Three Dollar Quill

In this post:

• Eeeeh.

This week, I have drawn:

• Sadly, I backslid on January 10. I just didn't want to use my fingers any more after the rest of today.
• The website got redesigned, and I discovered this on January 11. I'll try to get a fresh start tomorrow.
• I started reorienting myself on January 12. Reviewed the earlier lessons, and resolved to go back and watch the videos. The two big things I need to do are to make sure I'm drawing from my shoulder, and to get a better balance between exercises and messing around. I'm way behind on my messing-around quota. As a side effect, I need to be explicitly putting aside longer explicit blocks of time for doing this stuff. I also need to, if I'm going to mess with video footage, figure out how to do video footage that doesn't make me feel ill. I tried to get a handle on the drawing-from-the-shoulder thing, and I'm kind of feeling like I need something closer to a proper drawing surface, because it was like I couldn't really engage my shoulder without also engaging my waist. Anyway, time to go sleep off that video hangover.
• I reviewed some basics on January 13. I think my highest priority right now is getting less pressure on my pens, because I think I've messed up two pens so far. So, I worked on ghosting, and discovered that I'd gotten a little rusty. Anyway, I did that, then, for fun, I tried drawing some Pokémon fusions. That... rapidly got less fun, on account of the fact that between my current skill level and the fact that they're unholy spritesmashes, the unholy spritesmash part was the less unsettling part of the final product. "Yeah, yeah, Startales, your face is a giant faceted gem, and good lord what is wrong with your legs?" I noticed relatively quickly that I ended up not drawing on the ideas of lesson 2, which is one of the reasons I had filed away in my subconscious for making sure I only use photo references, at least for now: I got focused on replicating the compositional details, went on autopilot treating it as a flat figure, and turned poor Magnedos into the LLVM dragon. A shame, I think the design was promising, if vulnerable to immature jokes. All of Cuem looked good except for the skull, and the limbs... in other words, the pile-of-rocks aspect looked great, at least in comparison. I think next time I'm going to look for some rocks or something, try something a little more attainable first.
• I waited too long to start on January 14. I'm going to jot down some ideas for later, and try to put aside a specific time every day.
• I drew some planes on January 15. This went much slower than previous plane drawings, and had some line issues. I believe the problem is that my previous planes weren't drawn from the shoulder, so it's not properly conditioned to do what needs to be done. I think I'll stay on this until the sheet is reasonably full, maybe try to redo the homework because I was formerly using my wrist so much. For fun, I started sketching stuff out for a con-script.
• I let things go too late on January 16. I think I'm going to have to accept that work is being hard on me right now, and I'll have to scale back my expectations for how much hobby stuff I do until it eases up a little.

Next week, I dunno.