Gettin' Inspired

 

Another video by Jeff Haines. You get to see him drawing here, and it's a joy. I got so excited about it I dug out my old charcoal pencil kit and did a sketch. It looks real nice, but I'm really more of a graphite artist than charcoal. If I were going to use charcoal pencils I'd have to draw really big, and that brings a whole set of logictical problems with the storage etc. I can get very similar effects in a soft enough pencil. I used to draw in the softest pencils I could get, all the way up to 9B, as well as General's Layout pencils and Derwent water-solubles. That was in the 90's when I was drawing really dark. I loved it, but it creates a solidity and opaqueness that's very limiting. Right now my favorite drawing tool is the Staedtler 2mm lead holder (has been for many years). I keep some fairly hard lead in it, I think it's HB or maybe 2B. That's soft enough to get really dark if you want to. But I used to be able to get a lot more expressive just using wooden pencils back in the day. I might need to lose the gadgetitis and get back to basics. The wooden 6B used to be my standard, at least in those dark days. More often though it would be the 2B, which allows extreme darkness and also a very delicate light touch. That's the one I used to call the Poetic Pencil, because when I was getting ready to draw I'd always ask myself "2B, or not 2B? That is the question." 

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.