There’s a lot of images, so I made a splash art for this post, heh 
If you don’t feel like reading a lot of text, just scroll to the pics! 
For the last 30 days I was participating in Art Senpai’s drawing challenge. The references were usually shots of Asian girls in various poses. The task was to make one sketch a day, nothing too elaborate, keeping it under 30 minutes.
Well, I have failed on that account. I still struggle a lot with proportions and perspective, so often times just getting the pose to look okay’ish took me 30 minutes. Instead, I decided that I’ll enjoy it more if I take it easy and draw as detailed (or not) as I like. I also often inserted my own twist for the giggles. I still think a time-gated sketch has its merit, but I left that for another time.
What I learned from this:
- I suck at drawing hair and eyes
- Perspective is hard but required
- Drawing in time limit is hard
- Drawing a stylized character from real-life photo may be challenging
- I need to do more copy studies to get the mileage and good habits in
- I’m clumsy and press my pen buttons at random when in hurry
- I should practice drawing the same character, to learn to convey the likeness
Everything drawn in Krita, naturally! I almost exclusively used:
- Charcoal Pencil Thin & Eraser Small - lineart bread and butter
- Basic-1 brush - mainstay of flat shading
- Lasso rules
- Charcoal Rock Soft - love it for painting
- A5 300dpi canvas, usually without cropping
Day 1
I still wanted to keep it in the time limit.
Day 2
30 minutes!
Day 3
34 minutes!
Day 4
40 minutes. I think I ran into a problem with the faces and had to tweak a lot.
Day 5
42 minutes…
Day 6
1 hour 15 minutes… Ho boy. I’m still self-conscious about missing the time! There were two characters and probably getting the poses right took some effort.
Day 7
1 hour 30 minutes. Three characters. Yep, I’m too far gone at this point…
I managed to show some interesting expressions here (I think), but it’s more of a happy accident, I’m afraid.
Day 8
1 hour 15 minutes. Ugh. Did I already say the hair needs more work? But otherwise I like this one.
Day 9
1 hour. She didn’t yawn in the photo, but I thought this was a great opportunity!
Day 10
1 hour 12 minutes. Hmm what was difficult here? Not sure, probably just a few small challenges put together. Dayum, BTW, whoever came up with these school uniforms was a genius
Day 11
1 hour. I had fun with this one. You can probably tell by now that I’m a spammer and memer at heart 
Day 12
2 hours 11 minutes. Huh? Doesn’t look as complex right now… Something gave me a lot of trouble here.
Day 13
1 hour 20 minutes. Huh?? Male characters? Wait, is that even allowed?
Day 14
1 hour 26 minutes. Umm. This doesn’t even look like anime anymore. I definitely need to do more studies!
Day 15
1 hour 40 minutes. This was the first assignment where we were supposed to tackle a simple shadow! Yeah, screw the time limits…
Day 16
1 hour 30 minutes. Oh, we’re in the second half now!
Day 17
2 hours… I really liked the top-left reference for this one. Nice lighting.
Day 18
1 hour 50 minutes. I decided to put a bit unhinged expression on this character. Somehow it felt like the right thing to do 
Day 19
2 hours. This time we were asked to venture into simple, limited coloring (just a few shades and rather monochrome).
Day 20
2 hours. Interesting lighting. This time I decided to use more color, but still trying to keep it simple with soft shadows.
Day 21
2 hours 20 minutes. Now we started exploring the perspective. I really like how this one turned out!
Day 22
1 hour. Lol, that was an awful reference photo. The girl had these ugly glasses on her face, too. And a terrible fashion sense 
(Or maybe my fashion sense is terrible. Could be a possibility, too).
Day 23
2 hours 24 minutes. I wanted to experiment with hatching shading. Definitely needs more work, but overall, I do like it quite a bit. The hair still could use more love…
Day 24
2 hours 42 minutes. This one had a challenging, top-down shot. I opted to do it the hard way and created mannequin construction for it. It was a lot of effort (for me), so I couldn’t help it but add that layer to the final picture on the side The original model wasn’t so cheeky.
Day 25
3 hours 16 minutes. I already posted this one, but let’s keep it chronological here. I really pushed this one. In the reference, this was a very young girl, holding hands alongside the body. Obviously she had no katana on here Did full flat, colored shading here, too. Used quite a few layers, but rather simple, with multiply blending for shading.
Day 26
2 hours 38 minutes. I really liked this one and shared it before, too. The pose was very interesting and I saw this as a golden opportunity to explore the flustered office lady trope. Hey, don’t blame me, I know I’m a degenerate 
The shading is just a flat, single fill, but with a gradient applied on top for a hook.
Once I was done, I realized that there’s no way a mug would roll this far if it has a handle… Oh well, sometimes you overlook such obvious things.
Day 27
2 hours 34 minutes. I loved the reference photo for this one… (umm 
). Got a bit experimental with coloring this time. Wanted the character to pop out, but keep it simple and delicate. Is this my favorite one?
Day 28
Bruh, 4 hours! Whoa! Erm, this is still SFW, right? Here I focused a bit more on the lineart, but still had to add the basic shading, otherwise it wouldn’t look good. This is another fun piece. The model didn’t have her hair all drenched and her expression was nothing like that. Her bra design was much simpler and the photo was too small to make out the details.
Day 29
1 hour 53 minutes. This is a simple sketch, but I added some gentle colors. I didn’t even try construction for this one, just tried to capture the pose as it appeared with shapes. Maybe a few sanity guidelines here and there. I really like how effective the simple flat shading can be.
Wait, we’re almost done!
Day 30
3 hours 49 minutes. The grand finale! I wanted to do something special for this one, so I left my comfort zone and tried a full-on thick painting. I did no lineart, only started blocking out shapes with color from the start. I tried to follow the teachings of Marco Bucci (this guy has some amazing lessons!). I painted virtually all of it with Charcoal Rock Soft (adjusting the size as needed). This brush is really amazing!
There was a moment of panic here, definitely Eventually, I did a rough drawing for the face leveraging some references from Hide-san’s materials and then painted over it. I need to copy more to really get a hang of it. But I’m really happy with how this one turned out. I like the colors.
Phew, that’s all folks! Now that I look back at it, it’s a nice milestone and this post is a kind of closure for me (I mean, for this challenge!). Maybe I’ll go back to it when I get stuck and feel down. Thank you, reader, for taking the time to check out this post! I hope you liked it.
