Christopher’s 100 Day Challenge: Building A Solid Foundation

[Christopher]

Hi everyone,

My 100 Day Challenge is all about building a solid foundation to work from later. That means visiting/revisiting the fundamentals finding potential weak points and evenly develope the chosen area’s.

What:

• basic observation & hand/arm control (pencil control)
• perspective
• form
• value & shading

Why:

• to find and work on my weak points
• to get more control over my tools (graphite)
• to get a solid understanding & skillset about/for perspective, form and value

To achieve those I chose to follow An Introduction To Drawing For Beginners, Linear Perspective Master Course + the first chapters of the Russian Academic Drawing Approach to compare to Drawing for Beginners and to see what works for me.

I might consider to throw in Head Drawing For Beginners to have a subject matter to follow but I already got 3 courses and I don’t want to overdo it.

Since all of these courses are full of excercises the things I show in the first weeks might not be the most interesting stuff, so sorry for that.

And thanks in advance to everyone taking the time to visit this thread and maybe even giving me a little hint or two.

[Christopher]

Day 1.

The first three are exercises from the beginner and the Russian academic drawing course. The last three are from the perspective course. I already finished the first chapter a few days ago, now I wanted to revisit the principles and check what stuck before I start the second chapter.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Christopher.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Christopher.

[Christopher]

Day 1:

I did much more but even after reducing the size of my pictures being under 5mb my post didn’t got through. Is where a way to post more than one picture?

Anyway that’s from the Russian academic drawing course.

[Nick Hausman]

Nice work. X1 looks especially good.

I also have recently started with the Introduction to Drawing for Beginners and the Russian Academic Drawing courses. The exercises in the Russian course definitely take a long time if you complete them all.

I feel like basic control and ability to draw lines and ellipses is the study of a lifetime.  Right now it is so hard for me to draw ellipses fluidly with my whole arm in an exact area. I am definitely getting better with an eraser though, which I never really thought about before, but is a skill in itself.

[Christopher]

Day 1.

The first 2 are excercises from the beginner and Russian beginner course, the last 3 are from the perspective course. I already completed the first chapter, this was just a revisit to check what stuck and what not …

[Chris_Legaspi]

Hi Christopher. It’s warm my heart to see artists do fundamental drawing exercises. I still do them myself and I always encourage art students to do these type of ‘dexerity’ exercises.

Your elipses look great but I love the pages of tones and freehand lines. It can get boring but it pays off in long run. Keep it up.

[Jessica]

Christopher this is such as great idea!  I am still deciding on what to do for my 100 day challenge, and may incorporate this idea into my goals.  Thank you for sharing. 🙂

[rizk.christopher]

Love this. I find myself going back to the basics/fundamentals all the time. Maybe I should join in on this!

[Christopher]

Sorry for being late. I don’t exactly know what the problem is with my posts besides not being able to post more than one pictue, but since my Day 1 post appeared a few hours later I wanted to wait if my Day 2 post also needed to be approved. That was more than 24 hours ago.

Anyway,

first a big thank you to everyone who took the time to visit this thread!

@Nick Hausman

If it’s about pen/arm control I want to be as versatile and confident as possible. That’s why I think it’s good to expose yourself to all these different approaches from the courses. There’s always an approach/movement I haven’t seen before that I’m therefore not used to.

@Chris_Legaspi

Thank you! My plan is to expose myself to the excersises while working through the courses and then choose two or three randomly every day as warm up.

@Jessica @rizk.christopher

Thanks! It’s like Chris Legasp said, always flex those drawing muscels!

 

Day 2.

Again nothing special. More excersises from the courses and the last and first excersise of chapter 1/2 from the perspective course.

[Christopher]

Sorry for the double post but as explained above, posting more than one picture leads to problems.

Day 3.

Two more perspective diagrams and besides the usual there are also some cubes. I found myself having trouble with measuring from observation. I don’t know if it’s my set up (table easel) but my arm is really “unstable” while trying to measure. Besides that this process isn’t really fun to me and seems to be really exhausting for me. After like 10 minutes of trying to concentrate and trying to transfer those measurements my brain feels like I was part of a math class for 20 hours straight.

[Bryan Mccabe]

I see you are working really hard as well. I haven’t practiced much perspective drawing yet, but it is on my list of things to learn eventually.  The lines also look really good. I have a book by Alphonso Dunn that is full of exercises like this, but I haven’t worked on them very much yet. I can see how these will really pay off in the long run. In one of the videos on here (I can’t remember which one) the professor talks about how Raphael used a freehand perfect circle as his calling card because he was the only one in town who could do it.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Bryan Mccabe.

[Christopher]

Thanks Bryan,

I got kind of a love/hate relationship with perspective. Hate because I really struggle with it which makes the process really time consuming and mundane. On the other hand I like how perspective opens the door I want to walk through in terms of being able to execute every idea through being able to manipulate and rotate objects in space exactly how I wan’t to. It’s also fascinating how much other fundamentals like light & shadow or composition are affected by perspective.

Oh and if I start to talk about books the conversation gets endless 😅 But even if those line excercises are from the russian academic drawing course I know what you mean since I also got this book. His YouTube channel is also quite useful even for people that don’t use ink.

[Christopher]

My post didn’t show up earlier today. So after waiting a few hours if it shows up, it seems like I have to write everything again 😭

——-

Because I often draw at night I’m going to be a day behind from now on, meaning I’ll post what I did the day before. That way it’s easier to find time for posting and there will be less yellowish photos 😅

Day 4.

Yesterday was kind of a perspective day. Having less pages then usual makes me feel like being unproductive but watching the videos + drawing along and understanding the information takes some time.

Additionally since (beside the perspective diagrams and the cubes from day 3) everything I did until now was “dexterity” stuff so I started to think of/evaluate what I’m most uncomfortable with.

While moving forward in the courses and therefore having less room to do every excercise everyday I have to shrink the amount of them. So pinpointing the weakness and focusing on them seems to be the best thing to do.

In my case that includes the curved lines, the long lines from the shoulder and point to point, ellipses that have to fit for example in a plane and finally shading while staying in the frame.

That’s four, so I can rotate and do two of them each day

[Christopher]

Ohh seems there went something wrong with my post, sorry for that.

And a big thank you to everyone for your kind words.

@Nick Hausman
If it’s about arm control I really aim to be versatile and confident. So mixing all this different approaches is really challenging, since I always get exposed to a movement or technique that’s new and therefore uncomfortable for me.

@Chris_Legaspi
Thank you! My plan is to expose myself to these excercises while working through the courses and then throw one of them randomly in as daily warm up.

@Jessica
You are welcome. Another thought was -even if it might seem mundane in the beginning- that it would be interesting to see where I came from looking at my progress after a while.

@rizk.christopher
As Chris Legaspi said: Always flex those drawing muscles!

Day 2.

Again nothing special to look at. First the last recap excercise of the first perspective chapter + the first excercise of the second chapter. Then some more course excercises. Especially the “perspective ellipses” are difficult since I either get smooth but imprecise lines from the shoulder or more accurate but ugly lines from my fingers /wrist.

I would like to do more “real” things but it’s suprising how time consuming those exercises are.

[Christopher]

On one hand it’s annoying if your post’s don’t show up because of this spam filter system but on the other hand it’s quite entertaining to see when your posts come back from wherever. I mean I did this day 2. post like 3 days ago and now it got approved and I can’t even delete it 🤣

—–

Day 5.

Yesterday I did exactly what I said for days 4 post in terms of doing two excercises of the four as weakness chosen things. Additionally as usual at least one perspective diagram and I followed along on the first form lesson of the beginners course.

So I’m slowly moving towards doing more interesting stuff to look at. Just be patient I have to be too 😅

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Christopher.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by Christopher.

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