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gavindel stARTs from the very beginning
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Other than that, working on the second half of Head 1. Stuff like this:
I remember trying a few of the classic asaro shots in December 2015 and being just completely unable to manage them. So, progress. And in the vein of artists everywhere, progress means higher standards. Definitely a bit of a skew on that last head.
The heads are starting to come around! I can be pretty bad at proportions myself after years of anime, so I have a tendency to stretch people out.
I even got a complement from a friend a few weeks back. "Yeah, I'm amazed at how long you've been doing this. I figured you'd have quit by now!"
Yeah, that sorta thing does happen- all I can say is try not to get overly worried about it.
There's always going to be a period of 'this porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold' with any concept, before you hit the porridge that's just right, and can hit it consistently.
But you can see the corner of my art 'studio', so this totally counts.
Mixing in some non watts drawing will help fight a slow burnout, for sure. Variety is good, and you never know what advice will work better for rooting you with good principals.
A couple measurement errors, a couple unforeseen tangents. Otherwise, as far as I understand, the perspective is correct.
Staring with the head once more...
Trying to pay more attention to proportions.
A skull study. Yep.
Need to practice shading a ton more. I still can't figure out how Watts does his crazy detailed shading patterns.
Facial features are a bottleneck for believable faces.
I've been looking at formalizing a training program based on the bootcamp. Really, it boils down to rotating a series of subjects on a weekly or monthly basis. A day doing figure layin, a day doing head layin, a day doing facial features and expressions...There are a lot of different areas that I need to improve together. In terms of priority, its probably more important to work on the rhythm and flow of my gesture and layin than to do renderings. Final renderings don't do much if the underlying drawing is stiff.
I wish there was more to say, but frankly I'm just drawing when I can find the energy right now.
Give some more thought and time to your feet structure and placement. Its super hard, and feet are annoying, but solidly placing them can really sell a pose. Some of yours feel small, and you might want to describe the bend in them with a bit more confidence.
As the critique pointed out, her head is too narrow. Another half inch of cranium would have done a lot to balance out the rest. The eyes and nose are starting to resolve into proper features.
Honestly, this one feels like just complete shit.
Turns out that I have very poor rendering skills. Suppose that's not surprising given most of my practice has been with line, not tone.
Whining about how hard it is aside, I feel like individual features are becoming less of a stumbling block. My drawings feel like they look worse, but its because they're starting to look like ugly people.
As for rendering it always seems reliant on taking the time to build it up anf make it look good. Rarely do you find a well rendered peice quickly done. At some point if you want to improve that you're just going to have to sit down and dig into it. I would recomend maybe picking a small area say a couple of inches by a couple of inches on one of these where you have the ref and really dig into it.
Finally what paper are you using. It looks like newsprint in some of the photos. If it is it might be time to jump it up to a little better quality. Keep up the work
The model for this second one is not, in fact, bald, but I was already 35 minutes into what is supposed to be a 20 minute head quicksketch, so bald he is.
My largest take away this semester has probably been the need for really solid basic construction. Every stage of the drawing needs to look "good" in the sense of reading as the basic object. Shading or shadow won't save me if the eye is too high in the socket or whatever. If the construction is solid, even simple value mappings will read well.
This one came out kind of lumpy. It looked better before I tried to add rendering. I'm still working on getting my tones to go down smooth.
20 minute quicksketch class. Except this one took 55 minutes. Watts tells us not to take the 20 minute time limit too literally, but I may have cheated even with that...
The sign up for next semester was very unclear. It looks like the three livestreaming classes have filled up in ~1 day. Does that mean for in-person seats or the livestream critiques too? I don't know.
Maybe next I should spend a few weeks experimenting with landscapes or something. Take a break from the human form.
Figure drawing is an area where I've heavily suffered from "What next?" syndrome, so my approach there will be to try and focus on gesture -> structure -> two value to get off the ground. I'm also in head drawing again, building on last semester's work. Need to describe more forms and less outlines. Still some proportions issues to watch as well.
In the meantime, draw without a deadline...
Warm ups are a good time to self test with drawing from imagination.
Copying some eyes from Eric Gist.
A more intensive eye from imagination. Some proportional issues I'm still wrestling with: the right side of the eyelid is a bit wide, overall iris is too large, not enough inner eyelid fold on the left side.
Figure drawing - still rough.
Shadow patterns - they're important.
Male eyes in three quarters is my fetish.
I erased the left eye a few times getting it lined up, and you can really tell with the texture on the tone. Newsprint really doesn't forgive more than one or two light erasures.