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From the same sketching session, this was the final drawing, a 25 minute pose. Same rules, ink only.

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I realize the class is now over (and has been for over a month) but this seems as good a place as any to continue documenting my progress. My six week figure drawing class wrapped up last week (I may upload some of the live model sketches at some point), so in place of that I did a “line-of-action” 1hr class mode.

Tonight went with a ball point pilot ink pen, so no erasing.

This was a 10 minute pose

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Bonus post! I've lost track of time wrapped up in finals these past few weeks... I thought the final reflection for this project was due last week... so that's when I did it. Turns out it's not due until tomorrow!

That being the case, here is the results of my last drawing session for this class at the CCC... and probably the last one for a while. I was informed that I am currently the only person signed up for figure drawing, and we need a minimum of four for the class to "make."

I already have a plan B, though. The time that I would be at the class, 2 hours every monday, will be spent doing a 2 hour class session on lineofaction.com, so all set there.

Looking at everything all together, I'm really happy with how far I've come in this class, and it's been especially helpful to see the effect setting aside the time to focus on my skills has had. If this is what I can do in six weeks, I can't wait to see where I'm at in a few more months.

Oh, and our model also asked me if she could take a picture of my drawings so she could have a copy of them, which gave me a solid confidence boost.

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This project started as, and is still titled, "Alex's Journey to Learn Digital Drawing and Painting."

While I still intend to continue working towards that skill, as I've indicated in my check-ins and posts, It became something else in the end.

In the classes I teach, I emphasize the importance of hand drafting and sketching as a skill that needs to be maintained, warning that design is first done by hand and then refined in the computer. The digital is just a tool.

When I reflect at the the outset of this project, I set out to learn a tool... but what became revealed to me was the gaps that I had in my own skill set. It doesn't really matter how well you know a tool if you don't have the skills to manipulate it.

I've spent the last few weeks really honing in on those skills, and learning how to refine them. Specifically gesture, construction, and value. As I practice and build those even further, I can start to take them back in to the digital drawing tools and use both to grow my skill set even further.

I think there's something really telling in the comparison between the very first boxy interpretation of Theophile wayyyy back at the beginning of this padlet, and the life and form in the figure sketches from this week.

I've come a long way. Not in the way I'd planned, but in the way I needed to. I found flow again, and have rekindled a love for drawing that I'd honestly written off as inaccessible forever. I look forward to the next steps.

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 4/4

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 4/4

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These were the last poses of the session, 15 minutes each. With the box there was quite a bit of foreshortening in her legs, so it was a new and interesting challenge.

All in all, very happy with my progress.

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 3/4

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 3/4

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The next pose, I didn't get as many gesture drawings in this time - though I did learn a bit about how things work in live sessions... specifically that It's ok to move around the room if you want to adjust the angle!

Basically, where I was in the room was at the back and side for multiple poses, and it was again when we set her up with the stool, but then they said we were free to move around and reposition... which they never said we couldn't, but it reminded me of our tendency to stay put or wait for permission to act.

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 2/4

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 2/4

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Here are the first two poses from the live figure session. I also tried drawing a close-up of her hand, but that's going to take some more practice in construction.

Also, as someone who has no hair myself, I find that I like drawing interesting hair. Glasses too. You can tell because for whatever reason I felt it was important to include both to complete the poses.

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 1/4

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CCC drawing week 5 - Live Figure Drawing 1/4

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Our first live figure drawing session started by drawing a dead guy! There was a hanging skeleton that we used to go over the basic construction process at the beginning of class.

The highly detailed one on the top left is the initial drawing, then I started timing myself to capture the forms similar to the class style posing from line of action.

Initially we were going to do something similar today, with variable pose times, but we ended up doing more of a 15 minutes per pose thing since it was our first time.

I'll tell you, it was a real challenge working from life vs. working from a photo. The photo is flat and static, so things don't shift slightly when you look away. It was a good challenge though, and I really enjoyed it.

So much so that I've signed up for the figure drawing class that is next session!

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The second drawing of the week was. similar experiment, but with the constraint that every single box had to use the same three vanishing points, regardless of where they were on the page.

Originally my plan was that this would allow me to compare the distortion (which it did) but it also worked to create a cool abstract arial view of a city or something.

That inevitably leads me to the next step in the three point perspective process - figuring out the height. In two-points you just set it relative to the horizon line, it's going to take further research for this one.

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I'm finding that the most important thing about taking this drawing class is that I'm giving myself the two hours set aside each week where I get to draw. I've removed myself from the home, from the kids, from work, and any other distraction... It's not dissimilar to the garden cottage Niel Gaiman uses when he writes (#throwback to the creative individuals project).

This week was one that I definitely embraced that aspect. While I have found that my knowledge of construction and gesture need a lot of work, especially with living subjects, I do not have a fear of perspective drawings that are apparently common with other beginning illustrators at my level.

Frankly, I fell in love with constructed perspectives in school, they're a very calming experience.

So in the case of today's work, I decided to work on a new skill, skipping the one- and two-point perspective drawings and instead worked on the three-point perspective drawing exercises from draw-a-box. Just messily layering three point boxes on top of one another, seeing if I could figure out how to manipulate the form through vanishing point placement and scale.

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quick note, I just saw that this was still sitting at the bottom of the page as a draft

Week three's project was a still life focusing on value and form. It's the first session that I spent the entire time on a single drawing, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Taking the opportunity to really look at something was really helpful, as was trying to catch the nuances of light and shadow.

Not to brag too much, but I was the only person in class who attempted the still life with the lantern, there was another option that had an empty flower pot instead (you can see them clipped to the board). I'll be honest, that sucker was difficult, trying to get the feel of transparency by really playing with the values and crispness of the elements through the glass, but I'm proud of myself for doing it. I'm also really happy with how the texture on the basket turned out, though it is difficult to see at this distance.

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More hand drawing skill building, this is the results of a 30 minute "class mode" gesture drawing session from https://line-of-action.com/

I'd never done this sort of thing before, but let me tell you, I am a fan. After inputting some session preferences (in this case, 30 minute session, fully clothed, all genders, adults), the website presents you with some warmup poses at about 10 seconds per, then some 30 second poses, etc. etc. until it culminates with a 10 minute pose (the ballerina in this session... i drew her twice in the allotted time)

My drawings from this session follow the sheets in general from top to bottom, with the bottom sheet having all of the "long" poses.

According to various sources, a typical gesture session should last 2-3 hours, and the class settings can schedule up to 6 (it builds in breaks). The fact that I can do a thirty minute session makes it possible to schedule this sort of thing a bit more regularly though.

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I'm finding that this project has evolved from my original goal, which was learning to draw and paint digitally.

More and more it seems to be that, but also working on all the skills and gaps that I skipped over when it comes to learning to draw in general.

Every time we've sat down in drawing class, the process has allowed me to find flow, and I haven't been able to do that for a long time, so it's something I keep looking for ways to get back to.

I've also identified hand drawing as a weakness of my students at school, something I'm planning on addressing immediately, we're going to be doing hand drawing warmups for the rest of the semester. Selfishly, this nets me more practice time too.

Our task Thursday was to learn about perspective, taking a cue from the "Draw 250 boxes" program available at https://drawabox.com/, I and the students worked on constructing perspectives, and how varying the number and position of vanishing points can affect the drawing.

While drafting typically uses two point perspectives, there's something really relaxing about drawing with three, and the images look very charged (reference the bottom right drawings). I'm planning on actually doing the 250 box challenge this summer.

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 4/4

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 4/4

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Close up of the process drawing. I realized that I maybe shouldn’t have darkened the final contours so much, and started taking the line down gradually with a kneaded eraser. This is when I realized the line work for Loup needs to be done by hand. There’s just no way I can think of that you can get this same sort of “worked” texture digitally - the layered lines, the smudges, the eraser marks, it tells a story of making & process. That’s one of the story’s core themes, the making of community, the process of coming together, the tradesmen, the laborers, the people who work for a living.

That needs to be part of the core DNA of the graphic novel.

Edit: and I think that line of thinking has always been there, looking back at the early conceptual posts. This is just me saying it out loud and codifying it.

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 3/4

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 3/4

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Process work from the first drawing, after having darkened all the contours, but before adding cross contours

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 2/4

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 2/4

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Here’s the second of two drawings for the night. I followed the same process, albeit standing at an easel, but this time I tried to let the contour lines fade into the background and let the forms take their shape from the shading

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 1/4

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CCC session 2 - a post-ecliptic drawing session 1/4

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This session of the drawing class focused on contour and crow contour line work some more, with a focus on hatching and cross hatching for shading. It was an interesting process, building up the shade and form by adding layers of line. In the second drawing, I tried to leave the contour lines lighter to see if I could build up the perception of the form through values rather than outlines. Not sure the degree of success, but it was fun to try. I also tried an easel for the first time, and it was interesting to see the change in my line when you compare the two.

We worked with graphite pencils this week, an ebony, and I found myself missing last week’s charcoal. Did not expect that. I think there was freedom and fluidity in the process that was inherent to the bolder, broader markings. Freedom in the imperfection…?

I also realized that “Loup” will most likely have to be a hybrid drawing process. Not really a surprise there, I think that’s how most people work. Hand line work first, then cleanup and color digitally. Part of the reasoning is, I really want it to have that “worked” texture to it, where if you look hard enough you can see the sketch lines and brush strokes. I want it to feel handmade. Third pic in this series will have an example taken from this drawing in process.

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I didn’t realize it at the time, but upon reflection I was definitely trying to channel Shiyoon Kim’s drawing style from the end credits of Tangled when I did the inking of this drawing

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This is work that I did before the start of this project, I didn't reference this one specifically, but I shared the other two big projects from the YA Lit class, so why not this one too?

Initial design and brainstorming is hand drawing. Final project is done in illustrator.

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In den Seiten des Comics, eine verborgene Anleitung umfasst,
Blättere die Seite um, finde Notizen an ihrem rechten Platz.
Anmerkungen verbessern leise die Sicht,
Enthüllen Details, die vielleicht ganz neu sind.

Sie bieten Einblick ohne großes Aufsehen,
Wenn du die Seite umblätterst, eine helfende Hand zum Bestehen.
In schlichtem Text teilen sie ein tieferes Wissen,
Comics in eine reichere Seite verwandelnd, ohne viel Gekrisch.

Erkunde also die Ränder, wo das Wissen verweilt,
Entschlüssle Mysterien auf einfache Weise, wie es verweilt.

In the pages of the comic, a hidden guide includes,
Turn the page, find notes in their right place.
Annotations quietly improve vision,
Reveal details that may be completely new.

They offer insight without much fuss,
As you turn the page, a helping hand to pass.
In simple text they share a deeper knowledge,
Turning comics into a richer page without a lot of screaming.

So explore the edges where knowledge lingers,
Unravel mysteries in simple ways as it lingers.

- Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, with ChatGPT

Prompt:
write a ten line poem about how the annotated version of this comic is available when you turn the page without using flowery language in german

Translated with Google Translate

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Read this free ebook by Alex Lalonde. Find thousands of free educational ebooks for classroom use at read.bookcreator.com

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This is work that I did before the start of this project, but I did reference it, so I thought I'd share.

Mostly hand drawing, with the composition & coloring done in photoshop and illustrator.

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Story Summary & Rationale

R.O.C.K. (Razorback Outreach for Community and Knowledge) Camp is one of the University of Arkansas' longest running programs designed specifically to help new students become a True Razorback!

These extended orientation programs help new students meet new people and learn about the university, and it prepares them to be successful during their first year of college. Some of the 2008 programs are open to students in either specific academic colleges or majors, while others are open to any new student. All programs will be held on the Fayetteville campus in August and each program is designed to be uniquely engaging, entertaining, energetic, & insightful.

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Read this free ebook by Alex Lalonde. Find thousands of free educational ebooks for classroom use at read.bookcreator.com

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This is work that I did before the start of this project, but I did reference it, so I thought I'd share.

Mostly hand drawing, with the composition & coloring done in photoshop and illustrator.

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Finding Inspiration for Page Grids in the Real World

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Read this free ebook by Alex Lalonde. Find thousands of free educational ebooks for classroom use at read.bookcreator.com

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Recently my wife saw a TikTok/Facebook/Instagram reel in which a family had started doing a 30 minute mandatory art session every day, to the accompaniment of classical music.

We thought it was a pretty cool idea, so we decided to implement it with our kids. We have smaller children (2 & 3) so we cut the time down to 10-15 minutes for tiny attention spans.

So far we haven't gone too crazy, opting to get a box of crayons and a box of colored pencils from the art cart, along with a stack of paper.

I get some pretty wild requests from my three year old on requests, and here is her favorite drawing that I've done so far. Each child picked out their costume, and mine was dictated to me:

E1 dressed as a princess, E2 as a ballerina, and daddy is dressed as the big blue guy [sully from Monsters inc]. Pirates are chasing us and they have a purple bird.

The original drawing is colored pencil only, but I recently started another (currently still in progress) that I inked the linework on. I liked the inking effect so much that I scanned the original drawing (agan, could not risk ruining E1's favorite drawing... it's been on the fridge ever since it was made. Everything else cycles out daily), and inked over it in procreate.

It was reminiscent of the work I was doing in the YA lit - Graphic Memoir course, specifically "Remember Your Why" and "Godspeed Josh Freeman" (Will link in another post...?). I think there's definitely space for a hybrid workflow. Frankly, I think that's how [most] professionals work.

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 4/4

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 4/4

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The last drawing of the night, I was trying a visualization technique by turning the reference upside down, and drawing upside down, to distance my brain from processing what it saw as an object and see more the shapes.

This was a ten minute drawing, so I'm pretty happy with how much of the form and detail I got in there in that amount of time.

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 3/4

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 3/4

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Most of the drawings were of shoes, because they "are not something we typically spend too much thought on" and they get "all floppy and deformed and stuff, you really have to draw the shape."

This drawing was a discussion of cross contour lines, and the basic shapes that make up pretty much all structural elements in a drawing.

We also discussed how cross contour lines can be built up in areas to delineate shading and other effects, leading to hatching and cross hatching.

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 2/4

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 2/4

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The task for the majority of the session was just to dive into drawing, specifically drawing with contour lines. Learning to see the shape, rather than the object.

We were encouraged to squint to abstract the forms we were looking at, and in doing so I learned a new limitation of my alopecia that I had never known before... that strategy does not work for my. Reason being, it is the aliasing effect of your eyelashes that causes the image to blur and abstract. Without eyelashes, the detail remains the same and I just end up closing off part of my field of view. Plus it feels really awkward and kind of makes my eyes water to hold.

All that to say, I'm going to have to learn to see the shapes through direct observation, no shortcuts. I think that's going to force me to become stronger at it at a faster rate (because there's no shortcut to abstraction) but it was an interesting and niche limitation that I had never experienced or considered before.

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 1/4

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CCC Drawing Classes - Finding Community 1/4

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One of the feedback suggestions I received for my project so far was to seek out a community of like minded individuals that I could learn from and collaborate with. I have so far been unable to find a group specifically for digital art and drawing, though I'm hoping to at least find an online community somewhere.

My wife has been taking pottery courses at the Community Creative Center for the past three months, and saw that they were offering a drawing session for the next six weeks. So far that's been the closest thing to a community so I signed up. I've never actually had a drawing fundamentals class before (I started with painting in high school since I switched from engineering at semester) so I figured it's the perfect opportunity to get some official training.

I have to be honest, I can't remember the last time I set aside TWO WHOLE HOURS just to draw. It was wonderful. I wish I had more time during the week, but for now two dedicated hours a week is two hours more than I've been able to manage for the past decade.

I also realized that I've been working at way to small a scale. This can't be helped with the iPad, of course, but with analog materials, it's a full contact sport.

We used newsprint and charcoal, so the sheets were something in the neighborhood of 20x24 or so. The short end went from my elbow to the tip of the charcoal (that's how I measured the square extents in the drawing).

All the tutorials always talk about using your arm, not just your wrist, but its much easier to understand how to do that when you're working at scale. Something I'm going to try to work on as I do more analog drawings in the future.

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On vacation at my in-laws for spring break, I caught inspiration from my daughter’s activity placemat. It had a drawing tutorial of a lion. I thought it would be fun to take that tutorial and apply the lessons I learned from the winter scape painting.

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Here’s the time lapse of the winter scape, so you can see all the lessons learned in process. One of the most interesting aspects of this tool is the ability to undo while painting. You’ll see that in play quite a bit here.

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This landscape is the result of a tutorial on YouTube from the channel “Drawing with Flo.” It’s a stylized winter scape painting, and there’s lots of interesting lessons learned here.

1. You don’t need tons of brushes - this was done only with two: the calligraphy ink brush and the soft air brush. Everything was filled in with color fills.

2. Palettes make a big difference in workflow and speed. Having your color palette set up will help you pick colors that work with your image. I didn’t have the one she used, so I had to pause and approximate the positions of the color wheel each time. Probably led to some weird-o variations and off color tones in my final.

3. Making the pine trees! I had never done this before. The selection tool has an auto color fill option, the process was to draw out the basic triangular form first, then add the “branches”

4. In this style of drawing, the airbrush gives you the depth. Layers + airbrush FTW

5. Confidence in your line is everything. The character and form in her process example is full of strong, confident curves and intentional lines. Mine were def shaky. Confidence, and the ability to accurately control the pressure on the Apple Pencil, is a must.

Practice, practice, practice.

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Here’s a time lapse video of the shading series from the previous post. The other big experiment I did was to copy each of the separate versions into a new file and lay out the four versions together myself, rather than stitching them together in a third party app. It’s actually really nice how quick and easy it is to copy elements from one drawing to another.

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New inspiration unlocked: shading and tones

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New inspiration unlocked: shading and tones

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As part of this project, and based on the feedback from my introductory flipgrid post, I discovered the work of Nate Powell, an award winning comic artist originally from North Little Rock, AR. I say discovered in an ironic sense, because on closer inspection I realized he is the creator of the “Comics ARE reading” posters that were plastered all over my classroom last year when we were making comics in math class, and he is also the artist behind the ‘March’ series, which I also had a copy of book one that I had picked up from Once Upon a Time Books forever ago because I was drawn to the cover. His work just speaks to me, I guess.

One of the things is it really has a strong grasp between cartoony and gritty, and he is a master of handling light. I haven’t done too in depth of an analysis yet, but at a glance it’s achieved by using 3-4 tones on a page. Always black & white as the bookends, and then the midtone shading, of which there is either 1 or 2. It’s also typically a color (in March, it’s grey tones, but in Come Again he uses two tones of red on some pages, and greens on others).

The color does a really good job of conveying mood and story, and I think that can be helpful to learn from.

This series was my first attempt, I did the yellow-y one first, and practiced playing with hue adjustments to get the other colors. I realize in hindsight that I’m actually missing the black level of shading which is actually severely hampering the communication of mood in the image. The line weights try to do an ok job, but it’s a good reminder that you have to have ALL the values represented.

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This is a spinoff of the earlier red/black/white sketch… trying to play with the different tones & moods achieved just by changing the background color block. It’s also a great example of the quick iteration possible when working digitally.

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ProCreate 101 is officially complete! To celebrate, here are some quick distortion transformations of the original Theo sketch. Tall Theo, Kingpin Theo, and Chibi Theo. None of which are designs that are going to go anywhere from here, but it’s nice to have a means of quickly modifying a sketch to explore multiple body types. Aka iteration or divergent proposals.

Now I’ve got to figure out what course I’ll do next… I have a ton of options. Will share more on that in another post

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The latest unit of procreate 101 was all about layers and masking… keeping your drawing organized. This is the first time I’ve seen it suggested that you group your blend mode types, and that the overall darkness level of your texture should be the opposite of the blend mode type (ie, light blend mode with dark textures, etc). Also, tactic so simple it never occurred to me, if you like a texture but it’s not working with your blend mode, you can always just invert the colors of the texture 🤯

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Here’s the time lapse of the apple painting, mostly because this feature is so darn cool

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Being a grown up and making time for yourself can be hard sometimes. It looks like two weeks have gone by since I last posted… two weeks of at least two people in my household being sick at any given time, taking off work to watch the kids, and trying in general to stay afloat and sane. But, fingers crossed, the chaos spiral is done.

I did finish the third unit of procreate 101 tonight, which culminated in the painting of this Apple. It’s probably the first “painting” I’ve ever done digitally, so I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

New interface options include an ON SCREEN reference image window, and the ability to pop out the color selector and having it freely available as well!

Also, the absolutely cursed “face” reference feature. I’ll share an example sometime when I can muster up the courage.

I will try not to go so long between updates going forward.

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I love role playing games. Beyond just the nature of collaborative storytelling, i think there is great untapped potential for weaving in cross curricular content, social emotional learning, and serious play.

Tactically facing games like dungeons and dragons, pathfinder, and lancer even have the potential to fold in geometry with the narrative storytelling.

This was my attempt for making a map for one (or all) of these games, but also trying to keep the trademark grid a little more hidden.

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Here’s a time lapse of my first attempt at the high contrast horror style. This time around I tried to be more cognizant of the light and shadow.

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I was afraid I was trapping myself into a single visual language too early, so I went to Pinterest and found this red/black/white that seemed to be common to “horror” imagery. Decided I’d give it a shot. Will include the time lapse in the next post.

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Inking and shading and texture and layers and such

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Inking and shading and texture and layers and such

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Continuing to mess around with texture, using ink and line weight for shading. Trying to figure out Theo’s shape, taking inspiration from some sketches by Shane Glines. He and Mike Mignola are pretty big inspirations.

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Tangent Time! A little details about my comic project

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Tangent Time! A little details about my comic project

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There's a legend in the area of Ontario that I'm from. Well, a "Based on true events" story. All the people are real. The actual event and antagonist is real, but some of the details have been embellished. That's direct from the guy who finally wrote it all down.

It's the story of a francophone community that was deeply divided, and the circumstances that finally united them. It's the story of how a wolf, believed to be possessed by a demon or the devil himself, terrorized the community for 18 months... attacking every night, indiscriminately, turning the community into something more like a military camp.

It's a story of my people, the Métis people, and an attempt to carve out a place in the world.

It's a story that I've grown up with (my family is directly responsible for the French cultural festival that takes place there now annually, "Le Festival de Loup" [Festival of the Wolf]), but never really known. My French has never been great, so every year during "Festival" I skipped out on the storytelling night, because I never understood what was going on.

This project came out of a different idea, one in which I wanted to create a comic to update awareness of Marshallese cultural stories, given how many of those students I serve and my desire to understand their culture. That got me asking though, do I have the right to tell their stories? Whose stories do I have the right to tell?

And finally, maybe I should tell my own stories first.

Which brings me back to Le Loup de Lafontaine. A story I've always known. A story I've never really known.

Step one was finding a version I could understand. Like I said, my French isn't great. So I reached out to my Aunt, who is a translator, and who still holds a seat on the Festival committee.

She said they looked into getting it translated at one point, but it was deemed too cost prohibitive. No English translation exists... though many French interpretations do, including videos, stage plays, and orchestral arrangements. Who knew? I was stuck. I'd never really know the story without a decent translation.

Enter the boogyman of 2023, ChatGPT. As a thought experiment, I started pasting sections of the story to see if it could translate it. It was written in 1955, so it has some archaic terms and formatting. In a win for potentially good uses of the software, it was indeed able to make meaning. So I processed the whole story through it. Naturally there were some things it couldn't handle, but it took me from translating a 40 page book myself down to interpreting a few key words and phrases here and there, and updating some syntax issues.

I'm happy to say that the second draft of the English translation has been sent off to review, and maybe it won't be so cost prohibitive after all.

Comic book checklist:

Step 1: create the first ever English translation of an important cultural artifact - DONE

Step 2A: Scripting

Step 2B: Visual Development

Step 3: Layouts

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I’m playing with the the image of “Theo in the snow” some more, and also trying out some more brushes. I initially liked the charcoal on midtones as the line language, but once I put the black studio ink pen to “paper” everything got just that little bit more crisp, that little bit more well defined. It got the 0-100 range of tones in, and gave the image just that little bit of edge.

This is a horror story, at the end of the day. There needs to be a sense of danger, dread, and darkness. If anything, there’s not enough black in here yet to really get the mood, but it’s on its way.

P.s. here’s another useful plug for the iterating capabilities I’ve found in digital drawing: all of the inking I did was on its own layer, so at any time I can turn that layer off and revert it to the image you saw in a previous post… or update the hatching… or anything else! I don’t have to start all the way over if I make a move that doesn’t work. #iteration

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I don’t have a lot to say in this post, other than I learned that procreate by default creates a time lapse video of your process for each drawing, so here’s a test run! Expect more of these, because this is the exact sort of thing we should have as a demonstration of learning.

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Continuing with the Domestika Procreate 101 course, here’s something I never knew about: drawing guides. This particular painting was done using radial symmetry, but there’s also guides for 2d grids, isometric, and even perspectives (1, 2, and 3 point!). I’m still playing around and learning what the features are and how to access them. About halfway through “course 3” at this point. Other topics covered include the brush editor, the color selector, color palettes, and quick shapes.

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I’m playing with the scene from before a little bit more, messing around with character shape, colors, etc. trying out new brushes too! There’s a 6b pencil in here, paint splatter, and charcoal sticks of various colors. I also wanted to try out using a mid tone background, something that oven never done before for as long as I’ve drawn stuff. This gave some freedom in both darkening things all the way to black, and lightening things up to white. I’m a fan.

I also tried to experiment with a lino cut effect on the jacket. I’m not too happy with it yet, I will need to see if there are any tutorials or brushes out there to help with that. I basically just filled the shape with color and then used the eraser tool to “carve” it back out. There’s probably a better and/or nicer looking way.

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This image was present in the previous posts, but I thought I'd share it without the menu overlays. It's a quick doodle that was made with a charcoal brush while learning how the brush, smudge, and eraser tools interact.

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I don't know how I've never heard of it before, but there's a quick menu button. That you can completely customize. And you can have multiple quick menus. The possibilities are literally endless! My mind is blown.

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The preferences menu... specifically, I can have it preview my brush cursor?! I've always just tried to guess what it's going to look like... then adjust, test, repeat until its right. On top of that, in the advanced settings, you can have it preview when you're hovering!

On top of that, not only are there tons more gesture controls than I knew existed, but they can be customized to taste.

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I decided to start with a course on Domestika by Brad Woodard, called Procreate for Beginners: Digital Illustration 101. I have currently finished Course 1: Essentials, and Course 2: Customizing your interface. One of the things about Procreate is EVERYTHING IS HIDDEN!!!!!

I understand the logic behind it, but there's so much stuff that I'm uncovering that I never knew it could do... simply by virtue of not knowing where to look. The following posts will have some examples.

I have now moved on to Course 3: Make, Smudge, and Erase Marks. And have been learning the controls by playing with a charcoal brush.

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[Pre] Getting Started, just playing around.

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[Pre] Getting Started, just playing around.

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I spent about an hour just playing with Procreate on my iPad, trying to see what I could figure out, how intuitive it was, and what I remembered about the gestural actions [spoiler, all I can remember is the two-finger tap for Undo]. I stuck with the Procreate pencil brush to experiment with pressures and lineweights, and to see exactly how "pencil-ish" it behaved, and I was pleasantly surprised. The pressure sensitivity is no joke, and I'm pretty sure will be a huge learning curve as I explore different techniques.

As I was playing around, I started working on basic sketches of Theophile Brunelle, one of the key characters in the Lafontaine Wolf story. As I got into it, I tried out basic tools like "Select," Copy/Paste," and Layers, which allowed me to quickly iterate on the design. Once I found a form I liked I was able to copy it quickly and try out different beard and ear shapes... then pick and choose what I liked, copy/paste, and put them together.

All of this would be possible with analog tools as well (so far), using pens/pencils and trace paper, but the speed that I was able to work at was great, as well as features like undo, changing colors, etc. I'm really excited to start learning what the app can actually do, and from there use the tool in ways that I can effectively control.

Quick note on the sketches: This is not best practices, I was working from memory based on the actual photo of Theophile and Emma Brunelle. As a preliminary design, I'm happy with the sketch/doodle, but when it's time to do more serious design I will definitely to have the reference photo front and center.