I got my hands on one of those Wacoms that's also a screen and it's a gorgeous bit of kit. I haven't drawn in years, but it was so nice and pleasant to on that little device.

I'm pretty pleased with the results considering how little drawing I do regularly and how I'm training myself to write and draw with my left hand, instead of my dominant right hand. It's all a great and fun experiment!

Anyway, here's my drawing practice, with notes, proudly poisoned by Nightshade:

Watson and Holmes