Been a while since I posted in here... Get my sh*t together and do some proper practice. I've (surprised myself!) drawn every day since July 7 this year, but it's mostly filler and little real progress. I've struggled for a while with actual 'ideas' of what to draw, but recently realised a lot of that is actually not being confident to be bad at art for a while and just have a go. I see the things I would *want* to draw and think 'no I couldn't make that,' or 'well I'm just not that interested in topic X to do serious practice.' For example, - I'd love to draw characters from my favourite video games or novels, but feel I'm not into learning figure drawing. But, I don't need to learn figure drawing; I need to learn character design and clothing because I'm not trying to be Michelangelo. - I love Rally, but I feel I don't like learning with measurement and tools like rulers, ellipses, etc. But, if I want to draw car, plane or sci-fi ship designs, I need to buckle up and take it on. - I like wasps and insects, but I feel it's too tiresome to sit and do all the fine details with accuracy. For this, I need to just give myself more time. The 'draw daily' thing has actually hindered this, as I'm more in a rush to 'fill a page' (I started each day on a dated fresh page) rather than work on a longer piece. This subject has also hurt my progress because I have actually done some 'good' paintings of wasps and so feel I should be further than I am otherwise! For inspiration, I'm going to make sure I read more inspiring stuff: I enjoy fantasy and sci-fi, but have honestly read only little. I want to have a vast library of source worlds and characters to create from. So these are my goals: - Learn character design, including figure fundamentals. Draw some of my favourite characters, do studies of them. Be comfortable being bad at it. - Learn vehicle/spaceship design: be able to draw cars at different angles and do sci-fi vehicle concepts. - Do more detailed wasp/insect drawings with some fantasy creature designs based off them. - I will jump around between these to keep interest and perspectives fresh. - I will not 'draw every day,' but might do targeted practice for a week or so at a time when I feel I need it. - I'll keep enjoying it, If I stop having fun it's time to stop or re-evaluate - Bonus goal: find an online or in-person community that I can contribute to and benefit from to push myself and enable positive feedback, support and engagement And, Happy New Year all!

I love ballpoint pen too! Great interview, April is such a down-to-earth artist and it's nice to see just a natural passion for creating.

I think it will find uses eventually, but not to the level of hype or threats discussed now. I think fundamentally, 'AI' generated pieces/references/whatever are *empty.* I think we (people) like the idea that a piece either came from something in our world, or was *someone's* idea. AI creating it out of 'nothing' in a sense leaves no exploration for 'why' or prompts to investigating the artist's choices. The AI (Well, ML really...) just *did it*. What do you explore with that other than algorithms? I think you're right on this use-case though, prompts for ideas will I think continue, but they are meaningless (literally) without the artists applying their ideas over it. Sure, people are still going to be wowed by the generated art, but the interest will disappear immediately after that, because who *really* wants to follow an algorithm. And sure, scammers, as there ever has been, will continue to try and fool us (i.e. photobashing) and so we must continue to be careful. On top of all that, I just don't think 'AI' will be profitable enough for these use cases. And, if people are all using these generation services for 'free,' then we have to ask how they are making money then.

Here's my attempt. I think maybe still not simplified enough? I wanted to be gestural as I tend to forget to relax and head into detail instead. I feel like my biggest concern is my line weight, which is always light... until I'm having any difficulty. Sorry, my phone has a terrible camera, I'll try and get better photos tomorrow in daylight.

Really good discussion around AI there, appreciate the insight and I like Jeff's attitude towards retaining individual style while mastering technique.

Just FYI, that insect is a fly pretending to be a wasp :)

First thing I would say is try to make sure photos are in focus and with even lighting so the drawings are nice and clear. I think you have really good proportions and forms, I would try to work on line weight so they're not so dark all over, then add heavier lines for important focus areas or overlapping forms, etc.

Very crude job, but fun anyway. Caption "ah, this is the life"

Ok so I tried to implement the feedback here: added slightly more contrast to the wasp body/head, toned down the contrast in the cocoon with slightly cooler shades (maybe too much?), added a little more detail to the leaf and some light cross-contours to the centre of the leaf. The changes are fairly subtle but I think work well and leave the wasp most focal. Thanks for the feedback!

I think you've done something quite fabulous here. You have great color unity. You've well described so many different textures: the reflective glassiness of the wings, the shiny body, the matte smooth leaf and then my favorite is the fuzziness of the cocoon. If your concern is that the cocoon is distracting, it is a dominant element: You have the highest contrast in values (brightest light, near darkest dark) and it takes up a significant portion of the image. If you don't want it to be a dominant element, it probably would be difficult to recompose at this point without losing parts of the wasp, but you could make all the values on the cocoon more mid range, and increase the difference in values on the wasp where you want people to look (maybe brighten the highlights on the abdomen right next to the dark rings (ridges? I don't know wasp anatomy. Sorry) All that said: I like it! You're good with wasps. What's your medium?

This looks great, well painted. The only thing I would do is maybe add some color variation in the green leaf background, and perhaps add some detail, like veins in the upper right hand side of the composition to help balance it out, and some cross contour detail on the stem part of the leaf to show its perspective and add some dimension.

I like the fluid nature of building the image here and it's how I find I paint digitally too, particularly the bit about painting too grey and then bumping it up with a mask/contrast! It's great to see strong results just mixing and layering in colour rather than picking specific hues and tones, which I struggle with.

It depends what you want to get out of that fun. Do you still want to become a 'good' artist and produce high quality artwork, even if just for yourself? If so, yes Proko is a good fit, but generally geared towards humans as the subject matter. Still, the fundamentals course is great and you want to learn as much technique and theory as you can as it will start to integrate itself into your process and eventually allow you more flexibility and confidence. What do you want to draw? This is a far more serious question than I think people give credit. What you want to draw, or enjoy drawing, can heavily guide your learning path! I.e. portraits, cartoons, still life, architecture, fantasy, product design, nature, etc. There are different styles and different skills you need depending on which way you want to go... If you know what you want to create, it's much easier to guide your process. I struggled for a long time not knowing what I wanted to draw but yet enjoyed drawing and wanted to do it! It has been very frustrating at times, where I needed to remember to just draw, without putting on the pressure of becoming 'a good artist' until I figured it out. I hope that helps in some way :)

Doing some review in preparation for painting some portraits.

Experiment! Play with the brushes and settings, you'll start to work out which ones click and which ones don't. I found two things important: which brushes do nice lines and which ones blend in a way that I like. Blending in particular has a few approaches and what works for one (say, using transparency and flow) might not work for others (say, 'wet' brush you blend by virtually mixing with your strokes).

Yeah exactly... It's quite dumb... Flickr and DeviantArt show full aspect ratio which is more pleasant. One thing though... on web it's actually a bit hard to display the correct aspect ratio for all images and put them so they fill up the horizontal space for each row. It will need a script to specify calculated sizes for all images and when the client window changes size it's gonna need rearranging etc... It's not like there are no existing solutions but I think the devs on artstation are just too lazy to implement that :/ I think the backend of them is wordpress, that might introduce some unnecessary complications but whatever. They could do it so much better.

Hi @Dan B We really hope to become the perfect place for this and check all the boxes you described. We have lots of great website features coming your way in the future.

Week 32+33 It might become a close race between how long my savings will last and how long I need to make money with art, at least the race is exciting again! In the past 2 weeks I made huge progress on my painting skills. I'm working my way through the painting workout by Wouter Tulp and continuing the pictorial composition class. Also made a new animation in Blender, a robot trying to hack an ATM. I liked it but it bombed on social media, the usual... I bought tickets for an art event in Berlin, I'm going to see Aaron Blaise and many others live! Not sure if this is going to be a giant waste of money (tickets + driving 600km back and forth) or life changing, I'll know more in 2 weeks. For May I want to focus mostly on getting better at painting and also use Blender for illustrations. I'm going to learn about stylized shaders but also how to paint over blockouts.