So Many Art Books and Not Much to Show

I got mad at myself this morning. The night before, I was online looking up gesture drawing videos and finally gesture drawing books. Whenever I find a subject I want to learn more about, I look for books. Yes, I could just continue searching online for blog posts, tutorials and articles, but the quality of those are always hit or miss. At least with books, I can look at the ratings and reviews they've received. Also, books have gone through a professional editing process and the publishers found a reason to publish the books.

This has been my process for years. Before writing this, I had just returned from my mailbox, where I picked up a book I ordered about making comics and two workbooks that were made especially for storyboarding. At that moment, it dawned on me that I probably have a ton of books on drawing that I've either didn't finish or never read. So I searched through my boxes (I know, I'll buy bookcases soon) to look for all of my drawing and art related books. Including the book about drawing comics I just got today, I have 15 books. 15 BOOKS!! To be fair, one of them is from graduate school and two of them are "The Art of ..." books. I've included the "The Art of ..." books because they do show the process of how characters were created and storyboarding techniques. 

Afternoon Sketch: Cali Lewis

Renee Busee, the SketchBook community manager from Autodesk was on Geek Beat TV teaching the hosts how to use Sketchbook Pro and how to draw. Watch the video below if you would like to learn too.




I ended up following along and creating the sketch below.


Sketch226132250 by enchanteddroppings on deviantART

I have an issue with shading. It is something I have been working on for years with little to no progress. But this was a quick sketch so I wasn't trying that hard. I was just following along. Next time I'll do the highlight on another layer so i can fix issues instead of making them worse.

Oops

So apparently I am missing 14 weeks of photos for my 52 weeks project. The problem is not that I didn't take photos. The issue is more that I've taken photos, but never put in the time to select and upload one or I took photos that week but not any photos meant to better my photography skills. The photos were random photos or I was taking photos to document something.

I get so reluctant about uploading photos because I want them to be the best photos I can take and not just anything, but of course that holds me back from doing anything. This doesn't even matter anyway because I end up hating most of the stuff I upload.

Ugh. I'm going to try to set time aside every day this week to at least select which photos I am going to upload and check to see if I am really missing photos for a week. I even created a spreadsheet! I dislike the fact that I had to make a spreadsheet because that takes the fun out of it but if I want to commit to this year long project, I think I have to be formal and structured about this @_@.