Suuper's Artworks & Illustrations

[Suuper-san]

Small update, just felt like posting.

Not too much progress at the moment although I'm starting to feel that I'm very close to entering my full power mode again which is nice, haven't seen even a glimpse of that for maybe a year or so.
But ironically with my full productivity mode comes a sleight hiccup in that I become productive in all areas of my life, so I start tidying my room and going through to-do lists more effectively, and so my art doesn't always get the full thrust until I've sorted out a lot of stuff. So we'll see how it goes in a few weeks from now. I'm quite hopeful all the same.

Have some rough sketches, nothing amazing but at least I'm getting through my WIPs. If I'm lucky I end u p with some nice ideas to take further, otherwise it's just good practice at core guidelines and stuff like face and hair which I always need practice.



I had some thoughts for my manga project but I'll save that for another day and post that in my writing thread. It's going very slowly but making progress though. Mostly working through stuff in my mind.

I've been doing a few more studies again, copies from photos and also from manga, and I think that's helping me to fill my head with art knowledge, which I believe is fundamental to entering "the zone". Kinda forgot about any sort of zone for the last year, must have been really distracted by work and other stuff. Hopefully that'll be a lesson for my future self to stay on target.

Also also it's been one whole year since my last masterpiece and so I really need to get another couple out, not just to test my ability but to actually produce good quality artworks since I have the ability to do half-decent work now.

[Suuper-san]

small update again

some of my recent good sketches from sketch survival. I'm not trying for anything amazing with these so it's quite hit and miss for the quality. Just doing it at all is a huge success for me.



As for my other work, both copying/studying and WIPs, I'm reverting back to an older method of project rotation, which makes sure that I work evenly on all of the projects. My project manager which I coded has an option to open a random project (from a selected group of projects, such as "copying" or "WIPs" etc). This makes sure that there is no bias and I study everything equally such as hands or figures etc. And also for projects using my own work, It'll make sure that I'm not avoiding the higher level illustration work such as linearts and coloured pieces. So I'm moving into a sort of endgame workflow, where all of my skills are active at the same time. As much as there is efficiency in working on a lot of the same thing, I get the feeling I'm forgetting skills which I'm not using during that period. I know I'm not forgetting it completely otherwise I'd never make progress, but I think I can do a lot better by pushing myself to do a bit of each project. And the random choosing my app does makes sure that I'm not avoiding anything, and also saves me being indecisive and wasting time about what project to do next. Of course I can outright pick a project, but for all times I'm indecisive the random button is going to be quite useful again. Not to credit myself too much, but I'm glad I added that feature so long ago, I dont think I realized how useful it would be :P

As for focus and time usage, I'm getting slightly better as time goes on. just being constantly aware of it I think is helping. And possibly my new exercise regime of jogging and light weight lifting is giving my schedule some stability as well as helping my self esteem, which does wonders for productivity. As well as improving my actual health, which also should contribute to productivity I hope.

So hopefully with my increasing output as well as varying the projects I work on, I should be producing a nice range of work soon hopefully.

[Suuper-san]

productivity still on the very slow rise, but consistency possibly on a faster rise.
I've finally done another set of coloured linearts, at my standard-good level. It's been a year since I did the last lot and so very overdue really, as this is meant to be the core of my output and my general portfolio. But I've been grinding skills in other areas so you can see the improvement despite not having practised too much the colouring.

These WIPs started off so bad that I had to completely redraw the lineart before colouring. In the very early days I coloured the lineart as it was with no changes, and then I recently started to make more and more adjustments to fix errors and produce a much higher quality piece. And so the difference between my old works and my current level is enough that I almost can't accept any of the old work, it's just too bad in comparison now. In the future I might even start changing up the idea of the sketch itself rather than keeping the pose and clothing the same. But for now this is my new workflow.

I've included the old WIPs for comparison. It took about an hour per piece to redraw and colour, so not bad at all.

 

 

 

 

The last two are my favourites from this batch. I'm still struggling to figure out both where the shade is meant to go, and how to actually put it on the piece in the right places. But I'm relatively confident now that I can work to this quality which I believe is passable for the most part. Plenty of errors if you were to nitpick, but good enough that on a quick glance nothing stands out massively bad. At least, at my current level of analysis :P

I'm hopeful that I'll be producing more of these coloured works as I have plenty of WIPs lined up to process, and I'm confident enough with quality control that I won't have too many failures. So watch this space as I blast through my older works and hopefully get up to date with some of my really good sketches that are pending.

Why don't I just work from my best ones first? Good question :P
Mostly it's about making sure that I can work with pieces that are not at my best quality, fix them up and make something good from them. So when I'm working on a big project like a manga, I know that I can deal with difficult pieces or things that are hard to draw. Secondly it's just my preference to have a consistent workflow and to make sure each sketch gets finished because that was my original goal. And the more skilled I am, the better I can turn a low quality piece into a great quality piece.

Once I finally get through all my bad quality pieces, I'll get able to work on the good ones, and my focus can be more on raising the quality even more to make some masterpieces.