Blahabop. Art adventure?

Short and sweet post on my progress.
Though the warning is... you can't really see it.

It all started with this drawing of Katrinn. She was an npc character I made up when I attempted to DM a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. She influenced probably 100% of the world I made up so she was pretty important. When I scraped my campaign in favor of learning to draw, I still really liked her character, so I took her design and designed to keep her as a character I can doodle a lot.

In this drawing you see its a simple pose with simple body proportions. I would not know too much about how to draw the body but I doodled mostly women in my spare time, so its pretty simple to know they have two arms, breasts, a narrow waist, etc.

What made this drawing a bit more simple was that she would have a big dress to cover her body. (More on this tragic mistake later.) So, most of my time was spent working in the weird details of her dress, which was heavily inspired by a dress Utada Hikaru had worn. Time to complete this drawing: 2~ hours.

Next, this second redrawing of Katrinn was made when I decided I would fully commit myself to learn how to draw and color. I drew this one 3 1/2 weeks after the first design. I decided I would take this drawing 100% seriously to see how I would improve after studying more about art. As you can see, one again I opt for a simple pose with her poofy dress.

I try to put her in a sort of perspective, which did not work out too well going on paper. At this point I realize that I should think more in 3D when drawing, a simple thing that I did not consider too much when I just doodled. While exploring by adding other random details to her dress, I realize that whenever I draw the body I erase a lot because I am taking a lot of random guesses to where body parts would fit and the sizes of them. I find out that I did not have any concept of proportion and rules of anatomy. Because of this, this piece took quite awhile to get somewhat "right" and even after it did not feel right to me. Again, the poofy dress was a mistake, as it hides too much of her body. Time spent on this drawing. 4~ hours

Finally we come to today, it has been around 2 1/2 more weeks since I drew the second drawing. I have been studying a lot of anatomy, proportion, and other techniques designed to help me become the artist I would like to become. I have restarted from the ground up, starting strictly from realism to learn how the body works in order to someday create my own style that I love. that is why right now a lot of my recent drawings have been a bit more realistic, in proportion at least. Someday I hope they will feel a bit more surreal and free.

This picture of Katrinn I drew up today made me learn a lot of big things. First, I opted out on the details of her dress, because I realized that the dress hides so much of her anatomy and she loses a lot of appeal because of it. Not only that, because I haven't studied clothing yet, you can't appreciate how much I learned about the body because its fully covered. I decided I will soon redesign her clothing to suit her personality more, instead of having a boring poofy dress all the time.

Second, I learned the way I draw my breasts is very boring. Even though I'm still studying the way breasts work in drawing, I have a long way to go to replicate how I want them to look in my style. Realism is pretty simple, its when you need imagination to exaggerate that starts to give me a headache. I try to exaggerate them in this picture by making them a bit bigger than I plan, I'm still not sure where it puts me though.

Third, I have to call out my terrible attempt at shading this piece. The shading totally botches the drawing, but I'm happy with how well the new pens I have are. So I need to learn more about lighting and equally importantly, drawing clothing on the body.

What I am proud of however, is how quickly I can sketch and pen this simple character of mine. 20 mins! I feel like this simple pose, however hidden and simple it is, is starting to compare a bit more of her persona and a bit more of my style. I am proud of how much I am learning through my studies and hope to demonstrate them soon in the future! Its hurting my head to know how many concepts there are to learn though, I really did not expect that honestly...

So yeah, I'll try to keep updates on more progress when the time comes. I'll keep drawing.