Unfortunately on the day I went to get the uploaded images Flickr (where I uploaded the first years worth of images for reasons I've now forgotten) changed how things are linked so those early images also appear to have gone. I have lower res versions on facebook still, but you can imagine I was a bit fed up with the whole thing by this point. Oh, and my sketchbook fell apart, which really capped my lethargy for the whole thing.
Over the next few months I'll slowly transfer the images from facebook (those I also placed there) back over to the blog so there's still a record of the first year of progress. No point having a blog about progression if the first year is a blank after all. So after all that I've cobbled together two images for discussion below.
Sketches
So improvement is most apparent here. The sketches from 2001 are from the first couple of months, 2011 about a year later and so on for the latter two images. In terms of poses and form I think I've actually backslid since 2012, which is a bit depressing. This may be because I haven't been keeping up on gesture drawing, or maybe for some completely different reason, but elements of the anatomy are improving. I'm hoping it's a case of two steps forward one back; we'll find out next year.
In terms of faces and such there is steady improvement though, so that's good. Before next year I hope to have made more progress with expressions as right now everyone looks a bit blank faced.
I am happy I went through this though as even I can see a clear improvement between the 2010 and 2013 sections. It's slow going, but progress is definitely being made.
None of these are from reference by the way - since I hadn't done much from reference recently I figured I would stick to the stuff I sketched without any. I most certainly need to do more stuff from reference again as it helps improve other areas.
Speedpaints
Each row here represents a different year (and at the bottom right you can see my latest, which I have not yet blogged about). I think there is less obvious improvement here than there was in th sketching to be honest, but there is some. The time taken over these varies wildly, with the latest one taking much longer than almost anything else. It's possible the improvement is only because I'm more likely to take my time now, but in fact the last one took longer because I used ArtRage 4, and the controls for painting don't lend themselves as well to speedpainting as those in 3.5 Studio Pro - at least not until I'm used to the differences. It's still a contributing factor though I'm sure, but I am making some progress. Now all I have to do is produce more of them. In the first 6 months of speedpainting I cranked them out, now I can go a month an not paint anything. Wonder why I've lost the desire to do them all the time...
And that's it. Teeny tiny retrospective for the third anniversary. I'll try to do something better next time around. Hopefully there'll be more to show :)
Next month I'll have a speedpaint post at some point, and hopefully my second post on optical illusions. Not much more than that though - I'm going to do the sketch posts a little less often because they're a lot of work and they rarely get read. I left an unresizable image in the last one that I only just noticed and apparently nobody else did either (or they did and didn't bother to let me know). That sort of shows how worthwhile doing the layouts for those is given that it takes me ages to do ;) So yes, I'll post when there are things worth posting still, but I'm not going to bust my hump just to have something to stick up here - if I keep that up I won't enjoy it any more, and then I won't post anything...
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