Radiorunner Term 2 roud up.
Continuing from my previous post, here is a quick wrap up of what I did for Radiorunner Curriculum Term 2, including extra circular stuff from the same time period.. This was around March of 2022, if I recall correctly.
Perspective III was basically Draw-a-box lesson 7: Vehicles which I talked about in my first post. There was some playlists for following along and learning about shadow and light. Nothing too exciting, just practicing some fundamentals. A lot of the same stuff found in DAB, and then some basics on light and shadow.
Bridgeman Boot Camp
I had been wanting to do this since it was discussed on the Proko podcast. It is free on youtube. It’s another follow along, but there is also homework. One warning, it’s long. There are 12 days and each class is about an hour in length. I actually watched in 2x speed to get through it faster. Marshall Vandruf is a good teacher though so it’s not painful or anything, but it does help understand bridgeman’s anatomy, which relies a lot on abstraction. You’ll draw a lot, but that was the point. I still recall some stuff but a lot of it is a blur.
Over the summer I like to challenge myself and do some additional courses that interest me. I get a little bored just grinding away, so it’s a nice break. I try to plan ahead and decide what I’m going to do during the summer break.
Manga Concept to Creation
Around this time I also did another Domestika course about creating manga. It was fun and I learned a lot, especially about using the page manager in Clip Studio Pro. I thought that I would start creating some manga in my spare time, unfortunately those thoughts didn’t go anywhere. The course was good though. The instructor is very thorough and it covers everything you need to know to start creating your own manga.
Sketch Anything Course
I also did a environmental composition course called Sketch Anything with Aaron Limonick. This was a pretty comprehensive course that covered how to plan and execute environmental illustrations. I learned a lot from this one. As illustration is my strong suit and also I just love drawing, this course was pretty fun.
After that I did a course by Sorie Kim on Domestika. The course was about developing daily sketching in ink habits. Overall I really enjoyed this one. Sorie Kim is amazing. I wanted to take a much longer one she offered on her own site, but it was like $800 and also the time zone was PST. I’m on Tokyo time so even if it was cheaper it wouldn’t have worked. Also $800 is a bit much for basically the same course only live. At least for now I can’t afford a course like that.
This was the first time I had worked with toned paper or brush pens really. Looking at the studies I did, I really want to go back and do the course again. The drawings turned out really nice, it’d be interesting to see if I’ve improved at all.
Next since I primarily want to focus on character design, and I love drawing characters, I decided to do a character design course by Arucelli. The course was incredibly in-depth and contained a ton of information, including how to pitch to companies and a lot of stuff about the industry. It’s definitely something I want to go back and revisit later. I use her ink brushes almost exclusively. Although I plan to revisit this one again later, some of it is a tad advanced but I want to try again later.
Tom Fox’s basic principles of drawing people course on Domestika was my next challenge. Tom Fox is really amazing and the way he draws really intrigued me a lot. I enjoyed this course but I wish it had been longer and focused more on drawing people. Again I think he had another course on his own site but it was over the line I draw at paying for courses. Overall I loved this course though, and it’s one of the only ones besides Sorie Kim’s that I’ve gone back and watched again.
I’m not trying to be a commercial for Domestika but I’ve done a lot of courses on that site. To wrap up this post, I did another comic course called Inking for comics. I should be getting paid to talk about these courses, heh. Again I could do a full series on just the domestika courses I’ve done.
This one was a lot of fun. It involved traditional and digital inking and using ink washes. The final project was a mix of both. The one thing I struggled with was doing shading using washes. Washes are hard to do traditionally.
Conclusion and final thoughts
You’re probably thinking what’s with all the extra-ciricular stuff? Well that’s ADHD for you. I get distracted a lot and have trouble keeping my attention focused on just getting through the ciriculum. Probably why I did so well in school, but struggle outside in the real world. Having structure to follow is comforting and makes finishing stuff easy. That’s probably why I try to structure everything in my life all the time. That’s another story.
Bit of a long post this time. I needed to get through all these though. It was interesting to look back and see some of these. I’d forgotten about the comic courses and the sketch anything stuff. I really enjoyed the environmental illustration, it takes forever though. Even with the copying and pasting parts to create repetition, it still takes a long time. And of course I enjoyed doing the character stuff. The Tom Fox and Arucelli styles of drawing directly without and underdrawing, Kim Jun-gi style, always intrigued me and that’s why I always practice/warm-up with pen sketching on a daily basis. I’m really interested in getting good at dynamic pen sketching and drawing without using an underdrawing. Something about it is really fun.
Next post will be delving into Term 3.
