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Sova Fanart 3: Class Unit 1 Day 3
It’s been a full week since I last drew for this drawing competition. I’ve been feeling a lot of dread because there are so many details in drawing Sova and I don’t feel any closer to getting better at him because it takes so long to draw a full figure.
I drew for a full hour but didn’t get very far.
Here was the reference:

Here is my rough sketch:

And here is my lineart:

The lines don’t feel that confident and don’t seem to be creating forms, more just tracing lines.
I feel that I need to slow down. I like the idea of the exercises but I feel that they need to be broken down further into smaller syllabi. Since I don’t have much time to draw every day and each task every day feels a bit daunting and overwhelming, I need to break them down further to learn at a fast rate.
I also wish I could draw from the live model, but the issue is that you can’t hold an active shot (like shooting or doing the ultimate).
At the same time, I said I would embrace failure and I did. I still believe in my overall plan and I believe when I look back, this will actually be helpful even though its painful right now.
Valorant 31: Class in Session – Unit 1 Day 1
UNIT 1: VOD Review | Day 1 – TenZ
Exercise: Imitate Tenz and imagine I am him
Lessons learned:
- I’m exhausted – fell asleep for a long time after watching and imitating for a short period of time
- Knife to gun transition – keeping knife out until dangerous angles, then switch to gun or do a jump peak while switching if no room
- Hold for peeks – clear where they might peek, not where they might be, continue to hold it or switch to another angle they can push you from
- Set graphics to low
- Don’t push smokes unless with flashes or off of someone else’s contact
- Spray with good spray control – pulling down
- Fall after spraying to reload
- Jiggle if holding close to an angle
- Warm up at the start of each round by flicking onto teammate heads
In game what I did very successfully:
- Spamming through smokes – I got many headshots through the smoke
- Holding peekable angles – I felt I got a lot more intentional to where I was staring
- Holding off angles when watching for the flank (specifically I utilized the place Tenz hid on Pearl in the first round to get kills
- Being more intentional of when the knife is out, I rarely got caught out with my knife. I figured out how much time it takes to pull out the gun, and I always timed it so that I pulled out my gun before peeking anything.
What I can improve on:
- Pulling out the knife more often when I know no one is close
- Spam more boxes
- Utilizing jump peeking more
- Making sure my peeks are still tight and clean and fast
- Being much more focused on holding specific peeks when slowly scaling up
Workpost 8: Crawling
I did not wake up feeling good. I went to bed at 11:40 (much earlier to my credit! I ended up not working on one of my projects and didn’t play Valorant). However, I couldn’t fall asleep because I just showered and my body was too hot.
This morning, I went for a walk and I crawled for about 30 minutes. Crawling feels EXTREMELY good. I found a way to do it very naturally. I think it is funny how great hardship yet again provides so much value. I know how to crawl because I had to learn how to walk properly after messing up my knee so much that it hurt to walk. In learning how to walk I have a clear idea of how to shift my weight and do the same thing when I crawl. I’m going to try to crawl more throughout the day.
Other than crawling, I did feel extremely happy last night driving around but again in the morning I feel kind of lonely and depressed and I wonder again what I can do to soothe that.
Perhaps, I will play some Valorant today, do some art and music, and more crawling because those things all make me happy. I also reached out to a lot of friends yesterday and a lot of people wanted to talk today so maybe I will talk to them too. I am excited to go on the trip to California with my brother and sister!
As for the different projects, here are my thoughts:
- AI Consulting: I’m happy with the new direction, but nervous about shooting the videos
- Art Coaching: Really excited about my new ideas, interested in creating the materials that I’ve been planning for
- Art Coaching Product Research: Feeling pretty anxious about this since this is what I dropped yesterday due to time constraints
- Demo work: feel bored by it
- I also want to revist my knee challenge for my spar with my friend coming up and my knee challenge for the same reason
Finding the First People On Social Media
I had a thought today. I have a friend on Instagram who has a handle @theirname1. I was wondering who got the handle without the number at the end. I was thinking, they cannot be that old since Instagram itself is not that old. And why stop there…why not look at the people who old the handles for the most common names? Like who owns @bob? Or @john or @mary? Do famous or rich people ever buy those handles or are they owned just by early adopters?
The Valorant Challenge: From Silver 1 to Platinum 1
I’m gonna try to do something crazy, which is to try to rise from Silver 1 to Platinum in Valorant.
For all of you who don’t know, Valorant is a competitive FPS shooter. Like all popular computer games that are competitive, it is extremely difficult to progress in rank.
When I first started Valorant I was in Iron 1 and after months of playing, I rose to Silver 1. Now I want to make a similar rise from Silver 1 to Platinum 1. But I want to do it faster this time. I want to do it within the course of 2-3 months.
I want to use this experience as a test of my speed learning skills and also how I can make videos for challenges.
I also believe that mindfulness and self-awareness can bring greater success than any brute force tactic, and I want to prove that with my progress in this game (which will be easy to measure and indisputable).
My current philosophy for speed learning:
- Embracement of pain
- Lower expectations
- Process emotions
- Try new things
- Self-reflection is KEY
- Need to see yourself
- Focus on fun
- Play when you want with things you like
- Small steps
- Don’t need to do everything in one day
- Do tiny steps if possible
- Prepare yourself
- Create an environment for success
Specifics:
- Embracement of pain
- Don’t set goals
- Assume I’m gonna do bad
- Slow down and process when I’m doing bad
- Always try new strats
- Self-reflection
- LOTS of VOD reviews
- Focus on fun
- Only play comp when you want to
- Other days do light practice
- Focus on agents you have fun with (focus on agent abilities that are fun)
- Small steps
- Find ways to practice in aimlabs, spike rush and deathmatch
- Prepare yourself
- Work on environment
- Work on posture
NEXT: What my plan on filming will be.
Also, got recommend How to Fight Thich Nhat Hanh by a friend on how to work on mindfulness.
Sova Fanart 2: Class Unit 1 Day 2
UNIT ONE: Sova Model Studies | Day 2 – Half Body
Today I was supposed to work on the upper body, but I found a really cool pose and decided to work on that instead. Unfortunately, it took a very long time to sketch out and I was also very exhausted from drawing until 4AM yesterday. I also had a lot of travel and work coming up so I was a bit stressed and overwhelmed.
I feel sometimes that I put too much on my plate for a challenge. I definitely felt overwhelmed coloring a drawing with this much detail.
This was the rough sketch:

And this was my attempt at more refined line art:

And for reference I used this pose:
