Art thoughts

Hi everyone! Guess it's time for a journal update again.

As you can see I am still working on my character design skills, making slow but steady progress. Turns out it is much more work than I anticipated when I started doing this (as always), and you do have to do an incredible amount of studies that seem boring at first. But it is certainly very rewarding and I think a must have skill for an artist who wants to build their own IP! And yes, after some time of doing them you can even enjoy doing one minute gesture drawings.

I am also very flattered by the attention some of my older spaceship art is getting these days. I would be happy if you let me know where you found it? And while this is not my current focus, I am already planning to so some new tech stuff soon.

Other than that, I finally started doing some fanart besides my original characters. It's fun to just draw away and not having to think about designing the character first. Plus, it's a good exercise to drawing to spec.

In other news, I finally made the leap and signed up for the Gnomon Workshop a couple of weeks ago, which I dare say is incredible value for money. There's nothing wrong with free YouTube tutorials, but sometimes I feel they focus a bit too much on entertainment and motivational aspects, as opposed to really teaching professional industry knowledge.

I started with the Visual Storytelling tutorial by the master Ian McCaig (who did a lot of key work on well known IPs like Star Wars). One of the key messages of this tutorial is the importance of having a story in mind when developing characters and worlds. This made me think about my own art journey again and how I originally arrived at making art, some ten years ago. I used to write a lot around that time, before I ever got serious about drawing. Originally I did this because I wanted to illustrate my world Xegity, which I started as a background for a pen & paper roleplaying game.

Now after all these years and focusing on getting better at drawing exclusively, I think that I may have neglected the storytelling aspect of creating an IP. I guess I will blow the dust from the old material I have written and see where I can connect my art again to what was my original intention when developing my world. Of course I cannot do everything at the same time, so doing art has to stay my main focus. But as the tutorial shows, it is even possible to develop a story visually.

I also considered joining Schoolism, but they recently increased prices and their subscription model is still somewhat weird. You subscribe to one course, which you can switch at any time - so why not just subscribe to everything, like with Gnomon? Anyway, it's still not too expensive and I may subscribe when I have finished the more interesting Gnomon tutorials (of which there are a lot). What are your favorite free or non-free art education resources?

Thanks again for the faves and watches and don't forget to follow me on social media for the most recent stuff.

Keep it up!