A Hop, Skip, and a Jump in the Right Direction - Vardia's Sketchbook

[Vardia]

Hello, everyone! My names Vardia and I'm currently a junior in high school. I just started my first real art class that's painting with oils, but other than that, I've never had any actual art classes. I want to one day have an actual career in the art field, and hopefully this thread will help me get better so I'll have enough know-how and skill to. :)

So let's get this thread rolling (Unfortunately my scanner is in storage right now so I'll have to make due with my camera for taking snaps of my sketchbook) :

[alesoun]

Vardia if you use the Go Advanced feature you can use the attachment manager to upload your pics directly to your sketchbook

[Vardia]

Alesoun - Thank you very much for telling me this. :) Makes things a lot easier.

[Vardia]

Took me an hour and a half just to do one sketchbook page. I should really find a way to shave down on time with these.

[Vardia]

And here's some pose maniacs before I go off to bed.

[Vardia]

And here's two more..

[Vardia]

And here is a delicious (?) apple before I go off to my oil painting class. One thing I don't like about this is that I just can't seem to blend colors together at all in photoshop, and I refuse to use the blur tool to do this. I've tried lowering the opacity and the flow but it just doesn't seem to work. :nohope:

[Vardia]

Here's a banana that I made. Been busy lately since I only have 15 days left to finish all of my classes plus their finals. As you can see, still having trouble blending up the colors. :\

[Vardia]

Here's a few 30 second pose maniacs. :) Anyone have any suggestions how I could make these a bit faster and still look remotely human? :thinking:

[Vardia]

and here's two more pose maniacs I did. :) Still trying to find a fast way to do it while still making it look somewhat humanoid. Comments or critique would be greatly appreciated. :)

[TheButterBunny]

I'm new so I cant crit you, nice commitment to posemaniacs though, and those are 30 second poses? wow, my 60 second ones look much the same!
keep working, practice makes perfect!

[Vardia]

Sorry it's been a while! We've been busy packing up getting ready to move back the USA along with preparing for a cruise we're taking next week. :)

The good news is I was finally able to take home my landscape (and first traditional painting) from my oil painting class, so I figured I'd post it up here. :) Even though the webcam messed it up a bit!

[Vardia]

Finally back from the vacation cruise my family took! It was fun and I got to see all kinds of different cities. The only bad thing was that I had to buy a new sketchbook halfway through the cruise since my other one got lost when I left it by accident in the ship lobby. :[

[Vardia]

Hey, everyone! Finally finished moving and are settled in a new house. My scanner finally came so now I have a few more pages of my sketchbook to load up here before I leave to Michigan tomorrow. :)

[Vardia]

and some more...

[Vardia]

Long time no see! My laptop finally seemed to have kicked the bucket, and my scanner (which is just as old as my laptop probably!) isn't compatible with Vista, so for the time being I will post up my sketches and whatnot with my web camera once again.

[strange1900]

Wow :) I really like the studies. You're in AP art I hope?

[Vardia]

Wow :) I really like the studies. You're in AP art I hope?

Most unfortunately, as much as I wanted to be, I'm not! I had to move to PA from AZ and they have some freaky art class requirements going on here. So instead of taking an AP or Portfolio class like I wanted to, I'm stuck in Painting I. Although I guess practicing painting isn't entirely bad. :)

[Vardia]

And a few more! :)

[strange1900]

No, it's not :) and if you talk to the teacher and he can see it's unnecessary you could probably get him to give you a hand putting the portfolio together and just submitting the work. you don't need the classes to take the exams after all :D

[Vardia]

Glad to post here again! My first quarter of school and SATs are finally over,(Thank god) so now I have a bit more free time to draw and upload said drawings. :)

[Vardia]

Here's a digital picture for you all. What bugs the most about painting (either digital or traditional) is that I just cant seem to get any more then a base and a shadow on anything. As much as I tried to get some different color variations and some lights, shadows, ect in this thing it just turned out like this! It's incredibly annoying and frustrating not knowing what I'm doing wrong. (I usually just take a brush and have that color at a light opacity than what I used before.)

[Rotten Apple]

hahaha, I see a man's head from that banana painting. That's actually a really good piece of art.

[andres333]

Do more life drawings and in figure drawing try focusing more on gesture otherwise your drawings will be lifeless, at this moment I think it's more important for you to study structure as much as you can, and leave color theory or even rendering for later.

[Vardia]

Rotten Apple You think so? :} I guess I'm having a hard time seeing it, but thanks!

Andres333 Yeah, I have been working hard on structures and all that, I just figured I'd take a quick break from that and see if I could dish up anything different for a short bit. :) (I did, but as you've said, I should really focus back on the basics!)

[Vardia]

Two more pages I was able to do today between homework.(Which they've decided to load onto my graciously this weekend.) :)

[Vardia]

Here's some more. :) Unfortunately, lips and torso's happen to be my weak point and right now the book is chock full of 'em.

[Vardia]

Hey, everybody! Happy new year! (and birthday to me!) I have to admit, I've never been very good at keeping up with updating things like this. (As you can probably tell since my last post was in freaking November. But I'm going to try my best now to keep this updated frequently. :)

Apologize for the not-so-good quality of my webcamera for these. I'm hoping I'll find a decently priced scanner soon that Vista decides it likes and wants to run.

[Vardia]

Been really busy with school and applying for scholarships lately, but I've managed to snap a few photo's of a project we're doing in art with my cell. We have to paint some kind of furniture with acrylics and I'm going to try "The Red Hat" by Thomas Musgrove Joy. :)

I have to admit I'm not very good with traditional paints and I prefer oils over acrylic a lot. (Mostly because acrylic dries so fast I can hardly even use what I've mixed.)

[Vardia]

Here's some progress on the stool and something that I made in Maya. :) Unfortunately the UV map has a bunch of seams in it since I used an automatic mapping but I'm not sure how to get rid of it yet, none the less I'm satisfied with it. :)

[Vardia]

Here's an update on the stool I'm painting :)

[RickyS]

Some of the drawings are hard to see, but it looks like you're drawing a lot and you're doing the right studies. Which is good because then you'll always improve. That Maya creatute is cool. I remember how much of a pain that program was, haha.

[Vardia]

Here's another update. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take any picture of my stool we're working on at school, so I can't show how its going. Although I am making a bit of progress in my Bridgman book, and have finally reached the hands! (Although considering how bad I am at them I'm not sure if its a good thing or not. :p) Looking forward to finishing this book and moving on to the next one, though! (I've got about five or six more, haha.)

[Kamber Parrk]

Hey Vardia!

Decided to lurk your SB after your post in Art Discussion.

You have a very solid work ethic-- your Bridgman studies will serve you well!

Helpful Criticism: You have a tendency to focus on the outlines of the figure. Try studying The Human Figure by John H. Vanderpoel to gain more insight into developing the internal planes of the figure.

Keep drawin'!

[Vardia]

Kamber Thanks! :) And yeah, I have a tendency to avoid the inside of figures. I'll be sure to look that up once I'm done with Bridgman!

[Vardia]

An update on the stool I'm painting in class. Unfortunately my art teacher decided to put me aside while she "helped" by redoing the light colors(as in painting over and redoing entirely) I had made on the woman's dress.

[kyurai]

hey,

as far as i can see, when you draw from books you make the lines straight and long, but when you don t actually see the lines (like in the gesture drawings) you tend to make the lines very fuzzy.

i can see that you improved on this in the later studies :) keep it up

[Vardia]

Here's another page of the sketchbook I was able to do today during study hall. :) I don't have a big update on the stool yet, since all that I did today was paint the legs, and that's not incredibly exciting.

[Vardia]

Ugh, really sorry for not updating for a bit. I had come down with some awful bug and was out of school for a while, and as a result when I came back I had tons of homework I needed to catch up on. (One of the downsides of having ten classes!) Hopefully I'll have a bit more up on here by the end of today.

We're starting a new project in art, and thankfully I don't have to go out and buy a stool again. However since my teacher just loved the other portrait I did she insisted I do another one. (I wanted to do something simple this time!) I guess its not all bad, I just don't really have the hang of acrylic paints and I think I prefer oil more.

[mike butkus]

Your doing an amazing job! All that hard work will payoff in the long run, so keep up those great studies!

[Vardia]

Here's two sketchbook pages. :) I'm glad I'm almost done with this book so I can move on to another!

[Vardia]

Update on the new picture I'm doing in class. :)

[Vardia]

Decided to bring in my picture before I start painting it. :) Shame it was too big to scan completely.

[kyurai]

winter portrait ? it will look nice when it s finished, she has that ladylike look

the only thing i see is that your portraits characters tend to have the same position in both drawings

[Vardia]

winter portrait ? it will look nice when it s finished, she has that ladylike look

the only thing i see is that your portraits characters tend to have the same position in both drawings

It's a picture from a book on various Russian paintings. :) And yeah, they did but I think that's just because the two pictures I copied from both had them sitting the same way.

[Vardia]

Hey all, sorry about the absence lately! I am unfortunately packing out to move in a week and wont be able to update until around the 15th of June so I'm going to update right now as much as I can before I have to go. :)

[Vardia]

Another update

[beejazz]

I love your hands and arms. I don't know about the face in the second to last post. The features look a little flat. Did you draw from observation or from your head?

[redpandafire]

Contour drawings are lookin nice! I'm glad your using continous lines and not trying to scratch your way through curves lol. Keep up the hard work! Hope to see more.

[Vardia]

Bejazz Thanks! :) And this was from observation, I only did a quick sketch because I was going to copy it to a larger canvas later. So I didn't really see the point of spending time doing shading on it.

Redpandafire Thanks! I used to do a lot of scratchy lines, but I'm trying to not do that anymore. :)

Here a few few old-ish paintings I had to do in my art class this year.

[Vardia]

Been recovering from some wisdom tooth removal I got a few days ago, hopefully I'll be feeling better some time soon.

[Vardia]

Bah, shame on me for not updating in so long! School is starting in a few days, at least so maybe that will get me back in enough of a schedule to start freaking drawing something.

Unfortunately my canon printer/scanner is deciding to be finicky and not work, so I am momentarily (I hope) out of a way to scan in any of my sketchbooks. So I guess for now I'll just use my tablet, which I'm not entirely thrilled about since I'm not very good at using it.

[kyurai]

i don t know anything about drawing with a tablet, but i know i like that painting with the shoes :)

[Vardia]

A few things I've done in my Design class the past few weeks. The first one was a simple pencil drawing, the next two were contour in pen, and the last was with a brush.

[Vardia]

Kyurai Thanks! :D

And two more updates. I searched around my place and unfortunately couldn't find the third charcoal drawing of this set. Maybe it will pop up later.