My Art Workshop

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!

Higher resolution

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.

Higher resolution

15 faces – speed drawing, 120 sec each.

Higher resolution

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 🙂

Higher resolution

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

Higher resolution

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.

Higher resolution

The past many days I have had so much fun with those quick poses and posting on Tumblr. Watching what other people draw and getting a bit of feedback is really motivating.

So today I did the quickposes for around half an hour, 60 sec/pose. I then drew one pose with no time limit. That one was fun too. I might break it up like this from now on, doing a bunch of fast poses first and then one drawing, where I can play with shadows and refine the form and movement a bit.

Higher resolution

I’m technically challenged today I think.

I was ready to do the quickposes and attacked the first pose with enthusiasm. I drew like crazy and kept drawing and thought: ”Wow! I am getting good at this!” As time went by, I had to realize that it was not really me, who had got much faster. I had forgotten to set a time limit in the pose sketching program. So the first reference picture just showed on my screen forever, instead of switching to the next picture, when time was up. I ended up doing a rather slow quickpose.

Still I had decided to do quickposes today. So, soon I was at it again. Around 60 poses from Quickposes.com. I thought I was in a terrible hurry today. No wonder. I had set the program to switch reference every 30 sec instead of the 60 sec I usually do. I did not notice until I was all done 😀

Now I just have to do the assignment my kid gave me: “Watch a James Bond movie, pause it somewhere with action and draw the scene.” Cool idea huh?

Today it is time to smile. It is hard to draw a smile, especially when I don’t use references. This one just came out of nowhere. I was doing the usual scribble to get line thickness and pressure right when this happened. It seems my pen had a mind of its own today 🙂

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.