Obsessed too Burnout with Drawing Cartoon Female heads
Sometime last week, I got the itch of wanting to improve my female cartoon characters, this is not a bad thing, but usually, when I get this urge, I tend to go overboard to try and improve. For this case, I ended up trying to draw other peoples examples that they had posted online and try to reproduce them accurately. This did not go well, and the main thing that just drove me off the deep end was the eyes, they just seemed to be too big or not the right style, something always was off. I got to the point where I just was discouraged and took a mini-break from drawing.
During my break, I started to go through a tutorial I had purchased from Aaron Blais on drawing human anatomy. The way he presented the material helped me connect some dots that I had not made on my own. Also, there is something about the way he gives the tutorial it is like he cares and wants you to understand what is being said and help you fast-track your progress. I have to thank Cory Barker and Photoshop TV for introducing Aaron to me; otherwise, I am not sure if I would have been made aware of him and the vast resources he offers at his site.
After my break and short tutorial sessions, I focused on one female character. I drew this female cartoon and had my wife help me figure out updates that needed to be made to improve it. The second attempt improved on the first and the third attempt, possibly done tomorrow digitally, should be the best version.
Progress Made on Digicember Piece
I have made two steps of progress on the piece this week:
A. I was able to copy over the layers from the Berry meets Bug sketch to the Digicember piece in Procreate, took a little trial and error to tap and select in the right order, but it is possible. Now I am able to continue the process of drawing the character in a separate document and add to my main piece without having to worry about the layer counts for when I flush out the cast.
B. Sweet Dill was started and is over halfway complete. I will be finishing her and adding her to the original composition this weekend and evaluate the whole to see what changes I need to make for the rest of the characters.
Lessons Learned
Procreate: Sharing layers between images is possible and can help your workflow by giving your more layers to work with for creating parts of your composition for individual items and then moving/copying a flatter version to your main comp. Since my main arrangement allows for a max of 14 layers due to the dimensions and dpi, this helps give me more flexibility.
Take a step back from things that are starting to frustrate you, if possible find a way to look at the problem through a different set of eyes and reflect on what you learn. If that is not possible, then stop and take a break for a day or two to recover.