SomethingTober #12 - Hatching Practice 1

 

I initially intended SomethingTober to be a showcase of old characters and creatures of mine, but I find myself being rather fed up with how limited my style tends to be. There is still a TON of work I need to do on all manner of art practices. Right now, I sort of have managed to achieve some kind of simplistic Toon style with a flat-shading technique that I guess works for what it is, but is not where I want my art to be. If I was trying to crank out pages of a web comic, I suppose the style is good enough for that. But I don't want to be stuck with it.

Color theory, shading via hatching, proper inking, body poses, shading via color, painting, better anatomy, better character design, proper hair, proper clothing folds, etc., all of it needs work. I curse myself for not grinding out the practice all these years, and curse myself again for not being able to put in the work in the present. Too old, too tired, too scatterbrained, too flakey, too not able to wrangle myself into practicing every day like I should. And so, I'm stalled out at square one for a lot of things that I should be way further along with, even in the few years since I started doing digital art in earnest.

Well, it's the struggle I have to deal with, for internal and external reasons. I don't know if I'm making any progress with it, but it's a reason I'm forcing myself to do SomethingTober, even as I get more disillusioned the longer it goes on. At this point, it's both to see if I can force the habit of daily practice to stick, and to see if I'm even capable of achieving such a goal.

Anyway, the character above is intended to be Harol from my Strange Shades idea, but I wanted to focus on the shading over the color gimmick. This sketch started as hatching practice, and then pretty much devolved into scribbles. I know it looks like shit, but that's my point. It's a style I'd like to learn to do, and I'm still at the beginnings of it.

On a tech note, I drew this (and #10) on a new Samsung Galaxy Tab S8, which has replaced my iPad. Couldn't stand using the iPad or Apple Pencil, but I still wanted something to draw on the go. While  my XP-Pen 13 Pro has been my go-to for most of my art, and I find it the most comfortable of my devices to work on, I do sometimes find the XP doesn't have quite the responsiveness to quick-strokes or quick-loops as I'd like. The Samsung (and the iPad) is definitely better in that regard; hatching is definitely easier on it. While the screen is smaller, I should really do more work on it, if only to justify the investment. Not sure if I'll eventually upgrade the XP-Pen to something else within the next year, regardless.