Suuper's non-manga art

[Suuper-san]

I find having named layers helps in that it reminds me what work is remaining, like sometimes I would forget to do highlights but now there's a named layer for it, I cant really forget now haha
Plus sometimes you want to make changes, and you have no idea what layer the thing you're trying to erase is on, so it helps to pinpoint where everything is.

It was near the middle of town, so yeah there were plenty of cafes. Although I would prefer to sit outside the cafe and draw, otherwise other than the inside of the cafe I can't sketch anything haha. If there hadn't been so much rain I might have done that more.

[Suuper-san]

Finished a 2 hour page. Spent about 50-90 seconds on each face.
I cant wait to get onto learning shading once I figure out placement of features.
Faces from Google images haha

[legomaestro]

Yessss. This stokes me so much to draw more with pen and ink. Love these, Suuper. Man you're really understanding the bones that make structures and protrusions depending on how the head moves (even if its' referenced, I tend to simplify things so much you don't really see those subtle bumps on the head.) Good stuff!

[Suuper-san]

Yeah I've been trying to increase the accuracy and keep an eye on those subtle shape changes. And it has already started to have an impact on my manga face proportions, which is kinda cool. As with pretty much everything, should have done it sooner :P

[Suuper-san]

923/1000 hands.
As I hinted at earlier somewhere, I've changed the way I do bulk regimes slightly, by drawing in a premade grid.
There isn't much difference to drawing without a grid, except it does make counting a lot easier.
Again in line with my larger pages, this is a 256 square grid so it took just under 2 hours to fill in. Beats saving a page every 15 minutes for sure, and I can stop at any time and just save my work, which has made it easier to start drawing if I am unsure of how much time I have to draw, knowing that I don't have to fill a whole page.

256 is convenient because 4 of them is 1024, so it's perfect for a regime. I could have done something smaller but I wanted a big square so there you go.



trouble is now I've got a random amount left to do. might do another 256 since the regime has lasted so long I think it lost its benefit a little.

[Suuper-san]

Finally started my 1000 clothing shade studies regime, and it's seriously overdue. I have literally only ever done like an hour of clothing shade study before lol (or even any kind of shade study), it's always been just normal line copies when I have studies clothes before.

This is also doubling up as actual workflow practice on how to actually shade, i.e. what brushes and settings to use and so on. The 4th row I started to get a bit of a methodology going. It's sort of hacky but it's decent enough for the moment. I also sort of feel that I have a bit of a shading style coming on already, like how I want to simplify the fold patterns etc.

Took just over an hour and a half for 30. (ETA for 1000: 50 hours)
Only working in monochrome because colour is a different beast.
Copying photos from the clothing references I have collected over the years.
I'll be doing at least a row of studies a day as per my other post about doing things regularly daily.
Quality is all over the place as my observation is not quite up to scratch.

30/1000



I've also got lined up to do 1000 body shade studies alongside it because that is also important. I might do some more painting style illustrations once I start to get the hang of face and body shading. Some portraits might also get done if we're lucky :P

Not sure if to do faces separate to bodies to make sure I get it proper since faces are more important to get really good. Maybe not 1000 faces, so like 500 body, 500 faces, something like that?

I'm suddenly realizing how difficult actual art is now haha. I'm hoping that I get used to it XD
I get the feeling my style is going to fragment even more @_@

EDIT:
and while I'm at it, I thought I'd share the program I've been working on, my image splitter. it basically saves all the finished images in my bulk WIP image page as individual images again.
Previously I used a similar program that I wrote, but I had to click and drag a box around each image. Fast enough, but now it's extra fast.
It can either split the images up like a grid, or same but also crop the write space out. That's super useful when you've got 20 images on a page to crop.



The annoying thing is that it catches the date on the top right, but as long as I write the date small enough I can skim past it. I'm wondering if I still need to write the date, since the images all get split up anyway. Plus the filename contains the date. It was sort of a backup in case I accidentally renamed my files.

[Suuper-san]

And also finally finished my body shade page at the same time. Until I know what I'm doing with faces, I'm going to skip doing them and just focus on the core body.
A lot of varying quality, small beginnings for sure. I hope to stabilize before 500; 10 pages is 300 so that will be a good checkpoint, for both.
Some turned out really good all things considered, so I hope to eventually do this sort of shading from memory/imagination.

So this regime is also 30/1000
Took 80 minutes, a little faster than the clothing, but pretty much the same, so about 45 hours of work left.



I'm using the exact same shading method for the body as the clothing until I see a better way one way or the other.

[Suuper-san]

Oh I completely forgot to mention that I've been slowly cleaning up my original 1000 figure sketches.
I've been going over the top and redrawing them but more accurately. I think it's been quite helpful.
Thanks to my new daily routine I'm going to stick this in, to get it out of the way. It's good practice as a lot of the poses are super hard.
I've been on this since December 2018, pretty much the moment I finished the original regime.

336/1000
Here's the most recent page I did, working on a huge number per page since I can stop-start with my open canvas workflow (TM)
I'm going to use all of these as inspiration later on I hope :P
(with my new image cropper I split them all back to individual images in nano time!)



After this is done and my hands regime is done, I might pick another regime to do 1000 of.

[MoonFlame]

thats amazing, i think i will even save these images to use as reference for my own drawings, i love the way you study every part of every detail you can

[Suuper-san]

Thanks! If it's useful reference then I'm glad, but bear in mind I'm still learning so there'll be mistakes XD
But I do recommend trying to draw poses you have thought of yourself as it will help you to grow as an artist I think.

[Suuper-san]

Finished my 1000 hands regime.
2019-02-06 to 2020-01-20
Took only 6 actual hours of drawing time, but nearly a year of actual time. Tells you what time management is all about.
It's not impressive so I wont post it all, but here's the last page.

256 Doesn't really look like much when it's in a grid.
Final count: 1179/1000



Thoughts: I'll be brief.
-Hands are hard
-Grids are awesome
-Reference helps a bit
-Daily effort is very productive.
-Repetition of poses is good practice
-Original hand poses are difficult
-Hands are hard.

I'm going to take my last 2 pages, 512 hands and try and make them look really good. So straight into the next regime. I'll probably do 4 sets, with a cleaning and inking stage. So the regime is 512 lineart hands, maybe. At least "higher quality" hands.

[Suuper-san]

Inked Hands 100/500
This took 2 and a half hours, so it's taken quite a while tbh.
But I did do a cleaning/redraw layer under this, which took probably about half the time.
Mixed results but overall decent enough methinks.
I've been doing 2 rows a day, but with 2 layers it averages to 10 finished a day.
I've not been consistent with this though but I'm getting better.

[Suuper-san]

Good news! I have finally finished my figure cleanup regime. Out of the original 1003, 867 were actually complete poses (it took 100 or so before I got my act together the first time)
And here they all are in their glory. I combined the images for ease of upload, Mostly I worked on 20 at a time, until my open canvas method, and then I moved to 48 per sheet.

Spoiler

I'll try and be briefer than normal but still talk about what I learnt this time round:

• As always, an improvement regime shows how it is possible, with almost 100% success, to take an idea or sketch and improve it in some way. So it's good to learn how to not only generate good ideas first time round, but also how to improve them. In this case it was just poses, but I was able to sharpen up all the portions and improve some poses to be more realistic
• If you plan on applying the above and taking ideas and improving them, then your best bet is to not take a long time on the first sketch, because you will be drawing it again later. Which means that expressing an idea accurately is not the same as drawing it accurately. So for an initial sketch, proportions are not the focus, the idea needs to be the focus. Not needing to focus on proportions frees up your brain to be more spontaneous and creative with your ideas.
• It took over a year to finish this regime, but over half were done in the last 2 months. This highlights a few issues and also solutions. 1) if you start a project, assign regular time to actually work on it, otherwise it wont get finished. 2) assigning a daily portion of time to the project adds up an incredible amount over a short period of weeks and months.
• I found that the first few sets that I drew were sharper in line quality but the proportions themselves weren't great. So if you focus on one area of your art, other other areas may suffer, especially if you are still learning, like me. So I eventually dropped the line quality to focus on accurate proportions.
• After the above, I still found that the proportions weren't great, so I dropped the line quality again, and this time focused on more global proportions, such as arm length or shoulder and hip widths, rather than the actual curves of the muscles and so on. So the poses I eventually produced are quite solid in terms of pose and perspective, but are lacking in local proportions
• I doubt I will go over these again, but if I did, it would be to work on the exact proportions, getting the arm roundedness right and so on. Each iteration level has different skills that are needed. i.e. Idea Generation>General proportions/perspective>Specific proportions/accuracy. And each iteration has a different quality that you are aiming at. There's just no point trying to get a lineart quality on the initial sketch phase, as you have no idea if what you're drawing is right until you've drawn it.
• Overal this took 20 hours of actual work, although adding the time to sort out and stuff maybe 22 hours. So not a lot of time at all really, for such a large amount of sketches.
• Now I have all these basically correct poses, I plan to use them as inspiration for my other sketches. Having the pose already set out for me will once again free up my brain to think of the backgrounds, costumes, expressions and so on. And I will have a decent base to put it on, meaning that it will be easier and faster to clean up in later stages. This is just one initial part of my master plan to create incredibly creative sketches and original chaarcters. Doing the same with other aspects, such as hair styles etc, and then [randomly?] combining previously created ideas not only can give life to a character you might never have thought of, but it's a repeatable process, forever. Imagine 1000 poses, 1000 backgrounds, 1000 outfits, 1000 expressions and hairstyles. You could combine them forever and never have the same one come up twice, especially if you use a unique colour pallette for each costume, they will be incredibly unique. And you can change things up and improve them anyway for an infinite variety. Whoops that's quite a spoiler for my master plan XD
  Don't forget patterns haha

So that's a nice thing to have under my belt, and I can move on to my next regime, which I paused temporarily, that of clothing and body shading studies. It's going to be a bit more of a long term regime, lasting about 6 months maybe. Once I've done enough linearts, then I'll be switching my WIP focus to coloured linearts to upgrade my colouring and shading, and then finally rolling back round to finishing sketches again (or possibly cleaning). fun stuff.

onwards and upwards!!!!

[legomaestro]

Oh my word I can't believe you really crossed the threshold. And how the hell didn't I notice you'd already hit 1000 hands dude hahahahaha! Congratulations suuper! This is awesome

Gaddamn the complexity of these poses makes me want to work with more complex poses too. No wonder your stuff is so polished in so apparently short a time. You've had some legendary practice to work with.

And wowee that is a masterplan and a half. It's related to that booklet of sorts too right? Basically referencing stuff done by yourself? Man, this really makes me think I could go back over an old regimen and use it somehow. Heck you mentioned using my thumbnails could help me with Sketch Survival. I'll look into that.

Also encouraging bit about the sketching. I still need to see how that works out for me especially when I throw backgrounds into the mix. I really want to think some of my roughest works can be polished up to look much better. I'll see over time if I can do that. I'm happy with sketchy linework but yeah... It could also look great without.

1000 expressions and hairstyles will interest me a lot when you get to it.

22 hours. In of itself it doesn't seem much but knowing how long you took that's a lot of regular dedication.

Really hyped to see you hit the finish line here... And to think you got the hands in the bag too! Cheers all around dude!

[Suuper-san]

Well the hands regime went super overdue, so when I finished it, it was more of a fizzle than a pop; I didn't make a big thing out of it.
But I'm inking half of those hands for practice anyway so it's like the regime is just in the second act.

Epic reaction sketch there, I am honoured :)

I don't think complex poses are necessarily a good thing or better, but it's good to have the ability to draw them because it means you understand the body and your guidelines better.

The booklet was the first glimmer of the masterplan before I even had it. Wayyy back then I struggled to think of any idea, so I thought, "I need a book with all sorts of ideas in it that can inspire me", but I didn't realise at the time, that it was a catch 22 - To create this booklet of ideas (to inspire me, who has no ideas), I needed to come up with, ideas. So it became redundant because as soon as I came up with ideas, I realized that I didn't need the booklet after all.
But my memory isnt perfect so I will still make the booklet as a database of sorts, maybe with my top 100-200 of the 1000 regime stuff that I do.
So yes, just referencing my own stuff. I still like to work as originally as possible just for my own self satisfaction.

At some point I must spend some time expanding my booklet, because it'll be good to come up with like 100 hats or 100 shoes anyway. Creating the booklet actually kicked into gear my ability to break down ideas and categorize stuff.

Not every regimen can be used again as inspiration or turned into new ideas, but many can. And certainly your building thumbnails for inspiring a proper background sketch. If I recall correctly, you actually did redraw some at the time, which went really well.

And yeah most projects dont actually take up that much time comparatively. Even my 2 one-shots only took about 1 hour per page.