Month Three Complete!

Another month completed!  Incredible.  This artistic journey has lasted nearly 100 days, which is about 95 days more than I thought possibly.  We're starting to see improvement, and big improvement in some areas.  I sometimes feel there's an artist hiding somewhere inside me, as opposed to before, where I thought I didn't have an artistic bone in my body.

Normally here is where I compare something I drew previously to a recent example to highlight said improvement.  However, because I spent all month working on faces, and my previous work was rather laughable, I thought I'd do something different.  Here are all my sketches.  Yes, all of them.  No, I don't do this a lot.  Nothing is dated, but you can still see noticeable improvement, even in these 30sec to two-minute doodles. 

Here are my earliest sketches.  I know the resolution sucks, but so do most of these doodles, so it evens out.  If you are unsure what a particular image is supposed to be, don't ask, because I probably don't know either.
Time frame: roughly the first five weeks.

Sketches are getting better.  At the top we have hands that look fairly hand-like, especially for sketches.  We also have what may be my best Joey ever, done in a fraction of the time.  (There's also a tiger, which shows that I haven't magically become a master sketcher yet!)  At the bottom we have four quick attempts at a beautiful cougar face, which also happens to double as my computer wallpaper.  Spoiler alert: expect to see a full drawing of this soon.

This is what inspired me to do this sketch comparison.  On the left, a cartoon with guidelines still visible, trying to get a face in the right proportions.  On the right, another sketch, this one from 'Amazing Faces' and is no better or worse than anything else I tried from that book.  In the centre, something I drew in two minutes yesterday night.  I find it very compelling: it's a very old face, or the rough pen lines certainly suggest this.  Drawn with value tones even though I'm using pen.  The cheeks are actually contoured, and you can tell where the face ends even without an outline.  The proportions are spot on even without guidelines.  Holy crap, what an improvement in sketching!

If you look closer at some of these, you might go blind, so I don't recommend it.  If you don't heed that warning, you may recognize some of my finished drawings.  In virtually every case, I did the finished drawing first, liked it, and then tried to see if I could sketch a likeness of it.  I think that's called working backwards.  Oh well, let's admire the improvement, and let's also bask in the glory of my proudest achievements again this month!

Unsurprisingly, all of my portraits made it into the Hall of Fame.  If I keep making works like these, I might have to become more selective... but that's not the hardest of problems, is it?  This draw everyday challenge has been marvellous.  I look forward to it everyday.  The improvements were so fast, so rapid, so unexpected, I feel like I'm living in a dream.  Let's see where this dream takes me in the next few months!