2024/03/21 Time Spent: 2 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 542.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Working too much + homework + other hobbies. I'm trying to restructure again so I can hit my minimum amount of drawing a day, which is 30minutes as of now. But yeah, I'm gonna study Perspective, and put into practice the principle of eating, breathing, and dreaming a subject to learn it. So everytime I wake up, I'll collect geometrical shapes around my house (primitives) and paint them. Make it a value study and a perspective study. I also plan to continue doing my Blender studies and try and make a rendering pipeline for my manga, since I like doing prop and set design in Blender so I would like to transfer that to TFF.

2024/03/12 Time Spent 1 hour: Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 539.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 We back bois. I did a long period where I just wrote, worked, and did college. I felt terrible the entire time since I wasn't drawing, and I after some changes in my habits, I am starting again. I've also did a decent amount of 3d modelling and animation and shader coding work (in Godot) for an unfortunately unfinished project with a friend. Maybe around 40 hours of work over 12ish days spread across a month, Ill see if I can do export of them and showcase them here.

2023/11/21 Time Spent: 1 hourTotal Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 538.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Oh boi I have been completely swallowed up by Obsidian. I mean I am happy that I am not playing games till 7pm and getting all of my exercise and yoga and other habits consistently everyday, but it sucks that I haven't been motivated to draw. I do like 4 hours of writing in obsidian about TFF, gathering resources and studying, and I really enjoy it, but I then lose all of my mental energy for drawing. I am going to try and alternate every couple of hours between writing and drawing, try and figure out some sort of regimen. Maybe I need a nap or some break to regain some mental energy to continue drawing. Maybe I just need to continue pushing myself and then my mind will adjust to intense learning for more than my current 4 hour max. I bought a new mattress and its really good :) Also, I want to write about my experience with todays 40m face study, since I am deliberately copying the workflow of Christophe Young since I like his style. Sometime that I am reaaally confused about, is how when I color balance the greyscale image, It doesn't select some values for some reason. Like, I tried colorbalancing the first time and it just didn't select the airbrush but it did select the freckles, which I did with a pencil brush. And at the end I did some gradient mapping, and that worked, I just needed to do a background layer to fill in the whiter areas. Oh shit i realized exactly where I failed. I use an airbrush swapping between 100% black and transparent (0% Alpha), and when I use transparent I am essentially erasing which is why I had to fill in the higher value areas with a background layer. But this is what I am supposed to do, since Christophe Young does this exactly in some of the portrait studies he releases on youtube, and the mistake I am actually doing is the color balance / tone correction. I need to keep the monochromatic layer without tone correction and do a layer with the hues beneath it, and I need to experiment with some layer blending because what I think is supposed to happen is that the black layer ontop is supposed to add shadows to the color layer beneath so I don't need to do some crazy amount of layers to render some of the shapes I layed out in the greyscale layers. IDK I gotta see if I can figure out the exact intention behind this two layer process in some of the other videos. I feel like my writing is incoherent I must be tired omegalul Also, the eyes are too big, and too spread out horizontally, and the lips are too small and incorrectly shaped on the upper half, along with the chin not being angled correctly. It's like I made her into an anime character. I don't particularly care about the rendering being bad, since I will improve on that naturally, I just gotta be aware of the fundamental / structural mistakes I am making aaaaa.

2023/11/01-11 Time Spent: 5 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 537.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Too lazy to catalogue the exact dates. But I have officially deleted a majority of my games and apps and installed website blockers to prevent me from using youtube at certain times. So now I am feeling more productive, but I have to see how I fare with the upcoming gigs because I have a lot ahead of me. So my plan right now is just to find a way to comfortably do 6 hours of study daily, whenever I have no work or a half-day gig (7 hours taken usually for work + transit) 1 hour for chores when I can and 1 hour for exercise everyday except Sunday. I only play video gaymes past 7pm now. Which is what I wanted to do since the beginning.

2023/10/20-/11/01 Time Spent: 3 hours I got accepted to QCC, waiting for other CUNY decisions, then I'm going file my FAFSA. Still working, learning, socializing, and severely undisciplined.

2023/10/05-7 Time Spent: 3 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 529.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I'm like manically reconstructing my life right now and it's been pretty successful. Now, after fixing my sleep and exercise habits to work well with my career, I'm finally starting to focus on my art. I hope to do more long form studies and blah I gotta go to sleep.

2023/09/27-29 Time Spent: 4 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 526.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 aaaa

2023/09/20Time Spent: 2.5 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 523.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I've been super busy, and then also, super distracted. Every time I come back from work I am just way too demotivated to draw so I've been playing this complicated minecraft modpack I made for myself for the few hours I had free. But yeah, I have to go to a night gig soon so I did a bit of work before going. My movie composition study got cut short so it's unfinished. The movie is Earthquake Bird. I've been getting movie compositions from https://film-grab.com which is a really good website.

2023/09/11 Time Spent: 1 hour Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 521 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Ran out of time.

2023/09/06 Time Spent: 2 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 520 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I'm going to try and do a portrait and a full body a day. I played way too many video games today and I didn't do much

2023/09/02 Time Spent: 2 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 518 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Well when it rains it pours. I just got like 12 shifts confirmed for me in the next month, with more coming soon. This is going to be the most I've worked in the span of a month in my life probably. Of course, this happens right after I brazenly declare myself to be starting my manga. I'm going to try and hit my 2 hours of drawing a day regardless, though it will be hard when I have a full day gig. Full days are usually 10 hours + on average 2 hours spent in transit to and back from the site. I sleep for 8~ hours. meaning I have at max 4 hours of the day to draw. But Im going to be taking one hour off for yoga, showering, bodycare, etc. So 3 hours at max on a day where I have a 10 hour gig. I'm going to be doing smaller projects, I think I burned myself out too much by trying really big compositions that I didn't have the confidence executing. I should try those character design challenges again where I take an everyday item and turn it into a character. Studying Aoin has helped me a bit figure out how to approach rendering a character. The only problem being that I have literally zero braincells dedicated for color right now. The study that I did was me tracing, then coloring in from eyesight picked colors. Then I got tripped out over the brown laces since those are low-value desaturated purples?!? Also, since I gave myself a time limit I couldn't spend any time trying to figure out how Aoin made their colors and textures pop. They seem to be using a circle brush all over alongside some usage of airbrushes on the skin. I'm also curious as to how the layer heirarchy is thought out because airbrushes can get messy really quick. brain fried.

2023/09/01 Time Spent: 30 minutes Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 516 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I don't count the time I spend researching and preparing but I spent the better part of an hour just collating a bunch of references and videos on rendering in preperation for the chapter. I got really exhausted yesterday and I basically spent all of my day in bed recovering. There's something about certain gigs I take that just knock the energy out of me for a day or two. I don't know if its a mental thing or physical. Maybe I need to do more stretches before and after the shifts. Got the design figured out for Sin Prime. Little red fang decorated with gold and dragon bones, with a bit of inspiration from Gilgamesh's Ea from the TYPE-MOON Series Also, I found an artist (do not question how I found them) that is probably the closest to my envisioned artstyle I've seen so far. Their style of rendering is exactly what I want to do when mixing painterly textures on non-subjects with smooth / airbrushed textures on the subject. There is probably a better way to frame that dichotomy. They are Aoin Hatsu from Taiwan, here is the pixiv where I totally encountered them first. https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/537853/artworks

2023/08/29-30 Time Spent: 5 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 515.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Back to it. I'm gonna start the manga. Two things I've been thinking about. 1. For a very high quality product, I need to be spending like 12+ hours on each page. Those are the figures that I have been seeing on qoura or reddit from comic artists (and a few interviews with mangaka). I obviously can't do that. Especially since I heavily prioritize the story over the art. If I want to release 20 page chapters weekly, assuming a 40 hour work week (very very generous) I need to be spending 2 hours on each page, and create 3 pages a day. So 6~ hours a day on creating the manga. Of course, this would drastically lower the quality of each page, especially due to my current skill-level of drawing, a measly 500 hours. I think for this first chapter I'm going to take a bit slower, to see what I can do to increase the rate at which I can chug out pages (using 3D Assets, creating reference librarys since I am using no reference at all right now, using hatching brushes instead of cross-hatching lines one by one are some examples that I can think of) 2. Do I go with a completely traditional ink style (Like Berserk) or do I try and push the digital medium? I have been playing with the style in my head and I imagine quite a variety of textures representing things like the background, the drapery, and the items. The only thing that would be drawn with in an "inked" style is the characters in the story. I'll think more about this as I attempt the chapter. But yeah its time to sleep and work yar yar yar.

2023/08/10 Time Spent: 3 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 510.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I'm losing my damn mind, I can see the body that I want to draw in my head, and I can draw it without using guidelines (solely blocking in shapes), but I cannot color / render it in any fashion that can make the skin look good. I have no methods or structure or plan when rendering skin, and I can sorely feel that. Looking back on previous projects, I worked in black and white, but I feel like that limits me in some way in regards to learning color along with emulating traditional painterly styles in digital format. yada yada yada good night i spent way too much time gaming with friends.

2023/08/09 Time Spent: 2 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 510.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Furniture came in that I had to build for my home + other chores and habits so I couldn't draw as much as I wanted. I always have to tell myself to not sacrifice things like exercise, cleaning, or walking my dogs to add more time to drawing. Those things are far more important to my life than drawing, but it doesn't feel that way since I guilt-trip myself so fucking hard for no good reason everytime I don't draw when I should. Add doomscrolling / social media into the guilt mixture im chugging right about now and suddenly the feeling of lost time is a lot worse. Maybe I'm just a sigma male with a crazy sense of drive and that's why I regret lost time so much :^).

2023/08/07-08 Time Spent: 4 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 508.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I spent literally like 2 hours finicking with the design of the score pickups (2nd image) and figuring out how the fuck to make a .ttf file out of a small retro-pixel typeface Also, super important, I made a change in my regimen. I added a "Mandatory" regimen that I must clear through before I can randomly choose an A or B regimen. I'll see how this works, since the main reason for me adding this mandatory regimen is A. My mornings are becoming more consistent since I do my yoga and other habits without wasting time now, so I often end up starting drawing 20 or 30 minutes earlier than I intend to start. B. My home is a bit chaotic, so I often have to stand up and leave my computer for 5-10 minutes to attend to certain things, this often interrupts my flow when studying, so I want to have a regimen that isnt ruined easily by interupptions. C. I am just drawing faster in general, so I can learn things faster or tackle harder problems now. I'll think about it more tomorrow, I'm fooking tireed.

2023/08/01-04 Time Spent: 10 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 504.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 Woo 500 hours! I finished the gargoyle boss I was making, taking around 6 hours in total to do. I took a lot longer than I expected, because I did not know jack shit about animating in retro style. I made it pretty flashy but I had to tell myself to not spend too much time on smoothing the animation so that I can focus on other sprites for the castlevania project. Also, for the 1 hour 3-value practice, I used a Guweiz piece, which can be found here. https://www.instagram.com/p/CpUQbbqvvdz/?img_index=1 For tomorrow I'm going to try doing a project with one of the thumbnails I force my self to create as part of my Regimen A, probably try 6 hours. It sucks that I couldn't draw much today, as I got way too consumed with this spreadsheet I created for myself to draft the story of TFF: Prologue. And now that I think about it, I don't really track my writing hours! I have my words written tracked on a little google doc extension, and maybe that tells me the hours. I have around 40,000 words written across a dozen different manuscripts for Tales for Fantasia as. I'll do the math at some point.

2023/08/01 Time Spent: 2 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 494.5 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 ooooo I need to start including drawing the human figure into my warmup routine.

2023/07/27 Time Spent: 1 hour 30 minutes Did a 3-value study of Doo's work on Guardian Tales, you can see the page here. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w6Jkl9 I f'ed up on the preportions, should've had lines indicating placement of the shoulders and angle of the forearms before I painted, because I got tunnel vision and made the whole image wider than it needed to be.

2023/07/26 Time Spent: 4 hours Total Time Spent Drawing Till Now: 491 Hours | Day Started: 2021/05/18 I spent an hour ish on the still-life. The 2nd image is a follow-along of MikeyMikeyMega's How To Draw HIPS & WAIST https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXNmBiNkcUQ The rest of the time was spent working on the gargoyle boss, which will be posted later (I haven't finished it) Also, I just realized that I have somehow understand motion better than still drawings. Once I move the objects on the canvas, I can connect the intended motion I had in my head to it better, so my mind's image becomes sharper somehow as I move along the animation.