Back from hiatus—posting my work from 2019

I decided at the beginning of 2019 to stop posting my work immediately after drawing it. There's something about it being seen too soon after finishing that I don't like. I never intended to wait a full year to post these, but somehow that's what happened. I must say though, it really did feel freeing to be drawing only for myself again.

After they've sat for a while—a few months maybe—it no longer feels like putting your freshest work up for inspection, you've drawn a bunch more stuff since then and that's what still feels too fresh to show. This is now older stuff.

In 2018 I decided I needed to work mostly on my drawing, especially figures, before getting back to the painting. The issues I was having were drawing issues. So I kept drawing.

I work best in pencil on regular old paper. It used to be typing paper back in the 70's and 80's, now that's hard to find and instead we have copier paper, which is much thicker and toothier. I do sort of miss the slick surface of the bond paper, but I also like the thicker feel of today's copier paper. And it comes in 11 x 14, a size I really love to work on, though most of my practice sketching is done on good old 8.5 x 11, standard typing bond size.

I don't know why it took me until July to start drawing last year. I guess I had other stuff going on. And I didn't get a lot done, for the most part just a few drawings a week, but I did keep on going that way for most of the remainder of the year. I'll start posting, probably once a week, in batches like this.

At this point I was just trying to get the feel for drawing figures entirely from imagination again. What I was trying to do is get a dynamic pose down first, a good gesture, and then develop it into a full figure drawing.  Sometimes I'd start with the stick figures like you see up at the top and draw cylinders and blocks around them to manikinize them into figures. Sometimes I skipped the stick men. Just playing around.

Sometimes I thought about the Vilppu method. This is not really a good representation of it. I shouldn't have smirched his name by writing it here, but I wanted to remind myself that's what I was thinking about when I did these. I always try to write little reminders to myself or I won't remember anything about how I did them.

This is gonna be fun! All of these were photographed on the same day, though drawn over a period of a week or so.

See ya next week!

Patchwork man

I Frankenstein'ed this one up a bit - fixed some of the proportioning issues but introduced some new ones. I realized the mistake I had made (the main one) -- when I drew the head and arm I proportioned them to fit the massive chest, when they should have fit with the waist and pelvis. So I ended up with everything looking normally proportioned but a small waist and pelvis, when just the chest was supposed to be extra big. It's better now, but now the chest is too wide. Think I'll stop messing with weird superhero proportioning for a while. Or not - we'll see.

Thank you Mister Finch

Switched from a 2B to an HB pencil, dulled the point quite a bit, and I like the way it draws. Though I did pick up the 2B for the darker accents. 

Bodies

I was gonna wait till I have more but this'll have to do:

Yeah it's rough and hairy - the 1st one especially, which I didn't consider worth taking any farther due to too many problems, though there are things I like about it. The other one I cleaned up better, though not completely. These are working drawings - just developing my comic-style figures with some more detail on them. And as I said earlier (here or on ConceptArt?) - when I'm working outside my comfort zone I do tend to draw hairy. It's because as I go I can start to see what the shapes need to look like, and I go in and change them sort of spastically. Not great I know, but I suspect when I learn the body better I'll be able to draw it crisper and cleaner

Kiss Kiss!!

New Intuos tablet has arrived

I've hardly drawn anything for the last month, but here's what I got...

Decided to add a face to this drawing from last post. I couldn't find the original picture, so I used a different one of the same person and modified it to work. She was facing the other way and I had to invent lighting from a different angle, which was fun and actually not too hard when working from a picture. I could have flipped the image and copied it pretty much exactly, but instead I just imagined what it would look like flipped and painted that. I think it resulted in a much better piece -- rather than patching on a head at the wrong angle I was able to creatively merge it all together. I like working this way, I think I'll do it some more.

I should add, I got myself a new Intuos tablet and that's how I did the face. Man, it's so nice actually being able to access the control panel and adjust things like pressure sensitivity and line taper. I lost the ability to do that with my old tablet after upgrading the computer a few years back, but as long as I remembered to never update the driver, I could at least still paint using the last settings I had put on it. Then one day I forgot and decided I was going to check for new drivers... that's what killed the old tablet. As soon as I got that new driver installed it went completely haywire and spazzed out! Couldn't make a coherent mark with it anymore!! It's because it was a pretty old tablet and the newer Mac operating system no longer supported the Wacom drivers for it. So I just had to shell out and get myself a new one. Now I'm up and rolling again, and it feels good!! Complete control once again... AAAHHH!!!

Only 2 to upload this time

Really pushing the shading above. Maybe I cranked it a bit too much in photoshop.

The Business. Now I'm seeing some problems like that arm that needs to be pulled out from the torso a bit. Might see if I can fix it. Really it was just a torso sketch though, working as usual lately on the serratus muscles and the abs especially.

About the lines - I drew these with some scribbling, but cleaned them up carefully. I think that's acceptable, though I'll continue to work toward always drawing cleaner to begin with. It's still true though -- when I'm unsure about what I'm drawing I scrub a bit.

Worked it over a bit in photoshop - pulled out the arm and re-drew the hips using a mouse.  Much better now.