Understanding academic drawing & anatomy (or understanding anything more deeply I decided) would help me as an artist manipulate what I see in front of me and design imagery that would help to communicate my ideas and philosophy more articulately, so I began.
Attending an art school at this point seemed inappropriate to what I wanted to accomplish, as I had attended art university before and for now had very specific focus. So I began designing my own curriculum.
Initially I didn't know where to begin, so I just started drawing, people, animals, objects, shapes etc life drawing class (the basics). I also read up on materials... pencils, cheap paper for practice and how to use these materials 'properly'.
Below are my initial life drawing attempts...
After attending a few life drawing classes I began to uncover my short comings that led me to more focused study such as... Proportion, Value, Perspective, Gesture, Form.
Life Drawing attempts in order...
These drawings were completed over several months with detailed study in between using any resources that I could find online, including e-books, Youtube, Pinterest amongst others as well as material I found in my local library. Criticisms are a useful part of development as an artist and as someone studying at home, were sometimes hard to come by, a good criticism can give you study focus. Obviously doing more drawing is the fastest way to improve but noticing what I was doing wrong defiantly helped me improve faster. For example, as you can see above my hands and faces were falling behind and I made a conscious effort to address these areas.
After a few months of work on the figure I moved on to head and portrait studies...
An area in which I thought I had some knowledge in (after drawing quite allot of heads during my time at uni) turned out to be lacking in all the same areas. Form, Proportion, Values etc So I began again focusing my study and using and finding materials at my disposal... It turns out there is allot of material available on drawing heads and figures, (Reilly, Asaro, Hogarth etc) are good names to check out.
I then applied what I had learned to a few portrait studies...
I thought these portraits were of a higher academic quality to my initial 'off the cuff' attempts so in that respect I was happy with my progress, but as far as artist quality I still in my mind have a long way to go.
While this was happening I was (am) intermittently studying anatomy, doing master studies and working on other ideas.
So this is where I'm at up to this point, starting out in Jan 2015 till now 22 Sept 2015 with some drawings I finished reciently below...
I'm 31 now with the attitude, if you don't start something today, you'll repent tomorrow.
(This is just a brief overview of what I've been doing over the past 9 months and just attempts to document my attempts at self study, and what I've managed to accomplish so far).
There is a good community of people out there who are also tackling this stuff, some of my Favs are:
Proko (for invaluable, essential basics and anatomy)
Will Terrell (for Philosophy and advice about survival as an artist in the world)
Bradwynn Jones (for someone to look to and learn from as a contemporary)
There are of course many other useful pages and channels out there but these are my top 3 at the moment.
