Sped up a bit, but it seems I need to slow down.

With today's drawing I tried speeding up to only 60 seconds per figure! 

It was hectic. 

60 seconds just isn't enough time for me to get a decent/finished sketch for each figure. I'm going to have to stay at 90 seconds per figure right now. Besides that, some of these sketches are REALLY bad... but I was able to get this much done in exactly a minute for each figure.

6 minutes. 60 seconds per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Adding some detail

More sketches, took my time, and tried to add some detail. I believe I need to work on feet next.

15 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Less 'sketchy', less lines!

So today was an experiment. I didn't time myself on the figure drawings. What I DID do, was see if i could draw them by sizing up things beforehand, without guidelines, and with as few lines as possible. I feel like this makes my work seem more ...I don't know the word... professional? It suggests that I know what I'm doing, even though I don't. I would call today a success.

I did slightly fall back into my old ways on the female drawing today, oh well!

12-ish minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Long weekend (Part 3, Jan 27th)

8-ish minutes. 90 seconds per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Long weekend (Part 2, Jan 26th)

5 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Long weekend (Part 1, Jan 25th)

This has been a LOOOOONNNNNNNNNNGGGGGG weekend. An abundance of work/school/and other affairs have really kept me busy! I've been doing my drawings, but I haven't been home to upload these all weekend, until now! So here comes a burst of updates.

Pencil on paper. 10-ish minutes. With reference.

More gesture sketches!

Even more, same style guys. Here it is!

11-ish minutes. 90 seconds per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Slowing down a tad

With all these speed runs, the emphasis is getting a realistic human shape in the least amount of time (I've been capping each figure at 90 seconds mostly). But I need to work on details too. So today's work wasn't timed, but I tried to draw as fast as possible. I spent about 3-5 minutes per figure. Turned out pretty good.

12-ish minutes. 3-5 minutes per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Another day, another doodle.

Some more speed doodles! Another batch of 90 second runs, not counting the image in the bottom right. That one had some weird foreshortening, so I took about 3 minutes on it to get it looking the way I wanted it. I've noticed I'm starting to try and put too much detail into these, and I'm not completing them in the 90 second window I've made for myself.

I'm gonna have to work on that.

9-ish minutes. 90 seconds per figure (except bottom right, took 3 min). Pencil on paper. With reference.

Off days

Oh man, some days I feel like I'm not doing as good as I used to. But I've been told that this happens all the time when you're drawing a lot. Everybody has off days. One thing I'm happy about is even though I feel like today's wasn't as good as I wanted, when I look back I still feel like these are better than my quick sketches from a couple weeks ago.

8-ish minutes. 90 seconds per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Another day, another doodle

Another busy day, so small update.

Quick drawing, tried some different things. Sorry for the blurryness :/ I'll get on that scanner thing eventually.

5 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Quick upload

Been a REAL busy day and I'm pooped. Sorry but no big update today, just more speed sketches.
(I'm exhausted and you can see it in the drawings :/ )

11-ish minutes. 90 seconds per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

Moar speed sketches!

This has quickly turned into my FAVORITE drawing exercise! I love that I'm racing the clock, and the goal is a humanoid shape in the desired position. I even finished one or two of these just before the timer. Though you will see that some aren't exactly right, I am cutting down on my time to draw. 90 seconds still for each, though some were a couple seconds less than that!

You're probably going to see a TON of these. I hope to get down to 30 seconds per figure... eventually.

13-ish minutes. 90 seconds per figure. Pencil on paper. With reference.

SIDE NOTE:: You can see which ones I had trouble on easily by the amount of extra lines I had to draw to be happy with the figure.

Speed, speed, SPEED!

More speed sketches, for gesture drawing. Not too detailed, but getting better accuracy with this! 90 seconds for each figure and MAN, this is actually pretty fun, but it's a tad hectic. I'm worrying about finishing before the timer goes out each one.

But here you go! Mostly action poses!

12-ish minutes. Pencil on paper. 90 seconds per figure. With reference.

Need for speed!

Woo, speeeeeeeed!

That's what I've been working on today. When I have time to erase, re-do, and touch up every piece of art I create, I'm able to hide from myself where I need improvement. So lets fix that!

I took my older speed runs, which I still had time to "fix", and saw that I could still touch up bad areas. So I went to my reference generator, and turned the timer down so fast it broke world records!

...I'm lying, it wasn't THAT fast >_>

But seriously, I had it where I could only see the reference for my first 3 sketches for 60 SECONDS! I soon saw that it was too little time, as I'm not at the artistic level I want to be, so I adjusted the timer to 90 seconds for the bottom 3 poses. You will notice that the bottom ones are more "complete" and not JUST sketches. I feel like right now 90 seconds is where I'm gonna keep the timer until I can get better and faster at this!

Pencil on paper. With reference. Top row is 60 seconds per figure, bottom row is 90 seconds per figure.

Foreshortening with props!

Seriously! I'm getting this foreshortening thing DOWN! These hands look great, tons of foreshortening, quickly draw, and with props too! It's like a hand cushion thing lol.

Only took me about 10 minutes.

10 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference (my own hand).

First love

Decided to draw something that is near and dear to my heart, and probably most of the people around my age. I've gotten tired of just drawing hands with simple things, so I'm trying drawing hands with intricate objects, like my Super Nintendo controller!

This was a ton of fun, and I'm so happy about how the hands turned out. Everything looks proportional, and matches the size it should be with a controller.

I <3 my SuperNES

15-20 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference (my own hand and SuperNES controller).

Hands on!

Bad pun again!

But on a serious note, hands are getting easier to..see? When I'm drawing now, I can easier see how hands are positioned when I look at them. You'll see that both these hands have correct proportions (also the second has quite a bit of foreshortening!), and my next step is going to be figuring out how I want to do more detail in the hands.

But that's for another day, today I celebrate being able to draw hands!

10 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference (my own hand & remote).

(Also, I SWEAR I'm going to get that scanner set up eventually!)

Hand positions

So I think I've figured out what my problem with hands is. As you'll see in todays drawing, the hand that is almost flat is a very good recreation of what I saw, but that hand that's turned to the side with a ton of foreshortening has awkward proportions.

So I will start working on forshortened (turned) hands!

Todays took me about 10 minutes.

10 minutes. Pencil on paper. With reference (own hand).

Sunglasses (it's Fridays drawing)

This one is a tad late. We went out for my friends birthday last night and i didn't get home until WELL into today.

But here's Friday's drawing, hands (still terrible at!) with sunglasses (i'm terrible at adding accessories too!). It didn't turn out as bad as I thought, and only took about 10 minutes.

10 minutes, pencil on paper, with reference (own hand)

Draw-ception!

A drawing of a drawing!

Hahaha, I decided to do this as a joke today. I knew I needed to take a break from the Death Knight project, so that way I keep up my studies of hands (one of my worst things to draw, if you didn't know).

Did this in about 15 minutes, this whole drawing thing is getting a little quicker!

15 minutes, pencil on paper, used own hands as reference.

A little progress

Only a small update today, hand is cramping up pretty bad. I've got the outline for the main armor parts and some detail lines started for major sections of the armor. Will try to get the armor a little more finished tomorrow.

Pencil on paper, about 10 minutes.

Beginning of a project - Jan 8th

So I've decided that even though I need to do plenty of studies of pretty much everything, I need to do full compositions too. A car manufacturer doesn't JUST practice building engines and wheels, they also build whole cars.

My project is going to be a gift. I recently got my girlfriend into World of Warcraft (which, admittedly, I play too) she's played two classes, a Warlock and a Death Knight. Her current favorite is her Death Knight, which for the uninformed, is a person wielding either two one-handed weapons, or a two-handed weapon, and dark magic. I'm going to draw her character over a couple of days, to get some work doing a drawing from start to completely finished, not just a sketch or a study.

I've gotten a really good outline started, going to start blocking out the armor tomorrow.

Late arrival (I'm counting this as the 7th :p)

Wooo. I wasn't home in time to upload today's on the 7th, but since I haven't been to sleep yet I'm counting it as the 7th. More hand positions, but with much more foreshortening and including other objects. It's quite a tad awkward doing these weird positions. Need to keep up the work on that!

 Pencil on paper, about 15 minutes, with reference.

Action Shots!

Boom. Drawings DOING things. Seriously, this sucked. I did these poses in speed runs. I spend around 4-5 minutes on each, but a little more on the female figure because of the crazy amount of foreshortening involved with that p.o.v.

Besides being terribly hard, these speed runs were fun, and will help me get better!

Pencil on paper. 4-5 minutes per figure (an extra 3ish minutes on the female one, I suck at foreshortening) With reference photos.

Speed run!

I looked at some of my earlier works in this daily doodle blog, and realized that when I had enough time to go back and fix everything that I could make decent pose sketches. You will notice that my other figure pose sketches are each about 20-30 minutes for EACH figure. Well that's all the time where I go back and fix the underlying things I miss when I originally make my sketch outline.

To fix that I put myself on a time limit! I only allowed myself around FOUR minutes for EACH figure on this exercise! Crazy right? I literally took away between 80% and 87% of my drawing time. Oddly enough these aren't terrible, just some foreshortening issues. Notice the male figure standing actually looks really good! So I know a big weakness of mine now is foreshortening and odd figure poses.

I know what I'll be doing the next couple of days.

Pencil on paper, reference photos, only 4 minutes for each pose before i moved on.

More stuff I'm bad at!

Seriously, I think that the only way to get better at this is to keep doing these things that make me realize how bad I am at them!

Hands AGAIN! Plus foreshortening!

I would have dome more but with these weird positions my left hand was cramping something awful to hold them. All in due time. I'll get better. But I have to make these terrible drawings first.

One thing to note is that I had a MUCH easier time getting proportions correct. Probably due to the way my mind subconsciously told me to draw them yesterday. Following that format let these all have a "lifelike" size. You'll notice that yesterdays hands were all different proportions, although only my hand was modeled. I allowed myself to erase on this one, but only INSIDE my hand, not the edge.

Pencil on paper, about 15-20ish minutes. Used my hand as a reference.

Hand-y work!

And theeeeerrrrrrrreeeee we have it. I couldn't make it a week into this without a title being a pun. But seriously, I know hands/feet are my terribad areas. Sooooooo I'm going to fix it.

Today's exercise was to just draw my hand (you will notice they are all LEFT hands, I'm a righty!) and to see how I did. Also, I didn't allow myself to erase on this one. Forcing me to look at my mistakes will help me correct and avoid them in the future. It also helps you see exactly what parts make you want to cry when you're trying to draw them! By the time I got to the last hand on the lower-right, my mind already had me drawing certain parts first. I accentuated that fact to show you what I did. I would draw the main chuck of my hand, add the base for the thumb, then do each finger and thumb separately after that. It worked out really well, so I'm gonna go with that as my way to draw hands until I'm a master-mechanical-pencil-ninja at it!

Pencil on paper, 20ish minutes, used own hand as reference (NO picture this time!)

A little bit of foreshortening

Here is my second drawing! This position has a bit of foreshortening, which is pretty tough for someone who doesn't draw all the time. It took about 30 minutes to get this right, pencil and paper, with a reference.

I want to get to the point where i can get this quality outline, with a tad more detail in the extremities like fingers, toes, ect, but in MUCH less time. I have to keep erasing, and as you can see I don't use a single line, I use multiple to build up the outline.

A new year.

Hello all,

I'm Nick. I'm an avid gamer (RPG's, shooters, and puzzle games are my fav), a computer programmer (stillin school for that), and a small video game developer. I make games over at Golden Vault Games where I'm the programmer, but as an indie dev you wear MANY hats. Sometimes all of the hats. Which is where drawing comes into play.

It's a new year for me, and I want so much more from this year than the last. One thing that always haunted me was my inability to get better at drawing. I could doodle, but it wasn't art. The closest thing i could do was copy something using a reference picture.

I want to draw from my mind.
I want to draw everything that I'm imagining.
I want to draw BETTER.

So to do this, I decided i would start a blog. For every day in 2013, I am going to do SOME kind of doodle, drawing, painting, digital art, ect. Plus for video game dev side projects I would like to do my own art. This is why you MAY see some quirky, odd, and weird things that I'm drawing.

Art for art's sake.

Without further ado, my doodle for today!
(Sorry about bad camera quality, I'll have a scanner soon enough!)