This was written from May 07 through May 09, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Introduction
Hello everyone and welcome back. As mentioned in Learning to Draw People Challenge – Take Three, I’m about to revisit this challenge. I’ve also had some ideas on how to supplement the challenge to both be more motivating and also better guide my learning.
Project Overview
So, what will this project consist of? Well, the idea is fairly simple. Right now, I’ve simply been…meandering, without a clear goal, simply trying to draw different things from my guidebook. Sure, it can be fun and interesting, and I can even learn a lot from it. But ultimately, there’s only so much I’m getting out of it, and in the long term, it has no clear direction. Thus, I figured a project would be a good addition. After all, a lot of courses tend to use projects as a good synthesis exercise. Moreover, it will allow me to stray further from the exact models, to experiment more, and hopefully to exercise my own artistic freedom.
I expect this to be a mid-to-long-term project, considering it’s centered around learning many different things. The goal will be to draw different panels for a consistent and continuous scene. You can imagine this as a few pages in a manga, comic book or graphic novel. Moreover, these panels are pre-selected. I’ve actually had this idea and a draft of the panel descriptions while I was out at an event and feeling down, feeling like an outsider. I reckon this pushed me into thinking/creative mode, which I focused on this project. Having my phone with me, I decided to jot down notes and capture my ideas, leveraging my motivation and being creatively “fueled”. I…did go a little overboard with the ideation phase, but that’s just the initial phase, which can be reworked.
The idea is to have different panels focus on different aspects of drawing, while still having a small “story” and a single character we can follow. What’s more, this will push me to design a character that exists outside the realm of the guidebook, and also force me to learn consistency across drawing, since they’ll depict the same character. Ideally, each subsequent panel should either work on a new aspect of drawing, a more involved version of a previous skill, or combine multiple ones together in a new way. Obviously, since I want a specific narrative, this won’t necessarily be 100% accurate, but hopefully this will still help me to gradually build my skills.
The Panels
So, what ideas do I have for these panels? Let me set the scene: The entire scene will take place in a bedroom, where we have a single character wake up and dress up before heading out (I plan for the character to be male, but the scene could unfold with any type of character). Here are the panels, in order:
- Sleeping face (closed eyes, no hair, no ears, but tip of hair)
- Eyes open, zoom out a little (see ears, chin, top of head)
- Character yawns, zoom out a little more (Working on face expressions)
- See character in bed, from above, final zoom out (No blankets, only wearing underwear)
- See character in bed, from the side
- See character turn on their side, from the side
- See character sitting on the bed, from the side (legs still on the bed)
- See character with legs dangling from bed, getting ready to get out of bed
- Character lowers head into hands, sighing
- Character turns head towards alarm clock to check the time
- Focus on alarm clock and the time
- Character gets up
- Character approaches chair with clothes ready on the back
- Characters picks up pants
- Character in the act of putting pants on*
- Character with pants on picks up shirt
- Character pulling shirt over head*
- Character buttoning top buttons of shirt*
- Character with pants and shirt on struggling to puts socks on*
- Character walking towards door
- Zoom on hand approaching the door knob
- Zoom on hand touching the door knob
- Framing upper body, character hanging head down and sighing, while hand is still touching the doorknob
- Same framing, turning doorknob
- Door opening
- Door open, “light coming in”, character looking outdoors
The Goal
As stated before, the main goal for this project is to have something tangible to work towards, and to guide my learning. Along this vein, I am hopeful that this selection of frames should build skills gradually. We go from the simplest version of a face, to a gradually more complex one, eventually emulating emotion. We have simple versions of full body along two different angles, before moving on to gradually more complex poses. We then introduce clothes gradually, although with some complications thrown into the mix. The final few frames involve interacting with the environment and emoting more emotions, but I expect they shouldn’t be much more complicated than what came before. It does, however, help close the narrative, and focus specifically on hand work. Overall, not only should this give me a chance to gradually build my skills, but it should help showcase my progress as well, which should be interesting.
The plan for me is to spend some time figuring out what skills I need for the next frame, and then probably spend a few days working on these skills before moving on to the actual frame. I might even make a few attempts, and unlike before, possibly spend more than one day on a single drawing. We will see how things unfold. As the frames get completed, I plan to showcase them and the whole scene. I may have a page somewhere presenting the scene as it is so far, so you can see the progress in its full glory (or abomination).
Conclusion
There you go, the plan for my new project: a simple manga scene that should have enough variety to grow multiple skills gradually. I’m somewhat excited about this, and looking forward to see how this pans out. I hope you’re also excited! If you have any questions, or recommendations (such as potential improvements to the scene), please leave a comment below. Have a nice one, and stay curious!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 25 – 2024/05/13