Draw things for 30 days. Develop my style?

End of Week 3. I drew a shirtless Prince Zuko to give the anatomy a shot. The reference picture didn’t have his legs, so I finished them on my own. I at first tried to sketch it out from imagination, but the proportions were off. So I looked up images of people in Horse Stance and used that reference to get the legs. I’m really proud with the proportions. Still a little shaky on how folding cloth works.

Afterwards I drew my human druid, Sebastian Zander, as an Earth Kingdom character. I didn’t really know how to draw an older face in this style, as well as what hair style to give Sebastian. I kinda wanted like a messy dreadlock look, but I was running thin on patience by the time I was drawing it. I’m somewhat proud to say that I did not use references for this pose. I managed to put this together from imagination.

Radiostar Week 3

Reference here

I drew Toph today. I went in with the mindset of “don’t overthink and spend so much time on the drawing”, and… it shows… I picked a difficult pose on purpose. It makes sense to me to practice what I’m bad at, not what I’m good at. This underneath angle has forever given me problems; I can’t help but draw features straight on. I was pretty happy with the foreshortening of the limbs coming towards the camera, but the arm going away looks awful. I still have no clue how to make things look far away and not just shriveled and gross. I kinda gave up towards the end of this, and didn’t really bother cleaning up the lines or inking or anything. One positive from this drawing: The fabric folds are making more sense to me. Reference here

End of week 2 update. I only drew two times this week. This style is so much more difficult than the first one. I find myself really really needing to be in a good head space before I start, lest I become frustrated with the process. I’m going to roll this goal into week 3. I don’t think I’ve learned enough yet from this week’s challenge; I’m not ready to move on. I still want to draw earthbending and firebending, as well as some extreme angle action shot. Hopefully by then I’ll have an idea as how to draw an original character in A:TLA style.

I drew Kitara today. I went for a dynamic pose that included some water bending. I find I am spending so much time on each figure that I’m not keen to draw and redraw them like I did before. From skeleton to details (before ink), I’m spending about an hour. I don’t want to start over again and use another hour. And there are so many details I often can’t commit to erasing an area to fix a small mistake. I feel I’ll make more mistakes trying to recreate what I lost.

Radiostar week2: Kitara

Reference here

Week 2. Late start to the week. Skipped Saturday and Sunday with little excuse other than I didn’t feel like drawing. But today I sat down and got to work on my first A:TLA sketch.

Radiostar Week 2

The hands were tough, as predicted. Not as much shape as I would like… Also I didn’t try too hard to draw elemental effects yet. I just sketched them while the ink was drying on the main character. Last, I hate making mistakes with the pen. I fixed the jawline before inking, and then fell back into the old marking which made the jaw uneven again :(

Day 7? Took a day and a half off. But still flying in under the radar to get this original sketch done in the Teen Titans Go style. Again, I didn’t do much refinement. I just kinda sketched it out to say that I did. At the same time, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with the results. They could be re-iterated upon and improved, but for a first draft I’m actually impressed with how they turned out. Also here’s the cyborg from a few days ago…

Day 5: Not really feeling it today. I did one preliminary sketch of Cyborg, but no improving and re-drawing. I’ll upload tomorrow.

Day 4: Starfire. I picked a dynamic pose this time, to see how the style depicts motion, and especially joints. Turns out, it’s very noodly haha. I could probably make adjustments to my day-3 dynamic pose based on what I learned today. I was really happy with how I did, so I took the time to ink the lines. Still not bothering with line weight at the moment. The final sketch isn’t perfect. The eye shape and cheek shape need a little work. Reference here

Day 3. Beast boy. This character starts with a square for a head instead of a circle. He was a lot easier for me to draw for that reason. Circles are hard! I feel like I did really well and only needed a few sketches to figure him out. I can feel the knowledge from days 1 and 2 assisting here. I sketched a quick trio at the bottom, just to see if I could. The hands need work for sure. And I’m glad Robin is wearing a cape, because otherwise I couldn’t really draw the twisted torso underneath. Raven is the wrong size, but I didn’t want to run into the main sketches above. She was a last minute addition. Reference 1, Reference 2

Day 2. I picked Raven today because I want to be able to draw hooded characters. My Ironsworn TTRPG character wears a hood, and I think he would look like a mix of Robin and Raven. This drawing was a little bit difficult to skeleton into basic shapes. I immediately noticed that the eyes and mouth are based on the circle, but the hood seems to just kinda float there. I figured out some reference points, but I kinda wish I could’ve simplified it more. Reference here

I started with Teen Titans Go for my first week of characters. I noticed in my old drawings, I had a lot of trouble getting my point across with few lines. TTG characters are very simple, no shading, and quite expressive. Here’s the reference: TTG Robin

Here’s my baseline before the project starts. https://imgur.com/a/dbGjWU5