StewAle

croquis

process

reference

"Felina"

character design attempt

Lastly, I hope someone reading this feels motivated to do some studies of their own. Again, I recommend checking out Krenz's community articles if you'd like to see better drawn and explained works. They make the article something like a thesis/proposal, very helpful to read.

As long as you have a goal to learn something in your study and you achieve that goal, then that study is a success, no matter if it ends with just a sketch or something far from being "finished". It might be a good thing to move on to the next thing instead of perfecting it.

That isn't always necessarily the case. To me, studying mostly happens in the head. The artwork that was made in the process is a bonus: a pretty picture to look at. Sometimes you make a lot of effort to polish it for critique later, but that's not always what a study is about.

I'd like to briefly talk about "study" and how it can be portrayed on social media sometimes. It's kind of a meme when artists post well-drawn works and calling it a study, which isn't a bad thing of course. Sometimes however, one may think "good study" means "good artwork".

The study was inspired by Krenz's community articles at Zhihu (basically Chinese Quora). Do note that the website and content is in Chinese and you need an account, but it shouldn't be a problem with the help of Google Translate. Check it out, it's free!

https://buff.ly/4069RK2

Close-up

I made some ROCD (Random Original Character Design) and put them into the scene. I also added the missing details to fill in the blanks.

This was as far as I could go for the study due to time constraints, but I learned plenty from it so I'm happy with that.

The step after "big objects" is the "small objects". I thought about what kind of story the objects could tell, which helped a lot with the "coming up with what to add" part.

After that, I just laid out the rough position and pose of the characters.

After picking an angle that I found suitable, I laid out the "big objects" in the room. I looked up references of furniture know their size and measurement.

IKEA is a good resource for that, plus they have modern furniture that looks minimalistic yet appealing.

Laying out the objects became easier since I used a higher angle with little camera distortion.

However, this can make it look too much like they're mini model pieces in a fake room, so I adjusted the angles a bit using the 3D tool and then quickly drew the layout again.

Before, I made the mistake of making the squares too small which made it hard to count how many squares an object is. I fixed it to be 40cm per square which is a good size for indoor objects.

I then made a sketch with rough layout of the objects using simple shapes.

I made a simple 2x1 room layout using the 3D tool in Clip Studio Paint. This is very handy for quick and accurate perspective base and for later changing distortion/angles with the camera tool.

Then, I made this grid by duplicating squares and transformed it following the guide.

Perspective and structure study sketch

Process breakdown thread + close-up below 🧵

Not me trying to squint to see if there's Bad Apple in there somewhere

Yo