Suuper's Artworks & Illustrations

[Suuper-san]

Just doing a bit of grave digging in my artworks trying to figure out stuff and found these old copies i did, I've posted them before but seriously they are so good it's confusing.

Spoiler

One of my first ever copies of manga. Literally so good


Same again but I wrote the times for each one - about 10 minutes for each one.


This stupidly good copy took about 6 hours and is still one of my best pieces ever.


Fariy tail because why not.


The Erza's eye one was one of my first of a very few colour copies, and it's pretty on point.

And these are 6 or so years old or more.

So this is really confusing because I still don't think I can copy at that level, but I can't have gotten worse, surely?
And then I realise something really interesting - the amount of time that I spent doing those copies is astronomical in comparison to the copies or original sketches that I do now. I haven't spent 6 hours on a piece EVER except that Rozen Maiden one. And it's my best one.
So literally time is the multiplier for skill that I had forgotten about for so long. If you spend longer on something, it typically turns out better than if you rush it.
But I think partly the reason I was always aiming to improve my speed was that I already could copy if I took the time, I just wanted to get faster. So once again I find myself on a very strange path that my decisions have lead me on.

For me these days, giving myself 30 seconds to think about a sketch feels like a lifetime. But I don't want to be a slow artist haha

It's not really positive or negative, just an observation. I'll be doing longer time sketches anyway to get some nice pieces so I think overall my methods have worked out. But it's been a strange journey.

[Suuper-san]

Did 4 linearts, the first of many. I haven't done proper linearts since March or April, so it's quite a big jump in quality since I last did it.

I'm starting on my older WIPs that I queued for linearting, but are actually lower quality than my current standards, so I expect another jump in quality when I hit the proper quality of undersketch

since I also don't really like drawing guys, a lot of the male characters end up in the fast track for completion as well haha



Also my pen settings are all over the place I keep changing them to get a nice feel for an inking pen. I don't even know what thickness I want, like super thin sharp lines or more expressive thicker/varied lines. meh.

It seems I'm taking 15-20 minutes to ink a sketch compared to about 8-10 previously. That's either accuracy, quality or complexity, but something is sucking up the time. I'll be able to speed up a little when I get in the flow, but I think that's a common trend in my art - the better quality sketches take more time.

[legomaestro]

Late reply haha
I rarely see this kind of character in manga haha. Jeans look pretty cool. That's a hairstyle there. Intelligent teacher type? I can't place his age for some reason.
And yesss. Draw more dudes. Or don't do what you want XD.
I hear you on the pen thickness thing. It's driving me mad a bit. What makes it worse is that different canvases need different sizes and yeah.
That jump in inking time is interesting. But yeah, the longer you take on something, the better itll be for sure


The mixed manga copy page is pretty interesting. During my copying of Bleach it was hard to go through a bit because I lost interest while going from A to B. Perhaps if I isolated elements and characters I wanted to draw I would've felt more motivated to do stuff - and maybe if I did it on an infinite digital canvas I'd feel even better haha.

Re: 1000x momentums yes absolutely. I mean just look at the sheer number of things we've produced over time, suuper. I know we tend to play it down but it's pretty mindblowing to see that scroll bar go tiny and say 'wow. That was me doing this.'

Re: Statistics. Daaamn. I'm so glad you got whatever spark it was those 40 days ago to work at this. This is truly proving to be succesful. The getting up at 5:30 thing to draw is even cooler! I should think of that.

52 hours in a month. Jeeez.

I like your theory about a sketch. If it's true I can do a lot of major projects by nailing that sketch phase, and than later refining them to make them look a bit better (My sketchy habits are still going to be there though haha.)

I can totally understand about no personal pieces. It's the sacrifice that I'm doing too to be honest, but I really want this sketching/productivity question out of the way so that i can focus on actually sketching/drawing and doing what I want.



Re: Looking back

Now that's an interesting phenomenon. I think I saw it myself too. I used to do portraiture from movies and they turned out pretty well. Grayscale painting that makes me think: Wow, I used to have patience back then.

I suspect time is definitely the factor here, and also as you mentioned yourself you're more focused on excercises and studies right now. I think when you're doing stuff for yourself rather than for streamlining the drawing process you'll be sure to come up with some cool things!

[Suuper-san]

Thanks
The character is a 40-something archaeologist, at least that's the idea. Since I don't draw older characters hardly, that's probably what caused the age confusion :P
There's actually very little that I don't want to draw, but there's plenty that I want to draw more than others, which is why I'm constantly drawing cute girls :P

I think the jump in inking time is also because I'm a bit out of practice, I don't have a method or style, and haven't tried working faster yet, I'm still just figuring it out. But yes the higher quality will mean I will never get it back under 10 minutes I'm sure.

Isolating elements to study or draw is a great idea, and really that's why the 1000x regimes work so well. But apart from learning the individual elements, one needs to lean how to combine them, so overall composition is something that needs to be studied too methinks.

Yeah haha my 1000 finished sketches really was a great output, and the insanely high target kept the pressure high to achieve my maximum speed and efficiency. I think as one achieves more, and gets used to it, they naturally get ambitious to achieve even more haha
No matter how good an artist gets they always aim higher, huh?

Getting up early is fantastic, I've tried several times in the past to get it going, but perhaps only now that my drawing is less stressful (no pressure to do a whole page of anything), I can get up with much less effort. But you're gonna have an insanely early bedtime haha
I overslept to 10am today so it's not perfect yet XD

yeah I'm glad to be drawing so much. well I just checked and I've drawn for 24 hours this month already so I'm on target for 100 this month. I'm sort of aiming at 2 a day minimum now, although building up the habit takes time.

I looked at my history of usage in the last year and it's quite intersting. Not having a job meant that in January when I was doing my 1000 sketch regime I could really dish it out. The hills of higher/lower activity are also thought provoking. It looks that I'm on track for a new all-time high, I hope. And hopefully it stays high this time.

Here's the amazing graph. Hurrah for Excel.
The dip around July is my holiday, so I was drawing on paper instead.

Spoiler

I've just thought that I now want to do a graph that shows when in the day I draw, and how that has changed through the year. What a pain, I'll do it when I can be bothered :P

For my sketch survival sketches I draw a thumbnail first and it really helps for getting an idea down before "starting" on it, and when your idea is more solid your sketches reflect that as well. So it's better to spend a minute or two to think, before even putting pen to paper. That's the direction I'm leaning in now, although I hate spending more time on stuff, time is the ultimate wall. Kinda like a last boss, that if you defeat it, you can do anything.

I've spent so long doing practice and studies that I'm still not sure what I even want to do for personal pieces. I'm thinking I'll start up a couple of one-shots when the requests are out of the way. I might pick some of my favourite artists and do some illustrations in their style, or my version of their style. That will help to branch out and learn at the same time as enjoying myself.

I think I had a lot more patience back then as well. I think when you don't have experience you don't realize how fast you "should" be drawing, so you take much longer, resulting in comparatively better pieces. When you realise what is technically possible in shorter times you tend to limit your time to match your expectations, rather than aiming for a higher quality. maybe.
But quite a few people have said, including on MR, that one should occasionally take time to produce a maximum level piece, to properly assess your level. That's on my list and it's pretty soon, probably after I finish my requests again. Gotta get that embarrassment out of the way XD
Hopefully spending a lot of time on a personal piece should result in something fabulous, but we'll see :P

[Suuper-san]

Did 6 more linearts.
here's a comparison of 2 similar pieces, first done in February 2019, second just done this month.
(click to enlarge)




This is purely the inking level that has improved, because I'm currently inking older sketches from about the same time as when the top sketch was inked, so the quality of the undersketch is the same, but the final quality is much higher because of experience. Due to it being an older sketch, the proportions in the second one are pretty bad, that's something the inking can't fix unless I go wayyy off the guidelines and get lost. I can fix a little, but nothing major.
Also you can see the inking time difference, 9 minutes to 24. It takes longer to add more quality and details obviously haha :P
Also 2000px height canvas for the top one, 3000px height for the bottom one. You can actually fit in more details if you have the space.

Which is kinda strange, because I haven't done any inking practice but I'm better. Goes to show that all the skills are related.

I'm averaging 18 minutes for the 10 linearts I have done so far. Compared to my old average of 8. wow.

[danielsega]

Really good work, specially on the clothing.  But the hand jumped out to me, it seems a bit small.

Another thing that can help that piece is the chair/sofa with contact with the butt. If the material of the chair is soft, I'd draw an overlap line to demonstrate that it is soft. If the material was hard, I'd draw that contact area as a straight line.

[Suuper-san]

Yeah about the hand I was trying to just get the piece finished and not worry about stuff that was wrong, because I have so many sketches to get through haha
Thanks for tips on the contact with the seat. drawing objects interacting correctly is quite difficult, there's all sorts of forces and tension going on that affect the shapes.
I don't really know what sort of seat it is, so I suppose I have to be more careful when designing otherwise I won't be able to render properly :)

[Ryan]

Always fascinating to see what you're up to, and your thoughts on things.

What do you use to track time in your drawing programs?

Also, for inking:
If you have a Wacom tablet, look into using Precision Mode while you're inking (or whenever you feel like using it). There's multiple magnification levels, but I use what makes drawing feel most natural for me. Makes a big difference.

Also, if you aren't already rotating your canvas to a favorable orientation while inking, I recommend doing that. You'll be able to put down the line you want with fewer attempts than keeping the canvas locked to one specific rotation.

If you are doing these things already, then great. Like you noticed, the increase in your inking time is a good thing that reflects, among other things, an increased ability to notice what goes into inking, so you're spending more time trying to bring those things out. Also, the under-sketch is really just the trial for a drawing; often, in the ink stage you will inevitably come to things that need to be resolved right then and there. Small things, but they take a little bit more time to do rather than just tracing over the sketch. You might be addressing these problems more than you were before.

Hope this information helps.

[Suuper-san]

Hi Ryan, good to hear from you.

I use a timer I coded myself. It's features are that it's always on top of my drawing program, and has multiple boxes that store timings. When I click on a box, the lap time gets added to the time in the box, and the lap resets. So each box represents an image on my WIP page, as I work on multiple images on a single canvas. The program also saves its timings to a file so I can open it again and carry on another day.


I have used precision mode on and off, but I have found it just as fast to zoom in more and then zoom out again, or just "be more careful", so I'm using my own human precision mode haha.

Regarding rotating canvases, I have always thought that it wold be a useful feature to have, but when GIMP upgraded to have it, I never used it. Partly I feel like it's cheating. Not because "you can't rotate your canvas in real life" (lol), but because to me, it's admitting "I can't draw that line as it is", and so I want to not be limited by that problem. So I always try and draw any line as it is. I pretend my arm is ike a 3d printer that follows the path haha.

You'll be able to put down the line you want with fewer attempts

When I first watched "pro" artists on youtube do their speedpaints and stuff, I saw some who did make many repeats, undo and try again, undo and try again. And I swore to myself that I would never do that. Again it's a pride thing. It's like trial and error if you're doing that. I want to draw a line and know how it's going to be before I draw it, not hope and pray that it's right. Yes I use undo, but incredibly sparingly, and almost never on anything less than a lineart level quality. So that's my opinion on undo as well.

So my ambition for the level of skill that I want prevents me from using certain tools because they feel like they are preventing me from reaching a higher level of skill. And it's almost quite random as to what I feel I'm "allowed" to use or not.

but thanks a lot for the tips, but as I say, I'm avoiding things that help too much. Partly because I'm still aiming at being a traditional pen artist, so I can't rely on undo or precision mode in real life. I'm carving my own path in art it seems :P

[Suuper-san]

So I figured that I'd use Sunday as a bit of a weekly digest, as I'm trying to keep my browsing time down for productivitys sake.

Drawing in public - part 2.
I'm not really sure what's changed in me since I last commented on it, but I really don't feel any problem drawing in public now, I don't know why. So I'm using my travel time on trains and buses now to do a little drawing here and there when I fancy it. Quite varied sketch pages but it's a nice little doodle. If the journey is long enough I can do a whole page. So that opens up a bit more avenues for me to get exposure and practice as well.

Spoiler

I've been focusing on core skills again with a larger focus on copying/studying than I have been doing over the last year. I'm doing all sorts of clothing and body studies, hands and shoes and so on. I'm not quite doing as many WIPs as I would like, considering my huge backlog.

WIPs - I have been focusing on linearts this month so far, and I've done 16, of various levels of quality and styles. Picking a standard for my linearts as been a little tricky, especially as my older WIPs are a bit lacking in details and accuracy as well. Here are three different styles that I have tried out: (click to enlarge)

Very high detail - I've used quite a high level of zoom and taken my time to add the details. This resulted in a high quality line piece, but the original undersketch had proportion issues that show through, so overall it was a bit of a waste of time to process it at this high of a level. It's my longest lineart at 31 minutes.


Very sketchy detail - I figured since the previous one was really sharp that I might as well use my older WIPs in a bit of an experiment, especially the ones I don't care much for, so I tried a sketchier inking style, at a much lower zoom. The overall quality was pretty low, and a thicker brush would probably have suited this style I think. It was certainly a lot faster, which is a key factor for me, but not at such a loss of quality.


Medium, careful but quick - I tried to combine careful and quick, into a similar drawing feeling to how I resolve my sketches, and the result was basically a good quality, as long as you don't zoom in much. which in most cases, especially a standard level piece, is probably the most desirable level. The line quality was a lot better, but I didn't spend so much time on it. It's hard to compare to the first one as there was less time consuming frills, but I think it was a faster style. I didn't zoom in as much as I did for the first one. Usually I count how many times I click zoom in, to make sure I'm working at the same sort of level for each piece. The top one was 4 times, and this one was 2 times. So for the time being I'll probably try and keep this style up as it's fast and good enough detail. As I get to my better WIPs, I might increase my quality to match.


I've processed 66 WIPs this month so far, and spent 49 hours drawing in GIMP. so I'm quite chuffed so far, although time isn't everything, it's something. And I'm on target for 100 in a NORMAL month!
My average continues to rise which is great, here's my usage graph again. "Consistency" is how many days I have drawn in the last 30, divided to fit the scale. So a 5 means I've drawn every day for the last 30 days.
Weekly average is staying strong just above 3 hours a day, and the monthly average is still rising to match. I've not been this active for quite a while as you can see.


I didn't realise how useful a daily schedule was, being that I am quite motivated and draw quite a lot normally (my weekly average spikes a few times at more than 2 hours a day, so I'm not lazy by any means), I didn't think that it was possible to draw even more. But a fortunate rebalancing of the schedule and looking at my actual statistics made me realize that I was nowhere near my maximum performance (which I kinda guessed). I'm still nowhere near my maximum, being that I don't spend ALL my time drawing, and I do spend a bit more time than I would like in organizing my art, generating statistics, programming little apps for me to use, and finding more reference images of every kind. But I would put my productivity at at least 35% now.

I'm very pleased with how my new workflow is going, that of having lots of semi-finished GIMP files, and adding a bit more each day until they fill up. I generally don't do the same ones each day, usually just 3 or 4 study ones, and then some WIP ones as well. My daily sketch survival actually takes up the most time per item at the moment.
I've got 49 canvasses at the moment, and I'm trying my best to not let it rise any higher, otherwise I wont even be able to finish each one in a single month XD.
I have changed some up a bit, and combined some into a single file. Like I had hats in a separate one for a bit, but combined it with the normal clothing study one.

Another dangerous game I have been playing is having a file for drawing new sketches, which are casually inspired by my own older sketches. It's really good at generating new sketches, "unfortunately", as I'm trying to not make so many new sketches at the moment. But it's a lot less stressful knowing you can just open a file up, do a bit, and close it wherever you're at. Whenever I hit a WIP I dont fancy working on, I just close and move on to something else. Then later in the day, I'll have a eureka moment and know what to do with the sketch, and I can carry on.

I also said previously that I would cull my WIPs by about 10% at the inking and colouring level. I'm increasing the range to include every level of WIP now, so up to 10% of my WIPs will go into a "Dropped" folder, and not be counted in my remaining counts. I've got so many, and I'm improving so fast now, that I'm more ready to take on the better ideas and not keep focusing on my worst sketches for "practice". Of course I'll still keep them around just in case, and for trying out new styles with perhaps.
This also helps to account for the fact that at each level the time to process a piece increases, so I can't process as many linearts as I can finished sketches, for example.

Assuming I do cut out 10% at each level, this is how 1000 sketches would make it through to the end.
I'll probably increase the cutoff to 20%, or probably something like 50% eventually


also also, my WIPs are not (and have never been) the main output that I plan on generating. They are like my main regime that keeps me fit, but there's a lot of other art that I want to make that doesn't fit into the WIP scheme that I currently have. Fanart, homage styles, manga stories etc.
And I think that my open-canvas workflow is suited to creating a new page of sketches in different styles, and then finishing them off in the same canvas without putting them into a WIP folder, similar to my daily sketch regime.
Did you know that my daily sketches are all done in the same file? well now you do :P


In short (yeah right), I've got a lot of plans, I seem to be incredibly lucky with how my path has gone so far, I'm incredibly ambitious, and I'm currently incredibly productive. Roll on 2020 I say. I suspect I'll crash within 3 weeks :P

[Suuper-san]

"Quick" update - I finally crunched my drawing data per hour, to see how my drawing habits have changed over the year as to when in the day I draw. Its quite interesting, for those who like statistics haha
You can clearly see the larger consistency I have at the moment, which I hope to keep.
Man I love statistics. Especially when they are useful it's awesome.

Spoiler

I'm also rolling out the linearts as I changed the quality and my pen settings. Basically working with a bit more of a thicker line, and it's faster.

I'm moving up my next regime(s), which were 100+ linearts, and 1000 colour/shade studies of body and clothing each. Since I'm working with a lot of things at once in parallel nowadays, my regime of finishing my requests is dragging out now, and I don't feel like doing them faster so I'll be adding to my workload overall instead. I think once I've added those I wont have space for anything more, for a while. The shade studies will also help my linearts to be more accurate in terms of clothing folds and so on (I experienced a boost in my linearts last time I studied shade)

[Slammer]

How have you been tracking this? Thats so interesting

[Suuper-san]

I wrote my own data logging program a year ago. Basically whenever I am using a program it logs how long the program is open for, and when. It helped me to see how I was using my time and where I could improve. It's always open, hidden in the icon tray :)

Here's what it looks like. What great is whenever I want to have a feature, I can just write it straight in, because it's my program. It's a bit glitchy but it works :P
The graph is currently showing statistics for the last 30 days of usage btw


For my stats in the previous post, I crunched the numbers in Excel, and used the formatting options to give the cells colours based on value.

The data on it's own looks like this XD:

Spoiler

I have 600k entries of logged information which is ridiculous haha

Given it's a new year soon, I should probably sharpen up the code and add some more useful features XD

[Slammer]

thats so cool super! If there was an easy way to graph the software id ask for it : ) That's bad ass

[Suuper-san]

haha thanks :)
well, there is an easy way, I just need to write it lol
For me, as much as I like writing my own graph drawing code, it's much faster to export the data to Excel and use Excel's graph drawing features haha
When I spruce it up I'll make it available, maybe :P

well there are plenty of other programs that are avaliable online for free, I just automatically make them myself because it's more fun XD
in fact it was a youtube ad for a tracking productivity app I saw that inspired me to write it in the first place I think.

ugh gotta do my daily sketch. I've done a bunch of other drawing but not that haha

Edit:

22/100 Linearts done btw.

Started up body and clothing shade study pages as well, done 6/1000 for both.

Edit2:
woop 5k posts milestone.