I have been taking a new CGSociety course called “Introduction to Environment Design for Games and Film”. We are at week seven out of eight and this image was sone I created today is part of my homework for this week.

This was the final class in the term. More refinements of shadow shapes and blending of tones.

It was a great experience taking this class and I hope to do more in the future.

This week I seem to have made a bit of a breakthrough in my quick 1-2 minute gesture drawings. For about half an hour at the start of the session, the model holds a series of poses for short periods of time. Here is a sample of these quick sketches.

I also continued to refine my long pose drawing. This week I revisited the outline and worked on the shadow shapes and tones.

Tonight was totally focused on refining the shadow shapes and understanding the quality of the shadow edge of cast shadows and form shadows. The former being a harder edge with the later being softer depending the form.

This week I completed the outline and started on the shadow shapes and tones.

This week we have a new life model and a new pose Once again we start with the outline and establishing the proportions.

This was the last night with this standing pose. The focus of this session was shading based on grouping shadow shapes into three tones.

Further refinement this week on the line drawing and a start on defining the shadow shapes.

More work this week on the standing figure to improve the proportions etc.

And…here is my drawing from last nights class. It has some thickness issues I hope to resolve next week.

Well…I finally did it! I attended my first life drawing class. I enrolled at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney for term one evening classes.

Here is my very first life model drawing from the first night. I know it has issues but I’m just glad to be finally doing this.

Digital painting, to me, was the next logical step in my journey in learning art skills. Having learned the value of quality training from my pencil drawing lessons I looked for good online digital painting courses that would extend what I had already learned. This search ended when I found the CG Society.

The CG Society offer a number of similarly structured online courses for a range of digital art subjects. I was looking for something that could teach me foundational art skills in addition to the skills of digital painting. That course was called “Becoming A Better Artist”, an eight week “boot camp” style art course created and presented by Robert Chang. I couldn’t believe my luck in finding such a life changing course.

The course assumes you have Photoshop however I successfully managed to use GIMP instead without compromising the value of the lessons. After the course I purchased Art Rage digital painting software. This software provides a less technical environment for painting studies. This is what I used for the figure studies on my digital painting gallery.

In the past I suppressed the desire to learn and practice creative art in favour of the more technical engineering interests I had growing up. I am attempting to correct this imbalance now.

I started on this latest journey by attending two art weekends with Richard & Diana Moore in Jan and April of ’09. The drawings you see here are in drawing chronological order. The first two were created during the art weekend. The image of the eyes at the top of this entry were the first thing I was asked to draw after a short period of instruction.

The most influential book that sparked this journey was ”The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence” by Dr. Betty Edwards.

If there is no other book you read on foundational art knowledge this book will propel you into this new world with enough information to keep you there! I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Betty Edwards and her refreshing approach to teaching art to those of us who didn’t go to art school.

Since I started this journey I have expanded my desire to experience many forms of visual art from pencil drawing to digital painting to 3D modelling to Photography and most recently Film making. Each one of these endeavours has informed my skills of the next. Learning a skill on one of these medium seems to translate to the next. It never ceases to amaze me how that works. The only thing I can put that down to is that the fundamentals of art knowledge are independent of how they are expressed. To me it seems that learning to “see” is the fundamental gateway skill into this world.

The CG Society offer a number of similarly structured online courses for a range of digital art subjects. I was looking for something that could teach me foundational art skills in addition to the skills of digital painting. That course was called “Becoming A Better Artist”, an eight week “boot camp” style art course created and presented by Robert Chang. I couldn’t believe my luck in finding such a life changing course.

The course assumes you have Photoshop however I successfully managed to use GIMP instead without compromising the value of the lessons. After the course I purchased Art Rage digital painting software. This software provides a less technical environment for painting studies. This is what I used for the figure studies on my digital painting gallery.