Re Human Day 13

I’m re-defining my lifestyle — I’m developing myself in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.

Daily Habits

Re Human Extended Activity: Saturdays is Digital Drawing & Painting, and Music Production.

Digital Drawing & Painting

I watched the intro / preview video for the Vitruvian Art Studio Portrait course because I’m considering getting it, but haven’t gotten it yet. It’s for physical painting (not digital) and I feel I can learn a lot from it and apply it to digital, but I also think there might be better techniques/tools that leverage digital tools.

So I googled “how to draw digital art” and I watched this video:

Which had amazing techniques leveraging our digital tools, but wasn’t super amazingly presented.

The three main techniques I learned/want to apply are:

1. Use Layers and opacity to draw foundational frames/sketches, and keep adding levels of complexity with new layers on top of the frames.
2. Use “mirroring” to see what are the errors you may not be seeing. If you reflecting the drawing over the y-axis, you’ll be able to spot things that don’t look real your brain had gotten used to.
3. Change proportions by distorting and resizing elements.

I then realized the maker of the video has a pretty cool youtube channel with lots of digital animations of “him” in cartoon form talking about things. I always thought those digital animation videos were super cool so I looked around his channel and found he has a “How to Draw, for Dummies” playlist so I started watching some if its videos. But I realized I could spend all my time just watching and not doing, so I decided to start doing.

This is is me drawing layers on layers, and then using the “mirroring” technique to catch what looks bad:

The reflection looks way worse — then idea is to then edit the drawing in this way to fix it overall.

For Music Production I mostly kept playing with Splice’s beatmaker and then searched for more sounds. It takes time to find sounds. Splice already makes it sooo much faster and easier but it still takes time.

Fitness: Today I tried doing a handstand. So I first watched this video and I learned that it’s all about the fingers! Applying pressure/pushing your fingers down intermittently apparently keeps you balanced — I didn’t know that. Was able to hold myself for a bit at some points but still not great at it.

Writing: Today I created a template for a “monthly reflection” and wrote it for this month. Then I also experiemented with “writing” this post as I was doing the activities. I liked it because I can just paste things as I’m learning and it won’t take me much time at the end of the day. Will also write a daily thought once I’m done with this post.

Piano: Today in Flowkey I learned about the C major chord.

Books: Almost done with Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 lessons for the 21st century.

Meditation: 20mins in morning.

Soccer trick juggling: Today I juggled with a friend while we listened to music. Getting close to the around the world. Still can’t do it consistently.

Connections, takeaways and Ideas for tomorrow

Spreading out the two extended activities throughout the day — one in the morning and one in the afternoon was a good idea.

I’ve realized there’s so many “techniques”/tricks to things, and if you know them, you can be so much better at things. It’s about knowing the right things.

Read the next post (a weekly recap!). Read the previous post.

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