One more head drawing

This is my latest portrait drwaing. I had used a reference from newspaper. Overall I am satistfied with little improvements especially hair, but nose and right eye are main area I wish to rework.

My latest gesture drawings

Here are my latest gesture drawings, done in last 2 days. I have also started my sketchbook thread on CGSociety forum. So if you want see more drawings, visit the thread. I will keep updating that thread regularly. Anybody who wants to learn figure drawing should join this forum and visit the figurative art thread often.

<- My sketchbook Thread ->

Dont love your drawing!

I have heard this few times and I know I am suffering from this issue. Our class instructor told us yesterday that her instructor had told the same things to her class. And I realize that this is really a big issue with many beginner students and that includes me. I was a serious victim of this in past, but I have improved over it to some extent.

Once we get attached to our drawing, we start limiting ourselves, we stop experimenting. And may be we will stop seeing all the mistakes in our drawing. If you watch the same drawing after some time you will see the mistakes that you could not see at the time of drawing it. So attachment eventually slows our learning curve down. That's why it's really important that we dont get attached to our drawing. And that's the key to be fearless while drawing. And not getting attached will also help in being a very good critique for your own work.

so Dont Love Your Drawing!

Quick head exercise 3

Dont limit yourself :)


I have so much to improve in drawing eyes, especially in perpective and side views. Contour is not proper and they dont really look like they are sitting in the eye socket. First image proves that clearly.

Quick head exercise 2

Here are two more head drawings. This time more challenging as the views are changed. It was really a good excercise, I felt my weaknesses and I can see all the small and big mistakes I have made. But again no eraser :) and that's my primary goal right now. I am trying hard not to think of it, but still it caught my mind during shading of nose in first image.

I see a lot of mistakes (esp. in eyes). For me problem is that not all the things will fall into right place. If I do eyes good I will mess up with nose or may be lips. So still struggle goes on. But second came better than my some of previous tilted head drawings. So I feel I have improved (though very tiny).

But right now what I am trying to achieve is not perfect anatomy, but to be fearless. Fear of making things bad or making bad drawing is a primary issue I have seen in many ppl including me. And mostly it is in the early phase. We have to fight this to get really fast and smooth. I am trying to undersrand this phsycology and to find ways to solve it. But right now I would like to put one of my favourite quotes here:

"Failure Seldom stops you, what stops you is the fear of failure"

Quick head exercise

Here is the quick exercise I did in order to practice drawing without eraser. Was pretty fun, but at one stage I got attached with drawing and wanted to erase :) But I won this time, NO eraser! Also one more point I wanted to understand was making dark lines carefully and in right place so I only do where I need them (not all over the place). I think I didn't do much good in that. Also I tried to define things clearly in construction, but eyes were difficult, otherwise shapes of the head came pretty well in construction.

Second image came pretty fast and with better eyes. But shading near cheeks went wrong. And also there are some nose issues. But over all it was better and fun. More head drawings in perspective view tomorrow :)

Girl : surprise smile

Here is one more portrait drawing (from reference) . This time I was doing good, but I still messed up eyes and hair. Also i haven't done shading properly on the nose and some other area. But I had played long with it and there was no meaning of erasing things and editing. I think either I will do this all over again or will do new one.

The characteristic that I liked in the reference was the expression. In actual picture eyes were nearly closed. Also her eyebrows are up and she has a full smiling mouth features. So it was really something new in addition to normal smile.

I still need to do things with freestyle, it somehow takes really long even though I could have done it in short time. May be my choosey nature makes me erase parts again and again to get perfection.

Girl Portrait

Here is my late night drawing, it turned out to be better than I had expected. Usually I have trouble keeping all the features in sync. I think this time I have pretty much controlled my hand and eyes :) But still there is great room for inmprovement.

My first 3D character RIG

Here is a snap of my first rig for my 3d boy character. It has been long working on it. I had some issues in defining proper deformations. At one point I was stuck in doing that as max6 gizmos to do that does not work perfectly, but I have found out the way from cgtalk, so will be finishing it soon. This is really a basic rig, with lip bones and a jaw bone.

New character

Once I was practicing drawing foot and while contructing the bottom view, I saw a cool shape for the head. So I drew a character inspired from that shape.

3D character : Update 5 (clothes and shoes textured)

I have finally done texturing to clothes and shoes of my 3d character. Here are few updates on that. Shoe was the most difficult and time consuming. Rearranging uv coordinates took almost a day! It was really difficult to find or put suitable shoe material. Besides color choice was not easy either, I had a lot of combos but finally I settled down with chocolate color theme, I used very mild light shade of chocolate color for body.

Cargo pant was not that difficult in terms of texture material. Though I had to play around a lot to find good texture and resize/tile to get the best out of sample cloth material. But jeans material are not difficult to find. But just the jeans material was too plain, so I thought of creating stitches. And initially I was reluctant because I thought it would take a real long time for me to figure out how to make stitches. I played a lot with photoshop brushes but I was not getting the realistic effect. Because there are 2 layers for stitches, 1 consists of actual thread line and second for the holes in the cloth (darker tone). And I needed 2 separate color shades for both the layers, thus a need for 2 separate brushes to make threads. I will write a tutorial on this some day. But this technique was really helpful further to create stitches.

For shoe I had a real tough time selecting materials and texture patterns. I had to tweak different patterns a great deal to achieve some good looking effect. Some patterns were multipurpose. If you change the size or orientation or contrast of pattern, it will look different and can be used for different purposes.

New mouse design

I created this mouse for a 3d battle in KirupaForum. I had designed some of the concept designs. My main concept was to give a good grip and easy and faster navigation. I replaced the mouse wheel by joy-stick to give more freedom for motion. Joy-stick can also act as middle mouse down, just like mouse wheel.

I had done a little survey on that forum to know what is the general grip to hold the mouse. And I found mixed responses in given 2 options:

• full palm resting on mouse body (so whole hand will move mouse around) and
• palm over mouse not fully in touch with the body (so mainly fingers and knuckle will be used to move mouse around).

My sketch has a bump on the rear side of the mouse. This was added considering that dent in the palm can rest on that bump better. This design can work very well for people who like to rest their whole palm on the mouse body. I have a bit different design of that part in my 3d model. I had considered this 3d model for people who like to hold mouse like second type mentioned above.

Side face close up

I had this rendered image of my 3d character's face from side view. I really like this render, so I retouched the image in Photoshop to add some color and effect.

3D character : Update 4 (texturing begins)

Well! A lot of things have been done after I posted my last render. At last modelling part is over (pheewuuu)! I have started texturing the model now. Initially I was reluctunt to start with any complex texturing, rather I wanted to apply simple shaders to the objects. But I thought to have a look at uvw unwrap feature. So I was just playing with that feature and started texturing tshirt. But initially working with uvw unwrap was a real brain burning session. I had no idea of how it works. I went through some tutorials and help in max but could not get much idea. So I thought to just experiment directly and I flattened my map, what I expected was unfolded 3d mesh onto a plannar area like a 2d map. But no! I had lots of separate pieces of my mesh and they were arranged in a little box. So looking at that map I could tell about some majot parts which they belong to, but no way I could tell how they were connected. So I was about to give up and started with only basic shader. But I kept playing around and I remembered that one tutorial was talking about stitching parts together. So I started experimentin. I found that I can stitch related edges (shared edges or any shared element) to join all the different parts of map together to form faily identifiable flatten map. So day before yesterday I sat for like 14 hours straight and finally I got character's tshirt textured. At each stage I had high amount of excitement to see what result will come next in his t-shirt. And as this is my first time doing such a complex texturing it was difficult, but I enjoyed it a lot. So far I have got this :)

Old anatomy study drawings

Here are some of my anatomy study drawings I had done few months back. I forgot the name of the book (from library) I used for reference. It was something like Anatomy for figure drawing. I made these drawing to study general muscles and bones in male torso (hand and chest). I am planning to do similar drawings with more details of muscles some day soon. I did shading in these images to see in more details how shapes or volumes are formed.

3D character : Update 3

Here I am with updates on my 3d character. It's almost ocmpleted in terms of modelling. Only mouth is remaining now.

It took me so long to reach here because sometimes I was just running after a highly detailed character. So I kept moving vertices to get a very smooth detailed mesh. But when I see the result after rendering it's not much noticable. So there has to be an end to modelling, otherwise it goes on and on. So finally I decided on what I wanted and made it here.

Follwings are the main updates I have made

• Main modification was done to face, Nose is greatly changed. I added lips and eyes and ears.
• Clothes added.
  
• For shoes I added a bit of designs at the side and rear area.

I had drawn some sketches for his clothes. For t-shirt I detached polygons from his torso and then modified that to give shape of his t-shirt. For his trouser I started with a box covering hip area and then started slicing according to my need. Then I extruded 2 boxes from that box and then started shaping up the boxes to make it look like trouser. Whenever needed I used quick slice to cut the mesh. I am thinking of this character as adventurous too, so I thought of making his trouser suit that nature. So I added 2 big pockets as well. I had also planned to add some straps on top of the pockets, but I think I will not going to make it as of now.

I think major things remaining now is hair, mouth and his cap.



Next task will be to texture everything, and I am really novice at texturing, so I am going to have tough time with that.

3D character : Update 2 (Shoe)

Finally! After 3 days of pulling hairs and eye-burning sessions, I finally came up with something interesting and to an extent satisfying result. Lack of experience in complex 3d and lack of original drawings costed me more time than I had presumed. After I attached shoe to body of character 3dsmax took more resourses and now it was almost impossible to get smoothed result with iteration set to 4.

Here is a render of shoe I am going to use for my character. I have already added partial details for socks. I am planning to add good textures and add more details to shoes. It is certainly going to be challenging experience while adding texture for both shoes and socks.

Everthing is constructed from basic elements

There always exist some primitive elements that construct complex object. Any object can be drawn from basic shapes like, circle, rectangle etc. It's also similar to sculpting, we start from a lump of egg and then cut it and give wanted shape. And also add other primitive egg lump to previous one and join them to form new lump.

Similarly if I want to make a head I will start with egg shaped circle*. Then I can join another big egg to create body and similarly other objects for other body parts. This same construction rule can be applied to create any complex drawing. It also applies to human/animal figure drawing ( which I will post in future posts). Below are some of my drawing for similar exercise. Even if it was so simple, I felt like being child again, and it was fun :)

*in drawing and animation circle will have any shape :-) No math rules, it can be even sqashed!

3D character : Update 1

I could not finish the features I wanted to in last weekend. But I was able to complete leg, ear and started with shoe. Right now I am working on shoe and when I am done with it I will duplicate the leg and ear and will have fairly finished character. I will add details to face and eyes and mouth.

For the update I have right now his hands, which was fun working with. But due to my lack of experience with it i had a bit trouble modelling it, in terms of adding details.

after I worked on leg and arms

A fun drawing

I saw a picture in the newspaper and I liked the facial features of character. So I took inspiration from the picture and modified some features to my like and here is the result. A quick sketch of an old fella. I wanted to have more comic type of look, and I was glad to somewhat achieve that.

Very basic drawing practice

I was given the basic exercise of drawing as part of my animation course. It was for freeing my hand to draw smooth and fast. It was really helpful as i had not done drawing in past month.

I had to draw horizontal and vertical lines mostly by moving my elbow to get wide range or distance. Then I had to draw uniform circles of same size and this would use my wrist as well as my grip. Now grip is important on a longer run, so it's good to experiment few different methods of holding a pencil. Holding a pencil away from lead helps you get more radius for curves (very helpful when drawing on a large canvas). Hold your pencil loose when you want to draw construction lines. When you want to add fine details you can hold it close to the end to gain control over short distance. It's not must to have specific grip style, but technically if you practice some of these will help greatly.

Here is a snap of my basic drawing practice. I still do this sometimes when I am getting bored, that way I can utilize my time.

My first 3D character : modelling

3D has always intrigued me from the day I came to know about it. And I love 3D films for it's own style and test. As a part of learning 3D animation I started modelling a character in 3dsmax. I was planning to start with definite character, but I want to do more experiment in sculpting. So I started with some idea of what I want my character to look like. And this is what I have got till now. I will be posting more updates after this weekend.

Start of Beginning

After a long duration of waiting and thinking once in a while, I have finally started my blog. I want to share my learning experience with other people in hope that it will be useful to some of them. Also I wish to get comments and critiques for my work to improve my skills. So that is all I have to say in the beginning of my journey.

And for a good start I am posting my drawing that I did a long time back. I hope you enjoy your stay :)