Ah, who was I kidding? I couldn't wait a whole week. I kinda knew it really, even as I lied to myself that I would.
Shifted my focus to heads for this next batch. I had been drawing some simple wig-head looking things before this with like blocky noses etc, but now I wanted to try to bring them to more of a finish. More fully developed features and better shading using the core shadow technique. Also using what I've learned about edges, in particular the fact that form shadows have soft edges, while cast shadows have much harder edges. Seemed really weird when I first learned it—I didn't believe it was true, but I looked at shadows on myself, things around me, and in photographs, and after a while I had to admit it is. I like this one on the right, but once I noticed the eyes aren't in line with each other I could never unsee it again. Quasimodo's sister?
Going much more masculine here, almost Hulk-like. I wanted to try to develop a few different types.
Earnest and concerned guys. Wow, look at that—I even tried to have the one on the right looking down, with his neck bent. That's a first I think.
I like the smiling dude on the left—looks a lot less wimpy than the ones above. Then another attempt at neck mobility, not very successful. I can see that's something I need to learn about. I do applaud myself for a good effort though, and the face looks pretty good. Those upshots are difficult!
This time I decided no way would I let the eyes go out of alignment! I started by drawing a line across right through the center of each eye (erased by this point), and I paid very careful attention to make each eye match the other one. I also took it into Photoshop and sweetened the shading up a bit. That's always an issue with a pencil drawing done on toothy paper though—you can really see the graininess of the pencil shading compared to the digital smoothness of the Photoshop shading. Still though, looking really good.
Added some hair, stolen from a Miranda Sings picture. It's weird how much that changes the picture, it hardly even looks like the previous one anymore. I specifically wanted black hair because it's so much easier to draw than blonde or anything light—mostly just a solid black mass with some highlights here and there. Hair is something I really need to get a lot better at.
I noticed after adding the hair the drawing itself lost something and it took me a while to figure out why. Finally it hit me—if you look at the original version above, the quality of the line is very important. It gets thicker and thinner in places, very 'tailored'. But once I added black hair most of the way around, right up against the outline of the head, that outline disappeared. Now it's just an edge of light against dark. The tailored qualities, the thicker and thinner play—just gone. This does look good in a different way though. It just takes some getting used to. But that is the difference—one of them anyway—between simpler comic-book style line drawing and more realistic greyscale drawing in a painterly style.
And I realize the equivalent to that tailored line in a greyscale piece like this is edge. If I had taken the time to develop this farther I would work the edges just as much as I originally worked the thickness of the outline—in fact I did develop it a bit more below. The interplay between hard, firm, soft and lost edges is where much of the magic is in this kind of work—I'm really coming to understand that. It can impart just as much life as a tailored line, possibly more.
Developed it farther, smoothed things out all over. I considered really going to town on the hair, but I knew if I started that it would turn into a week-long project, and I was doing sketches supposed to only take a couple hours at most. I don't remember how long I worked on it, might have been a day or 2.
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