Sketch of the Day

I don’t think it’s necessary to be inspired to come up with something to draw – life is full of shapes, colours, and concepts whether we’re motivated to think about them or not. Any random thought can be a seed for creativity if you’re willing to put in a little effort to plant it. One of the biggest things that helps me keep moving along is the fact that I’m not picky about how my sketches turn out. A lot of the time they’ll just end up looking mushy or vague because I didn’t have a particularly sharp idea in mind. And that’s fine, it’s still worthwhile to practice. Art doesn’t need burning inspiration behind it to be worthwhile. If I get really stuck I sometimes look for inspiration in reverse – that is, I look at the last 3 or 4 things I’ve sketched and try to come up with something distinctly unlike those particular ones.

Routine! I am not picky about how my sketches turn out, since I do so many. I focus on the big picture (I almost never zoom in on a sketch), forgo any fine details, and try to accept mistakes and paint over them or work them into the piece, rather than habitually undoing strokes I dislike.

I find it very difficult to give advice, since my experience is basically just “give it a try 5000+ times in a row and you’ll eventually figure something out”. If you go waaaay back into my dailies you can watch me do just that over the years. But to try and give more of a concrete answer, here are a few things I’ve found to be especially important.

• Don’t overthink your starting point: just start painting, and be bold with adjusting colours as you go (curves in Photoshop, colour adjustment filter in Krita, etc) I frequently make drastic changes to the overall colour halfway through a painting, or even when it’s close to being done.
• It’s more important for values to make sense than colours. Bright/dark areas matter a ton for making a piece readable, colours can be wild within that and still make sense. 90% of the time when I look back at one of my pieces and don’t like it, it’s because of the values.
• Flipping the canvas horizontally all the time helps you feel out any imbalances in the composition.
• When you don’t like something, change it. Listen to your gut, be destructive and paint over things rather than agonizing about the sunk cost. Liking the result is way more important than getting there “the right way”.
• Paint zoomed out as much as possible. Look at the entire composition the entire time, and only render the parts that matter, like your focal point.

In my opinion the most direct way to learn is to watch other’s process, so if you also think that way I have a handful of process videos on YouTube that you might find interesting.

Check out this talk I did at PechaKucha for more of my thoughts on daily sketching.

I’m no longer taking on any commissioned work, but I do have some prints for sale on INPRNT.

Absolutely! You can find them on INPRNT.

No. I never have and never will.

The point of Sketch of the Day is to practice, learn, improve, and express myself. It is completely human from beginning to end, as is any worthwhile creative project.

My sketches usually only take around 20 minutes, so I don’t find it too difficult to fit them into my daily routine. And there have certainly been many times I’ve rushed something that I’m not at all proud of, just to have something to post.

That said, even though I post every single day, I don’t always do each sketch on that day. I often queue up a couple at a time to make sure it’s sustainable for me, and so that if I get blindsided by an illness or emergency, it won’t break my streak. I consider this to be well within the spirit of the project, since the point is to make practice a continuous and ongoing thread in my life. As long as I have something new to share every day and I feel like that continuity of effort is being maintained, then the project is succeeding. Sorry if this is disappointing for any hardcore daily art purists out there!

For older videos I used Screenflick on Mac, and Debut on Windows. More recently, I record using OBS and edit in Shotcut.

Most of my sketches take around 20 minutes, though I’ll go up to 30-40 on some of the more refined ones. Anything tagged #3d or #unity3d is a bit of a different workflow which takes longer, details about that can be found here.

Most frequently, default and custom ones. I like to keep brushes very simple. In the past I’ve made use of Blinck’s Brushes and Marc Brunet’s Brushes.

I did a 2-year program at a local community college which was focused on 3D art (Maya). We did some life drawing and other art fundamentals as part of it, and I took a supplemental 1-year course after that to further specialize into 3D art. I’ve also worked in game development for over a decade, but mostly in programming and game design. I do art for most of my own indie games.

The vast majority of the learning which has established my style was done after graduating, over the course of 14+ years of daily practice, observation, and self-teaching.

I primarily use an Intuos 4 tablet and Krita. Every once in a while I use Procreate on iPad as well. Previously I used Photoshop CC. Sometimes I incorporate 3D elements made using Blender (previously Maya LT) and Godot or Unity.