Xenoblade Chronicles 2 x Inktober

Twitter Thread of Inktober pieces (conveniently in one thread)
Instagram view (Easier to scroll through all at once, but only if you’re viewing this in November 2018 before future uploads clutter the page. Links to individual posts won’t allow you to seem them all together.)

I just completed my first Inktober. It feels pretty darn great. I was able to draw a LOT of what’s probably my favorite single-player game of all time, Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I was amazed (but not surprised) at how much that game’s world had to offer as opportunities to practice art, as well. Overall, it was definitely a successful month, and an especially successful first Inktober!

I had just started getting serious into drawing just about half a year ago. Although I did graduate with an art degree alongside my engineering degree, it was more so for graphic design, and thus my drawing skills were undeniably still lackluster. Throughout college I had only taken two drawing/painting classes, so while I did have some kind of head start, there was so much more to learn. The rest of the art studio classes were in some other form of media, so I wasn’t completely lost in the world of composition and whatnot.

Here’s my first piece that I drew when taking drawing seriously this year, back in May:

Whereas here’s the final three piece I just completed:

Pretty notable difference huh? I’d like to thank Inktober for the improvement!

With that said, I just wanted to reflect on the past month and just get out all the thoughts I’ve had about it in general.

Time Commitment

After keeping a work log of my Inktober journey, I’ve accumulated a total of… 50 hours! Wow. That’s just about as much time as I’ve put in to my entire drawing journey this year before October. Feels pretty good.

31 days in a row is a pain! Outside of those 50 hours, probably an unlogged 5-10ish hours was also used to figure out what exactly I wanted to draw. I had created a general list of what characters and objects I wanted to draw in September, but I hadn’t gathered any reference photos, and some days I just wanted to diverge from that initial list. With a more realistic 55-60ish hours actually spent on Inktober, this project ate up the majority of my weeknights, given I was spending on average 1.5-2 hours each – with some significantly more, and some less.

I wasn’t too strict on “one piece every day.” It was more so: Finish 31 pieces by the end of October. I gave myself half a week of a head start in actual sketches, so that if I did flop a day or two (or just hang out with people), it’d be fine. I ended up skipping more than just a few days. On the bright side, I also ended up doing 1.5 pieces often (i.e. a full piece plus a full sketch) to make up for it. Sometimes I did two in one day on the weekend. As long as I had time in the day, I didn’t mind the extra hours at all – I would simply be continuing on with my momentum.

I hated having to work on a piece the day it was “due.” Undoubtedly I was more careless on the days that did happen (about 5 pieces), and I was working on the piece for the sake of completion, not learning. Only once I had actually finished a piece after the given day, and although that was only by a few minutes, completing that piece didn’t feel satisfying. In the back of my mind, I knew that time constraints were making me draw worse. It was unnecessary pressure. “But you’ll be on deadlines in the real world!” No one gets a job with under a year’s experience (when you’re including classes as experience; this isn’t a laughing jab at the current job market haha)!

The more I progressed throughout the month, the less time I was spending on each piece on average. I believe these are the reasons why:
– I felt more confident in my strokes, so I could make those marks more quickly. Oftentimes I didn’t care for *exact* precision either. If I was drawing ink over my sketch and I missed a line by a few millimeters, no biggie. On the contrary, in the beginning I’d trace over every single line slowly and steadily.
– I’d slowly draw more messily, on purpose, when I felt like that would be fine, such as while shadowing. I never really cared for a quick, messy section in the beginning.
– I was starting to get a general feel of lighting, so figuring out where to add shadows (and highlights, but not as much) went by a lot quicker for me near the end of the month.
– Instead of one sketching phase, my methodology evolved into creating two sketches, one over the other. When I was doing just one, I was nitpicky on all the details, only focusing on one section at a time, even though I’d draw a rough sketch for that one section first (for example, out of an entire body I’d make a rough sketch of the head first). With a second sketch, I’d start out with a rough sketch for the entire piece first (about a 10-minute process) to get a feel of the proportions, then I’d fill in the details in a second, overlaying sketch. With less second-guessing in the detailed sketch, the two sketches combined went by a lot quicker than when I was doing only one (about 30-45 minutes  instead of 60-75 minutes).

Within the first week, I was averaging about two hours per piece, with the longest taking up to four! By the last week, I was only spending about 60-75 minutes each. What a jump!

Lessons Learned

I learned what I was bad at. Really bad at. Learning what I needed to learn more about felt pretty darn great.

Things I consciously improved on throughout the month:
– Line contrast, especially in a single stroke
– Shadowing
– Using white ink to add highlights
– General proportions
– Consistent continuity (I only paid attention to lines connecting behind an object maybe 75% of the time in the beginning)

Things I plan on working on in the near future:
– Foreshortening
– Hands and feet
– Facial structures and its symmetry (trying to make two eyes on a face look natural killed me repeatedly)
– Armor
– How in the world do I draw tree bark
– More POVs outside of 3/4th and head-on angles

Things to do next Inktober

– Consider the time it takes to draw a specific composition. Sometimes I picked a piece that looked cool and unique from what I usually draw (especially unique POVs), but that meant spending a LOT of time figuring out how the object actually looks like in my head. This was most notable with the piece of Rex, where I committed about 4 hours towards just an average piece (though I did learn a lot out of it!)
– Apply ink washes. I become so envious of other artists who did that in their pieces, while I was struggling with my pens to create subtle shades over large masses.
– Maybe one piece every other day. I feel like given the time I put into every piece and my process, I could do one sketch in one day, followed by inking it in the next. I neglected a lot of other things I usually work on in a given month, including reading and a side project I’ve been slowly working on throughout the past year.
– Alternatively, maybe one grand piece every week?
– Actually create my own compositions, maybe without as many references. Every piece I drew came directly from a source, whether it was a game cutscene I found online or the official XC2 art book (which was an AMAZING reference for when I did use it, maybe about a third of all the pieces).

I think that’s about it! Thanks for reading, and if you were there throughout the entire ride, thanks for the support. It means a ton believing in a guy who’s just starting out : )