day #365 - the end of an era

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I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
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day #86 - Oberon

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Today I'm primarily happy because even though I started late, I shaved a few minutes off practice, did some doodles among which an interesting imaginative scene, and might be able to go to bed 15 minutes earlier than usual. That amounts to something!

So let's not waste this good time, and focus on what I did today. Again, I know that you, the dear read probably don't care about me praising my own work; It was never meant as such. But after decades of negatively criticizing my work (with all the ugly results of it) I started a few years ago a form of diary where at the end of each artistic output, I revisit it, and try and discover all the positive aspects of it; a way to counter all that negative self-talk by also stating the positive talk. If nothing else, it doesn't help me transform the negative aftertaste that I'm left with when drawing and hopefully one day when this is automatic (and unconscious) I might be able to paint, and not feel bad afterwards.

So what is it that I like about today's work? For a gestures and postures are consistently better than they were in the past; nowadays, even bad days, look somewhat good. I'm still progressing on the path of getting rid of skeletons (though they are extremely useful for keeping notes about the pose!) and instead starting with the muscle form. I'm still getting accustomed to the leg and arm anatomy and certain things are starting to become muscle memory. Hand practice is still a struggle of hit or miss, but I think I'm ready after "winging it" to study with some method like what Andrew Loomis presents. I'm not sad about it since it was the plan anyway, but I didn't want to engage into some "system" before getting acquainted by  myself. Also during today's postures, I had the opportunity to do some folds!

What I'm more excited about is the doodle sheet of the day; I spent very little time but did quite a lot of work. I started with copying a youtube as he was painting some characters with frog-eye perspective and then went on doing some face and character design that I ended up aligning and posing is such a matter as if the character is jumping and flipping.

And then there is the scene at the bottom left; I wonder whether I should extract such details from these doodle sheets; Today's "lucky strike" was a plum character walking through a forest with mythical beings gathering around. I like a lot about it; the tree trunk, the character, the dryads, the flower-pedals, the posture and the overall composition.

There went my 15minutes.. sigh, once again I didn't make it to bed earlier...

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