#5 Hard rock

Hi. You have no idea how close we were to never seeing each other again. This one was so extremely hard to do. Not because drawing was hard, but because I could not find any strength to start. Every try seemed pathetic to me. Maybe I liked my previous one so much (the blue fox, you don't have to check. I got you ;) ). No matter what I started working on, it was just worse. But we don't give up. We learn! Today's lesson: learning curve is not a straight line (wow, that sounds so stupid and brilliant at the same time). Some days, you won't be able to progress or even recreate things that were simple for you yesterday. That's normal, don't worry about it. Your average skill is still increasing. For example: I always took me like 25 to 40 minutes and many breakdowns to decide on a shape of whatever I tried to draw. Now it only takes me 20 to 30 minutes. It's not some mind-blowing change, but after some time it will be 10 to 20 minutes, after some more (much, much more) I will be able to make correct shapes on the first few tries. You are also doing amazing, if some day you could make one push-up more, congratulation! You progressed! If now you need only 3 tries to pick the right color to match something, instead of 6 (like me, sob...), you also got better!

Like I said, it was really a struggle to make this one. I tried many things like books or crows (what? I really like books and crows) but it all failed, and I left them unfinished. So this time I decided on something that I can't fuck up (oh how little did I know). Time to rock! Rolls not included

I didn't know how to fill up the middle, so I added some cracks.

I liked how they looked, so added some more.

Changed the color and stared adding shade.

Shade on top and some softening colors around the dark cracks. It makes them less stand out and feel more like part of the picture.

Changed color again, yea, this one was extremely chaotic and always felt wrong. Don't worry, it's only going downhill from here.

I thought that there can be one main crack and some smaller ones, so I made it darker so it looked deeper.

Here, all reason flew out the window. First, things around the cracks are now trying to follow the shade and light (trying is the key word here). Furthermore, I added a second layer of shade. Second lesson of today: Do not add too many variants of the same color close to each other. It becomes hard to read and work with.

Here I was completely lost. Half of the picture was filled so much that you can not see what is happening, and the other one looks blank and empty.

I had no idea how to solve the first problem, but we already know how to deal with the second one. From the very first lemon!!! If something looks plain, add little spots of similar color. It also helped to break borders between layers of light. Lesson: If the light parts, look too separately, let a little color from the darker part "leak" into the lighter one.

It works on dark parts too. This rock ended as one giant mess, but that's alright. We are making progress, slow but stable.

You! Don't let one bad day (or bad week or two) stop you and ruin all that you already achieved! Next one is going to be better!

OK GOODBYE!