Hello!! Wow new year started its flying by so fast- honestly still feels but same but that’s beside the point let me type about art instead.

This month I think I did a pretty good amount actually in both terms of rendered pieces and character design. Maybe I finally found a nice “chibi” style to stick with, who knows!

First ill just talk about rendering, the type of art I like to do greatly varies on my motivation and mood and apparently I really felt like drawing two characters from a novel/manhwa series I really like to read called Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint. I binged the manhwa and it was good, but not done, so I read the online novel. It was a rollercoaster of emotions for sure. It was silly sometimes and sometimes made me sad, but it was a great read. Maybe a really long read, but nevertheless a great read. I want the physical book but its Korean-version only and pretty expensive sadly. The two characters I drew were Han Sooyoung and Kim Dokja. I think I’m pretty proud of both pieces! I tried new things such as lighting, background and other ways to shade. I really do want to improve a lot more however.

I really hate drawing backgrounds because I simply don’t know how. But that’s not a super great mindset to have about it lol so I did finally try one. It turned out alright I wasn’t expecting too much anyways. One thing that does help greatly are references. Take a bunch of them and take accepts of each one to piece together your own piece! Right now one of my biggest inspirations are those really talented artists I see on 小红书 sometimes and other great artists in general. I really like their may of lighting and composition so I hope at one point I can also get my own art to look like that. I might try one of those drawings every day challenges to attempt to improve my art but it greatly depends on my school schedule we will have to see.

This months character designs have been going well. One thing I really like when designing characters is coloring. I love finding mixes of colors that look nice together. Never been a big fan of sketching or doing line art. I do like the current style I use since it is pretty enjoyable for me to do personally. I still struggle with clothing ideas or other add-ons to make a design pop more but Pinterest is my best friend for that (even if I do get side-tracked often staring at something funny or really pretty 😭).

I also made some art that’s not character designs or rendering, Ill show them below.

My productivity in terms of art nearing the end of the month did in fact decrease. I like drawing but I really need to pick up my textbook and study for USABO so until I finish I wont be drawing anymore. I’m doing USABO since I was just curious and do like biology; its definitely more interesting to me than other subjects like computer science or math (I’ve tried both), so I look at it sometimes during my free time. Hopefully I pass the open exam this year. Next year I know I’m for sure going to prepare earlier and cut my procrastination.

/