My Art Workshop

Today I chose only male faces. I tried to vary the pencil thickness to play with shadows and forms. It is so hard to control, but when it works, it is pretty good. I still need to learn that by my Wacom pen controller. Roll forward = thinner, roll backwards = thicker. I keep getting it mixed up and cursing at the pen, when it does the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. Still, I must be getting better after all! Today was the first time I encountered google pics suggesting I added name tags on the faces on my drawing 😀

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In the end I will have done this so many times, that I will get it right 🙂 I like today’s results even though I kept running out of time, when I had only one eye of a whole face down on the paper. When I look at the last three days of drawing I think something happened. I am not sure if it is proportions getting better or what, but some of the faces do look more human now – YAY!

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Lots of practice today. Faces are hard to get right. But they are also the most interesting thing to draw. Today I sat down and attacked it 120 sec/face. The first many of thyem I struggled with, but as time went by and I had no breaks, it turned into some sort of dance, and the pen moved more fluidly. Very interesting experience and the resulting sketches I liked a lot more. It’s the ones at the upper left here.

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15 faces – speed drawing, 120 sec each.

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I am set on learning those hands! 100 drawings might help, so that’s what I am going for at the moment. I do see some progress from when I started so that’s pretty good 🙂

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Continuing my quest to nail hands. I gave myself a bit more time on these ones. 2 mins/pose.

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Today I focused on hands. Hands are completely weird! They are capable of bending into all kinds of strange shapes. Fingers are able to turn strange ways and in funny angles to each other, nails are curved, and skin is wrinkled and folding. Its a true challenge to make it look right. As weird and diverse a hand`s movements are, there are still strict rules for what is possible and what is not. It’s so hard to capture it the right way.

The James Bond challenge Rasmus gave me is in the work. I found a scene on Youtube yesterday from a Bond movie that I am drawing now. I am having great fun with it and it forces me to get to know my Wacom pen and my choices of brushes in Photoshop a lot better.

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I finally got bored with drawing humans. Perhaps because that Quickpose site kept throwing naked sexy chicks at me, in almost the same pose constantly, and I got annoyed. So at some point I stopped it and went to draw human heads instead. And just to add a bit extra I told the program to turn the heads upside down.

Drawing things upside down helps with turning off the left side of the brain, the logical one, which thinks it knows how to draw without even looking at the motif. Upside down the right side brain takes over. It does not deal with seeing a whole, so a head turnes into a bunch of lines. It sounds confusing but it helps in tricking myself to draw an eye or a head as I actually see it, not as my brain tells me an eye or a head looks. It was great fun to try out.

I am not sure I can see progress in the poses right now, so it is probably healthy switching to something a bit different for a while. Today I went with 2 min/drawing to change things a bit. I might check out another pose site. I want to draw all kinds of humans, young and old, thick and thin, not just naked sexy girls.

It has been a long nice Summer day. I didn´t think I would get the time to draw today, but now after 10 pm, just before it turns dark, the Summer evening is calm, warm and light, and I made one drawing after all. I ended up really liking it. The photograph is horrible but considering the lighting conditions here in the open it will have to do. So today’s drawing: Jumping Girl

The limited time challenges always turns out to be great fun to do. This time I was forcing myself not to spend more than 5 mins on each sketch. I ended up doing 5 different poses today. Drawing humans in weird poses is fun, but gee it’s hard to get right with perspective and shortening of limbs, which are supposed to stick out of the paper. As always the hands are the hardest (and the feet). Today I wanted to focus a bit on facial expressions too.