MY DIGITAL GRAPHIC ART ODYSSEY

I've always loved to draw since I was little. It started from drawing my favorite cartoon characters and later on creating my own. I also remember back in grade school and high school when I used to make my own comic books and passed it around to my classmates. Those were fun times.

Well the flame is still alive albeit quite faint. I manage to doodle every now and then. But lately I've been itching to do it more and rediscover my love for the art. My favorite medium used to be pencil and ink. It still is but I want to combine the traditional with digital medium. So this will be a learning and re-learning process for me and this blog will help me keep track of my progress.

 
REFERENCES AND INSPIRATION

One of my goals is to REALLY learn how to draw proper human figures. Below are recent samples of what I can do now. I'm sure there's a lot of room for improvement. I just need the patience to practice and stay with it.

ROCKET MAN: Well, this one's not really recent. I drew this about five years ago on a piece of stationery, while I was bored out of my mind. I used a regular black ball point pen.

I'M MY OWN HAND MODEL: This one's was done sometime late last year when I started reading Civardi's book. I thought I'd take a shot at drawing my own hand using a ball point pen that I had handy at the time.

LIGHT AND SHADE: Another exercise from Civardi's book. A study on light and shade using HB charcoal pencil. The cone shaped object is my Wacom tablet pen holder.

MALE HUMAN FIGURE: Here's a recent doodle done about last week using a regular #2 pencil.

I am currently reading a few books to learn and draw (no pun intended) inspiration from and in the hopes of improving my art. One of them is The Complete Guide To Drawing by Giovanni Civardi. It contains several drawing studies of faces, people, buildings, objects, landscapes and more. There's isn't much text or how-to's but the drawings speak for themselves.


I have more books on drawing that I will be able to share as soon as I dig them out of  moving boxes.

As for inspiration on digital graphics, I recently came across three artists who sort of re-ignited my desire to draw. Their websites are chock full of material that made me tell my self, "Hey, that's what I want to do!".

Check them out:

1) Dani Jones at Dani Jones Illustration
2) Jason Brubaker's reMIND blog and
3) Kazu Kibuishi's Copper: Step-By-Step Process

GOALS

As I've said, I'll use this blog to track my progress, among other stuff that I have going on, and see where it leads.

To help me focus, I've set a few specific goals for myself:

1. To be able to draw proper human figures.

2. To be able to draw complex backgrounds... cityscapes, nature, etc...without getting impatient.

3. To be able to apply effective lighting and shading in my drawings.

4. Learn how to digitally ink and paint.

5. Build a digital graphic art portfolio.

6. Create comic strips soon.

7. Create a graphic short story before the year ends.

8. Start a graphic novel early next year, 2012 (if the Mayan predictions don't come to pass)

Seems quite a tall order given the very limited time I have to do ALL the stuff I want to do. But I should not let it faze me. As a wise Nike slogan says: "JUST DO IT!".