Weekly Art Practice - Week 8
This week is another alternate take on the format. With the plan to do NaNoRenO in March, I know I’ll need to draw a look of backgrounds in a short amount of time. The game I’ve been ruminating on is set around a lighthouse which would mean a lot of outdoor shots and probably some establishing landscape shots. These have never been a strength of mine so I wanted to spend a week trying to figure out a style that would work for both:
- The vibe of the game
- Could be executed quickly
This leads to trying to find the right balance of detailing. I attempted to try out a few different approaches to this, taking lots of inspiration from Jacob Drawfee's “I made myself draw backgrounds every day for a week”. While also trying to remember the main take aways from the landscape course I did last year.
Day 1 - Drawing from imagination
Day 1 was the usual attempt to draw from imagination. I did some quick sketches to try to just think about composition and maybe about the kind of view I wanted to have for the game.
I also did some digital attempts on day 1 because I had the time. I tried to limit each one to an hour, focusing on laying down blocks and colours.
Keep these first attempts in mind as we move through the next ones.
Day 2 - Testing styles
I had gathered up a lot of different stylized landscapes for the week, a lot of them ended up being this kind of vector style which I do find rather quick to execute. For the first piece I just tried to copy the vibe without vectors to see if I could keep it so clean.
Vector pieces from Creative Market.
Then I chose a reference image and tried out a few more painterly + cartoon style. I didn’t love this and it felt like it sucked up a lot of time with little reward.
Photo by James Wheeler.
Day 3 - Reference studies
Now we’re into style practices. This first one is an image I really loved when I saw it. I have a high suspicion that it’s AI created and now I’m wondering if I should just spend my live re-drawing AI art. In this instance I changed it up by replacing the cabin with a lighthouse.
This piece took somewhere from 3-4 hours. Not ideal but I am pretty pleased with it. I found ways to speed it up and also found some brushes for texture I really liked as well.
Twist, turns out it's not AI! Cabin art by Christopher Oliver
Day 4 & 5 - Style studies
I gave myself an extra practice day this week since there was so much I wanted to cover. This time I was working from a photograph again.
For the first I wanted to try to be slightly more detailed but still kind of simple blocks for the buildings. The field is a bit of a trap in that you can spend so much time trying to detail grass and flowers. I could see myself enjoying this but it wasn’t the focus of the piece and I don’t think I’ll be drawing many grass fields next month.
Reference: Photo by Doug Kerr
For the extra day I wanted to try another simple looking style. A little bit like a comic or graphic novel. Flat colours and maybe more detailed line work. I also like this as a style but we’ll see in my final test how I’m going to struggle to really adapt it to my west coast inspired scenery.
Reference: Art by Cosimo Galluzzi, photo by Elenore Bridge
Day 6 - Drawing from imagination
For this last challenge I time boxed myself to 1 hour to see how far I could get in that amount of time. I wanted to prioritise the kind of flat colours style from the previous challenge while using some of the vector tricks to add depth or texture in the distance.
It does feel like with another hour I could get to something I like. Though I’m not sure if this style is really what I want for the project. I just feel like I’d like a little more texture. Working in some watercolour techniques might be my next exercises.
Conclusion
This was a fun week but it was also very time consuming. For most of the piece I put in 2-3 hours every day into working on something. Which is more time than I had planned to devote to art practice every week. But it also felt good to work on things outside my comfort zone again.
Next week is going to be a slightly complimentary exercise, but on a much smaller scope. I want to try to just draw a bunch of trees.