Fimvie's journal

thoughts, worries, routine

19/01/2025 - Weekly art studies №2

Ok i will be honest with you all. I failed. This Monday was the first day of college after the winter break and it really threw me off guard, expecially after 2 weeks of having WAY TOO MUCH spare time. The past 7 days were a time managment hell and i think that i will have to change my drawing practice schedule...
I also started playing Hades this week and it turned out to be super addicting lmao. I got like 10 hours in the game in just 2 days. Another reason why i didn't have time to draw xd
Anatomy
I started the week, like before, by anatomy studies. One of my weakest skills in human figure drawing are heads and faces, so i made some studies of the Asaro head sculpt. It was pretty difficult, but i think i understand the overall sturcture and plane directions a little bit better.

I actually drew more, these are just the better looking ones.
Stylization
I always wanted to draw fanart of media i enjoy, but it has always been very difficult for me to stylize characters and make them actually recognizable. I don't know why, but they just always come out looking either weirdly distorted or look like someone else drew them in their style.
I didn't have much time that day because of college so i just decided to try and draw some Squid Game characters in my style lmao. It was the last show I watched and there are some really charming characters in season2, so why not give it a try, you know!
It's not a lot, but drawing these took me surprisingly a lot of time. It's just so hard for me to grasp on to the right facial features and also make them cartoony, i don't know!!
One thing that calms me down is that i see that a lot of other people also have no idea how to stylize these actors' faces propely. I get so much fanart in my recommendations and most of them (not always) just look like anime boys with different hair colors lmao
Anyway i hope you can distinguish the characters that i drew! I think i actually did a decent job on these in terms of stylization, but there are still lot of flaws to work on. For example, the noses. I usually draw them like a single line, but here it just felt wrong to make them so simplified. The eyes i usually draw also looked out of place, so i had to make them a bit more. uhh y'know. Realistic? Like not actually realistic, but closer to realsim than usual on the spectrum
Environment
The last thing i drew this week was a simple little environment study. Learning about composition, color and perspective one by one is really good practice, but it's really time consuming. However i think that drawing backgrounds from actual photos kinda invovles all of the above? So it's a bit easier to manage when you're on a tight schedule.
And so i ended up with this piece! It a study based on a photo from Pinterest ( this one )
I tired to draw the place from the original photo, but give it something "mine" at the same time. I tried to make it stylized, as i was drawing something just for myself. I figured it would be the best practice for me since i am learning all of this to draw cartoony backgrounds for my cartoony characters in the future ahaha

It looks a bit wonky to me at the time. I think i should work on finding balance with textured brushes, because this whole piece was drawn with just one single brush and it kinda looks a bit dirty? I feel like adding simple gradients here and there would male it nicer.

Anyway, that's it for today! I'm not govong up!! However I will have to work out a better practice schedule for myself, adapt it a bit
Hope you enjoyed reading :D

12/01/2025 - Weekly art studies №1

In the beggining of the year i realised that despite having been drawing for most of my life i am embarassingly bad at...drawing. So i decided to start actually practicing my skills.
I made a schedule for myself, like i would for working out, where each day of the week should be dedicated to studying one of the core drawing principles. Here are the results of the first week! (i actually failed miserably at keeping myself in check, so these studies were made in different weeks...nvm)
Monday - Anatomy i skipped that day oops
Tuesday - Stylization
This one was pretty fun, but really difficult for me. I always struggled with drawing faces, especially recognizable ones.
For this excersice i used techniques i leraned from Tom Richmond's book on caricature. Before trying to stylize a face i did a simple +-realistic observational drawing trying to find out what features make them look like themselves.
To started out it semeed easier to use photos of people who already have some noticable facial features. It is way harder to capture the likness of people who are "conventionally attractive", since the beauty srandard usually implies having little to no memorable things about their faces (which i don't personally agree with but whatever). As a little challange for the end i tried to draw someone without much wrinkles or visible "imperfections". I think i failed on the stylization part with this one, but hey at least it looks nice in color
Later i also tried to make them look like actual cartoon characters, and these are my favourites

Thursday - composition
Not much to show here since stydying composition mainly involves looking at other people's art and analyzing why they put every object the way they did. I did draw some thumbnails to practice my knowledge in the end though. As a theme i chose the moment in my OCs' story where they meet for the first time. Tried to come with a "cinematic" composition, as if it was a shot from an animated feature.
There are three composition variations and i think that the middle one is the most effective. I also like the other two, but i feel like they aren't as good in the storytelling sense.
Friday - color
Also not a lot to show off since i mostly just studied by copying colors from other people's work and analyzing them.
What i can share is a little excercie i came up with where i would just try to find nice color combinations for an abstract scene. I finished it off with attampting at choosing a color palette for a thumbnail from the previous day. It's ok, but i can't help but feel like there is something off. Can't quite put my finger on it
Although just a week later I got to practice my new composition knowledge on an actual drawing! It's an entry for an art competition held by an online illustration school. The main prise was a course on book illustration (specifically the technical stuff like text layout, printing requirments and etc.)
Sadly i didn't win anything, but i was ready for that. At least i have a nice portfolio piece now, i guess
Sunday - environment
This one was tough. Despite being an interior design major i am awfully bad at drawing architecture and interiors. Backgrounds in general, actually, but nature i at least enjoy drawing. Can't say the same about houses.
One of my biggest weaknesses is perspective which is really important for drawing convincing environments.
I started off by trying to copy the perspective off of a pinterest picture(i belive it was a background from Steven Universe) It made me realise how actually bad my perspective is, so i took some time to leran how to use perspective grids After that i made two more studies from pinterest images. They may look unfinished... because they are. The point of these drawings was for me to familiarize myself with using perspective grids and drawing simple interiors

Aaand that's it for today! I think i will post updates like this one every week. I'm not sure if it's interesting for anyone, but having the pressure of uploading the results is a good motivation for me not to abandon my practice :)

11/01/2025 - Something else

Ok so remember i was complaining about how i don't understand how to make the "show more" buttons? Like one post ago? I found a nice tutorial for that. I have no idea how it works though, too advanced for me. I just copypasted the code from this video
I feel a bit bad copypasting something just like that wothout having a slightest idea of how it works but hey. If it works it works. I'm not a professional coder or anything i just wanna have a silly little website to store my silly little thoughts

11/01/2025 - In the benining

My first post here, let's go!
I am glad to be back to neocities. Having a little internet corner just for myself feels really nice and cozy. Because of social media i kinda grew used to having to constantly post something and caring WAYY TOO MUCH about likes and comments on mu posts. There is something super relaxing about just putting out anything i want to on my web page, though. No comments, no likes, no views, just me, myself and my niche little interests!
Another thing i really like about having having a personal website is the amount of customization. Like, i can just do anything i want. I could put a giant rat gif across the screen and you couldn't do anything about it. Because it's my site and i make the rules. And you know what? Maybe i will. Maybe i will put a giant rat gif across the screen. Or maybe i won't if i don't want to. Fuck you
Ok sorry that was a bit rude. I'm just really excited
I'm not quite decided on the design of this page yet though. I will have to play around with the assets and the placement of everything in the future. I really wanted to make all the post expandable at first, like with the "read more" button, but i can't figure out how to do that. I saw a couple of different solutions to that, but all of them are either JS-based, way too clunky or just don't work for some reason... or maybe i'm just dumb i don't know. Probably both. Anyway

All posts