Sycra, Sparekiss, and Ordering Principles (new name for Levels of Complexity?)

Picked up some inspiration from a few Sycra videos and the Sparekiss sketchbook on CA. The circle of forms below, as terribly as it's drawn, was based on something I remember seeing in Sparekiss' sketchbook like a year ago - he did a lot of these assemblages of basic and more advanced forms. Then yesterday (right after drawing this one) I decided to look up his sketchbook and page through it.

I thought the stuff I had been doing with random forms floating in the air was similar to his, but looking at his work was a real smack in the face. He doesn't just randomly place things, he arranges them in ways that make sense, that actually organize and activate the space around and between them. It's stepping up to a new level of complexity in a way - it activates the negative space and the whole composition.

Semi-related note - looking at Sparekiss' sketchbook made me aware of another level of complexity (it strikes me that Ordering Principles might be a better term): Personality. His characters all have it in spades, and it lifts his work to a different level entirely than my own bland generic faces and figures. Need to start working toward that one.

I didn't get it right on this one - I was still just drawing individual forms scattered around the page, except for the little groupings in the lower left corner, so I decided to follow up in a more concerted way.

Here I'm starting to get it right. Or moving in the right direction anyway. I've noticed that over the last few entries my placement of things on the page is starting to become more compositional - more thought-through or arranged to make the entire page look better. I suppose all of this is me starting to think at a more compositional level. At some point I need to go beyond that to the  level of suggesting story. Oh, and the little comic figure in the box was based on some things I saw in a Sycra video - in his 'secret sketchbook' he started drawing heads in these little boxes so each one became a composition with a simple background, even if just some tone or texture, and some had full scenes behind them.

His figure drawings kicked my ass too, and I wanted to try to move toward that as well. A long way from it, but this looks better than my rigidly drawn comic heads and figures just because I drew with the pencil on its side giving it a more fluid looseness and somewhat of a fine art feel. Actually I drew most of the head my old way, but just toward the end I turned the pencil on its side and did  little shading that way. Then I did the entire figure holding the pencil that way.