Evolution of the Student

Hi everyone,

It's been a long time since I posted. School started this week so I've had to slowly adjust to waking up at reasonable hours (... I'm tired all the time but I think I can make it work haha).

I still want to finish one piece of artwork once a week, but I see so many dedicated and amazing artists on steemit that post almost daily so that motivates me to go beyond that goal.

To celebrate the start of school (I feel like only teachers say that phrase), I decided draw how a student evolves throughout their education. I put together the famous "evolution of man" image along with my long and ongoing experience as a university student. And you better find it funny or else... (or else what?) idk I'll throw my giant bag of debt at you?

Here is the finished piece

It's a really wide image so maybe I'll split it up

From Elementary to Highschool

And Highschool to University graduate

Going through the process for this I feel like I have an idea for how comic book artists work, since it is a more "cartoony" newspaper strip style. I started with the lineart as usual.

I did this part last night, and was going to follow up with doing the colouring afterschool tomorrow.

Now early today, I reopened my work and saw a bunch of things wrong that I changed before adding in just one set of values (the darker shapes to show the shadows).

I saw that the giant anvil looking debt thing looked unnatural, so I changed it to a bag. The graduate was also way too long in the lineart for her pose. I somehow missed drawing shoes for a lot of the figures (I blame my tiredness), lastly I looked in the mirror to check the Sr. High students pose, and it did not seem like it would work (our elbows don't go that high when we're trying to hold our neck).

I found this to be valuable information for the future. I've always known that your eyes get used to your own artwork and little or even glaring mistakes can pass right by you. So that's why a lot of artists like to flip their canvas (horizontally or vertically) so that they get a fresh look, and then they can judge the piece based on if the shapes look nice. i.e. Not looking at if the head looks like a head, but if it's just an aesthetically pleasing shape. However, even flipped versions our eyes can get accustomed to, so getting a nights rest or taking a quick break can help (atleast for me).

Anyways, it felt nice this time doing it in the "comicy" style, as I only used one value for shadows to start with. I think one of the important things taught in school is to "keep it simple, stupid" K.I.S.S. is how I learned it. (You can bet our Gr. 8 classroom was giggling non-stop at the acronym.

This applies to a lot of things when you're just starting out. It was helpful just to be absolute: is this area in shadow or not? Separating planes into either light or shadow I feel like has helped my understanding. The real world is obviously much more complicated: there can be light/dark halftones, core shadows, ambient occlusion, terminator line, highlights, reflected light, different sources of lighting can bring in warmer or cooler tones, etc. Although to be fair, learning those terms isn't too much of a problem, it's just looking for and applying it on the forms of a figure accurately that I find takes practice (still got a long ways to go).

Anyways, by simplifying it down like I was taught in school really helped speed along this one, so if any of you are stuck on a problem right now, I would recommend taking a look at it in absolutes! To help aid in your decision making process, this might give you a new perspective. It's like in hiking, where you can see the tree but not the forest, sometimes we are too caught up in our problems to take an outsider perspective.

Although do please use it just as a way of broadening your perspective, if anyone tells me "Thanks Linco, I looked at my 50 year relationship in absolutes, I'm not happy -- I'm filing for a divorce right now!" Then I don't know what to say...

LASTLY, since school has started I always try to make the most of my time. And the commute to school is about a one hour train ride... so I'm now the guy that draws on the train (and sometimes, usually uses people on the train as inspiration). It's difficult as I don't want to stare at people... so uh here are some train sketches from this week.

Train sketches for practice on the go!

Some eye studies also on the train, I'm slowly going through constructing the face with planes haha

Hope you have a good day!