Smithies
England
I love to draw - I mostly work digitally because I am so messy. I'm looking to level up my skills, and hope to get to a point where I can sell prints!
Activity Feed

Smithies
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5d
added comment inProject - Shade a Sphere
Asked for help
The two untimed ones I have no idea how long they took, but probably not that long because my 25 minute one, I felt was ‘done’ after about 18 minutes. I continued fiddling and cleaning up and I’ve probably made it look better but I now realise I’m probably quite slapdash in my approach and I need to just chill and go with the rendering process. It definitely feels like I’m ‘done’ and then trying to fix what I should have just taken more care over in the first place. I felt very frustrated with my scratchy cast shadows in particular.
Another thing i noticed was the moment I had only 10 then 5 minutes I felt such a need to rush I suddenly couldn’t even draw a circle anymore, so will definitely be practising more of these timed ones and trying to stay calm.. I also spent too much time in the shadows I think, and my half tones were probably too light and sloppy.

Smithies
5d
I also had a couple of questions..
Q1) gradations between two different tones are hard enough, but my gradation in the penumbra to plain paper looked so sloppy - any tips on cleaning that up?
Q2) I haven’t had a chance to just try it yet, but any tips on doing this with coloured pencil (eg) and how to choose colours for that? My instinct would be to choose one colour for the ball, and another colour for the shadow and another for the light, but then it probably wouldn’t be cohesive… How do you substitute the values with colour?
Smithies
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5d
Asked for help
This assignment makes me feel so ridiculously excited I feel like an idiot! I can't wait to get started.
Interestingly I felt frustrated by one of the first assignments where we had to simplify a blocky object and draw it in lots of different angles from imagination because all my drawings came out kind of the same just rotated. It looks like that was basically the idea! Although to be fair I did choose a very simple object.
Smithies
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10d
Ooh I'm excited. I never really understood the core shadow and why it's darker and only in some places and this really cleared things up for me! Thanks
Smithies
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16d
Asked for help
Attempted Ortho no.2. I made a loose grid and then made all my 3d views (is that the term?) from 1 ortho that I popped into my grid. I did end up colouring otherwise all my lines got very confusing and it was hard to spot errors. In the pancakes video they mentioned ‘tangencies’ where lines meet - I have found that where lines meet in the picture where they wouldn’t in 3d a real throw off for errors! In my next one I’m going to try and make more lines that won’t connect with others.
Made a slide to show my process. I’m pretty sure in hindsight my original ortho in perspective was off, which didn’t help, so I will try and be more exact in the early stages next time.
Smithies
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21d
Asked for help
Are you trying to kill us Marshall?? The video made these look fun. I ran into a lot of problems, so submitting part 1 early to seek help from the community!
I tried to do it without using vanishing points - big mistake no.1. I retried the worst one with vanishing points, but none of my bits look like cubes! Is there an easy solution to this, or is it back to… draw 9999 boxes and they’ll start to look better?
I might do my next one using isometric angles just to try and make it look understandable, but feel like maybe that is just cheating..? Maybe I should try and do both.
See?! It looks so deceptively easy. I used the word “relaxing” when I started it 😆 Here are some tricks I found way too late:
- lay out the all encompassing container and divide it first. My proportions are off because I realized way too late many divisions are neat units and I can use diagonals and squares to divide.
- try working from the back towards the front of the viewer otherwise it might get difficult when everything in the front covers the back with lots of lines
- different colors help a lot keeping things situated
- drawing a vp grid very lightly on a loose light sketch at first from intuition slanting lines more and more on mindless setting can make things a lot easier because you’ll be matching and correcting these lines when you’re in the thick of it. I usually try both ways. If digital and the grid is accurate, I make the grid invisible then try on my own and switch it on to see how off I was.
all in all these look great for no VPs!
Ethyn
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2mo
Asked for help
I've had some project deadlines recently, so I'm just now getting to the latest batch of assignments.
I'm still working through this exercise, but here's what I have so far!
When I first started trying this approach, my drawings felt a bit stiff. Something wasn't quite clicking.
So I thought I'd go back and restart by trying something simpler, to try and become more comfortable with the tools for this task.
I tried to build individual forms, and try some variations including:
• Height.
• Rotation.
• Curving.
• Tapering.
• Crossing the horizon line.
• Twisting.
• Two forms bumping / interlocking.
• Connecting two planes of different shapes.
I like to sketch in quite a scribbling manner, with slower phases also to try and carve out forms or details.
I also tend to build in layers as I move things around and close in on final decisions. (My kneaded eraser is seeing some work lately!)
To move onto a compositional stage of this exercise, I've started to try and fold this type of form building into this sketching process, in particular the slower phases.
Despite a rough start, I'm really enjoying this exercise, there's a lot to explore when playing with combinations.
I'm looking forward to cleaning up some sketches before moving to the second part of the assignment.
Thank you Philip for sharing this appraoch!
Smithies
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1mo
Asked for help
I found this gold dust this morning! I've just had a brief look but feel like it's related to the orthos assignment so will try and study it... Wanted to share in case any one else is into this kind of thing and hasn't found it yet!
https://www.traditionalanimation.com/mickey-mouse-model-sheets/
Okay…. I bit off way more than I could chew and got all in a muddle. But hey, it was fun. I think counting the non mistakes might be harder!
Smithies
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1mo
Asked for help
Okay this one nearly killed me. I'm going to have another go at the back ortho because I tried to do lines to describe the shapes and then I realised afterwards I probably should have done cross contours to describe the forms... But I'd already used ink and it would have been a mess. I guess it's already a mess but nevermind!