unrelated to most of anything else I might say, I noticed after a while that my rough hours breakdown of this project…was missing hours 30-40. :)
Hours:
0-10: basic shapes
10-20: shading, perspective
20-30: perspective
30-40: IT’S A MYSTERY
40-60: objects, animals, beginning portraiture
60-100: portraiture
…know how I said that having hit hour 20, I was confident I’d at least get to hour 25? Yeah, well, as it turns out, the early hours of the 20s were the first thing I’ve REALLY HATED doing and I would have at the very least skipped them if my friend hadn’t told me I HAD TO DO THEM even though I already knew how and think I’m good enough at it to NOT WANNA. So here’s my STUPID VALUES HOMEWORK.
When I said this to my husband, he looked amused and said, “Family values?” because although he knew that wasn’t what I meant, he didn’t know what I DID mean, so values, in this context, means ‘shading on a scale of black to white,’ and my homework for it is ‘you’re allowed to draw faint outline, but otherwise render the drawing without linework, only VALUES.’
I did an okay job with the values but I’m HAPPIEST with the fact that my apple is actually SHAPED LIKE the apple in the reference photo. I’m supposed to do at least one more stupid apple and I guess I will because … eh. I don’t really necessarily feel like I did a great job with the actual goal.
DAYS LATER: I did not do another values drawing because i DIDN’T WANNA, SO THERE.
So, ok, recap: I’m combining this “Can I Learn To Draw in 100 Hours?“ video course with an Udemy course I paid for NEARLY TEN YEARS AGO and never did. I stopped partway through the perspective lessons on the 100 Hours course to go do (as it turned out, the INCREDIBLY BORING values stuff) the Udemy course up until the point that they converged again, which they basically now have: this is a landscape using values to differentiate distances/perspective (I really hated doing this one):
…and basic one-point perspective again, because honestly the practice is the point here. :p
I’m now up to Hour 25 (a quarter of the way done!) and into 2 point perspective, which I’ve lumped all the basic drawings I did for together into one because it’s too dull to subject you to individual images.
So…
-rubs eyes- So it’s a lot easier to do homework when you’re an adult. Possibly particularly when it’s self-assigned homework (my husband informs me that self-assigned homework is called “a hobby” 😅). In retrospect, I agree with my younger self that perspective is work and not terribly interesting, but what I disagree with myself about is that it’s HARD.
It’s not, really. It just requires some effort to do it correctly/well. I mean, I’m not claiming I’m doing it brilliantly or anything, but I’m not making a fool of myself, anyway. More importantly, I have more patience for doing it correctly now than I ever did before, obviously partly because my literal goal here is to go back to the drawing board (as it were) to improve my basics.
I would say that even at this point, having done fewer than a dozen perspective drawings in both one and two point perspective, I’ve learned the ACTUAL RULES of it more thoroughly than I ever had before. Again, it’s not hard…but I treated it as it if it was, which MADE it hard. Even if I stopped here with the perspective lessons, I’ve actually learned to DO it, which would improve anything I did going forward, as long as I put the effort in. And if my goal is web comics, given that it’s way the hell easier to do perspective lines with an app than it is on paper, there’s really not much reason to FAIL to put the effort in.
So at the 25% mark of this project, I feel like it’s been worth it so far. I think the perspective work has been the most valuable by far, but honestly, re-learning “put a horizon line into your random boxes sketch to give it a sense of place on the page” was actually also a real zinger. Like, talk about the most incredibly basic thing, but also in terms of all the basic shape practice, it actually felt like the one thing that I was all “oh, hey, yeah!” about.
I’ve got at least five more hours of perspective work ahead of me – the more complex 2 point perspective pieces are likely to take me most of that, and there’s some dabbling in 3 point perspective after that, so I’m fairly sure that’s going to take me past the 30 hour mark, which…
-pauses-
Ok, I went to check what was going on in hours 30-40 for yer man’s 100 hours, and up through about 35 is definitely perspective work, so I’m still kind of on the same track he’s on, I’d say. He switches over to objects & animals, etc, at about 35 hours, so I’m going to change up my rough breakdown of the hours to reflect that and…here we go.
Hours:
0-10: basic shapes
10-20: shading, basic perspective
20-35: perspective
36-60: objects, animals, beginning portraiture
60-100: portraiture