First Live Study

Finally did my first live model study today :) It was a 3 hour session. Made a lot of mistakes, but I've put in the time and will continue doing this; that should cut down on the number of mistakes I'm making.

I also completed another pose gesture sheet. I think I'm at 800 gestures right now. Almost there.

quick studies

Did one more sheet of comps and my first quick color study. I pulled a photo off the web of a temple high up in the mountains. No idea who shot the original photo, but great study material. If you know who shot it, please let me know: I will be happy to give credit, as always.

First Composition Study

Apart from my regular 100 pose and face gestures, I did my first composition study. It's fascinating to see what comes up when the shot is broken down into its most basic components.

These thumbnails are based on shots from "The Dark Knight". I hope to start producing at least one sheet of 8 composition thumbnails per week.

More Values and Gestures

I need to come up with a clever way of giving titles to essentially the same type of postings day in and day out.

100 more pose gestures: first I increase the interval to 60 seconds to flesh out my gestures a bit more, then I got bored and dropped the time to 15 seconds per pose. If you wonder why they look like stick figures, it's because that's all I could do in 15 seconds. It was interesting.

100 more face gestures: I'm at 500 face gestures now. Still weak, but I feel that I'm beginning to get the hang of it.

Value study: about 30 minutes. Grabbed someone's photo off the web (if you know who took the spoon picture, please let me know - it's a great shot and I'd love to give credit for it) and made a 4 tone value study of it's shininess. The effect would've been even better if I could push the range values out into full black and white, but rules are rules: 4 values around the midtone range.

Daily stuff

Some more gesture drawings. Had a hard time staying within my 30 second intervals (some gestures are missing legs and other important limbs). And then the head gestures wouldn't click. The last 3 rows started showing promise, I guess. Tough day for drawing, great day for whining :)

3 Value Studies

I finished my figure drawing assignment, but my scanner is throwing fits. Now I need to figure out how to get my sketches into my computer. I'll show what I did, as soon as I solve that problem.

In the meantime, here are my new value studies. The restriction on this one was that I could only use 4 values (2 for darks, 2 for brights) and limit each sketch to around 1 hour. I liked the exercise. I need to figure out how to find more time during the week to paint more of these.

500 Gestures

Hit the halfway mark today with my gesture drawings. Since it's a Friday, I wanted to do something different today, but ended up doing my regular linework drills, 2 pencil mastercopies (I'll post on Monday, when I complete the set of 3) and another 100 gestures. Better than nothing. Happy weekend everyone!

I just watched Gina's latest post and found out that she's a fellow steampunk aficionado. In display of solidarity, I will post my redesign for the dynamic sketching car week. I ended up designing a Steampunk Victorian Vigilante. I liked the concept, but my execution was a bit disappointing, so I never submitted the final layout for Peter's review at the end of the quarter. I'll probably revisit this idea once I get some more drawing experience under my belt.

Another Gesture Sheet

Very tired today. Barely managed to complete the daily 100 gestures. Here they are. I'm 600 gestures away from my goal now.

3 New Things

Got all 3 images completed today: new cube value study (it's another one of Matt Kohr's tutorial reference images), 100 gesture poses and 100 head gestures. Got stuck on the cube again (about 3+ hours), but the 200 gestures were done quite fast; 30 seconds per gesture.

Cube Value Study

Finished another value study. About 2.5 hours. My perspective is seriously off and the values need more work, but I painted within specific time constraints and I can see now what needs improvement.

Thank you for your advice louisC: I switched to Hampton's head construction gestures and things started rolling again. Loomis is good, but his examples don't lend themselves to gesture drills too well. Finished my first 100 heads. 900 to go :)

A Few More Rows of Skulls

It was a strange day today. Didn't get a lot done, unfortunately, but I did manage to put in a few hours of practice.

A few more rows of skulls. I started doing mirror images of the 3/4 view and side views. Very difficult to keep the proportions in place.

Speaking of which, does anybody know why it's so hard to nail proportions when it comes to the human head? It's ridiculously difficult. The basic shape doesn't seem to be that complicated, but trying to establish a proper relationship between different parts proves to be quite a challenge. Am I missing some kind of method? Or will rote practice eventually take care of all these problems?

Any ideas and suggestions will be very much appreciated.

Do Something Useful

This post is not directly related to art. It's related to a particular human condition, a condition that I was suffering from for many years. I call this condition the "not being able to get your shit together" syndrome.

David Wong wrote this marvel of an article, titled "6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person". Please be warned that the videos from the article might not be suitable for every office environment. I found the link to David's material posted on Gina Florio's New Year resolution post. Thank you Gina!

David wishes somebody would have explained all this to him back in 1995. I wish somebody explained this to me back in 1985. Better late than never. Hats off to you, sir.

First Batch of Animals

Had some time to draw after I got back home from work, so decided to do some more sketching. This is my first dent into the 1000 animal drawings that I will eventually complete.

My first 100 animal gesture drawings. Took me about 100 minutes (60 seconds per animal). It gets intense closer to the end. Especially the horses.

Friday Night Sketching

Had a bad migraine all day and I need to be back to work this weekend, so I did some light sketching instead of my usual masochistic labor camp-style art training. It was also a good opportunity to refresh my memory on Peter Han's dynamic sketching methods.

I attempted to draw different versions and poses of a tiger from reference (random images I found on the web). Doing it digitally allowed for some cool quick rendering effects which would've taken forever with pen and markers. Hooray for my tablet.

Coolest thing about tigers: nature already put contour lines on them. They are like a walking drawing aid with big teeth and an appetite for mammals. 

Good Time

Reduced the value study painting time to 2 hours. I'm comfortable with that for now. I'll need to pick another subject for my next attempt.

Here's the new value study, 100 gestures sheet, and another row of skulls. My goal is to draw 200 of these before I switch to drawing faces.

Good Start

I'm off to a good start. Completed my 100-a-day gesture drawings (takes about 1 hour to complete with pose rotation set to 30 seconds), a full value study based on Matt Kohr's tutorial (ref is on the left, my study is on the right; took me approx. 4 hours; still too slow) and managed to put in 30 Loomis face construction iterations.

The original size for the 10x10 sheets is 4000px  and the vase from the value study is approximately 2000x1000.

Head construction requires a lot of ellipses, which is a challenge, since my hands are still wobbly with the tablet *argh*. More practice should take care of it. Anyway, not a bad start for this new year.