#25 The first ladybug of a summer... the iron one will also do

Sorry, but as I said in the title, today was the first warm day of this year. So I could finally cultivate my favorite activity: getting lost in the forests. I lost track of time and ended up walking for over 3 hours... when I was supposed to pixel for you. This is my advice for today, going outside is not overrated. Stop thinking about all of your friends, important events, school or work. Just be with yourself, you give everyone around so much time, every second you are in contact with someone, through your phone, computer or the TV. YOU also deserve some attention from yourself, aways of all this mess.

I chose Aggron because: I love his design and I thought it will be simple. Well, I still love his design, but it was not simple at all.

I planned to make him in "one color, one shade" style. And it was all going smoothly. Shape was correct (at least I thought), colors were nice. Fast 30 minutes pixel and I will try to do something more challenging on the weekend... little did I know...

Basic, ready for shading. I came to like this part, in the past it was terrifying: "oh, it looks so bad, I won't be able to make it look more real". Now, it's like a deep breath before the big jump you made dozens of times, you know it won't be easy, but you made it before and will do it again. I think it's a really important lesson: everything seems impossible until you start doing it regularly, do not let the fear paralyze you, push thru, and then you will laugh at yourself for being such a drama queen. Really, I mean it, I have never thought that I will be able to create anything worth looking at. Even when I was starting this whole project it, I think, it was more of a punishment than a real challenge. Now, I really hope that I will get better, maybe not good, but better.

Aaaaaand we made it. My tonight's nightmare. Man, getting this shape right was so hard. I'm still awful at 3D shapes, and perspective: it was both. After like 30 tries to make it by hand, I tried the method presented on the screen. I know that real artists use lines to visualize 3D space, and I was so desperate that I was trying anything.

Another try, maybe I should dive deeper into this method. If it helps me to keep the shapes right, I'm down.

Back at the raw part again, to give you perspective, the head part took me 35 minutes while the whole drawing 60.

The shading starts here, I'm also really happy how the eye looks, it's not perfect but it took me no time so I decided to keep it to show really nice first try.

Here I added shaded to the belly. Another, very important part is the change of the shape of the back. It became a little sharper, what looks more like it's in the back while the head is in the front.

Final piece. I changed the original a little, but I think the light on the head looks better.

Anyway, thank you for reading and please: give yourself a chance. Even if it will be another one, give yourself one more, from me, in exchange for the time you spent reading this. We have a deal.