Practicing Portrait Drawing

I like the advice to do a lot more beginnings than detailed finishes. I believe he's right about that. 

Blocking in Color in Light and Shadow

 

Some good stuff here. I like this approach—get the line drawing, block in carefully, and then refine and render. He does what I do—add in each new color on its own layer so you can fiddle around with it until it looks right, then paste it down. 

More Arm Stuff

 

I need to do a bunch of these draw-overs, they seem incredibly helpful. 

Note to Self

 Don't let Google 'find' the video by inputting the title—even the exact title cut and pasted in. For some reason it can't do that. What do you think it is, a powerful search engine or something? Sheesh! You need to paste in the URL—and not the one from the top bar. It can't find it with that either. You need to right-click on the video and use that shortened URL. Wish there was something that explained that somewhere, you just need to fumble aorund until you figure it out. 

Simplifying the Arm with Emilio Dekure

This video shows the arm's equivalent of the Sartorial line, which connects together all the forms of the leg along one elegant line and makes it much easier to figure out how to place each muscle-form. 

Exploring Edges with Lane Brown

Around the middle of the video it gets to the part where Lane's art started to become more about edges than anything else. I've just started to really explore edges, and it really makes the work pop. This is an excellent discussion with some very important information I want to log here. 

Shape Language for drawings

 This almost seems like David Finch giving away the secret of why his drawings look the way they do. I remember when I was revisiting a particular Fafhrd painting a while back it bothered me that the simple curves everywhere made it look feminine and soft, so I squared it all up, which helped. I found a sort of compromise between the harder straight lines and the softer curves, but this is a much more advanced approach. Definitely worth playing around with. 

He pays tribute to the drawings of Jeffrey Watts at one point.  Proko did the same in a recent video too. Makes sense—Jeff is an amazing draftsman and teacher. 

In places Finch's "Line of beauty" becomes Bridgman's "Line with a hook on it."