Week Ten: Lee Hammond's 'Big Book Of Drawing' I

After my Lion King binge last week, I went to the library (one of my favourite pastimes) and looked around for art books that specialized in pencil drawings.  I found several, but I went with Lee Hammond's 'Big Book of Drawing'.  It essentially gathers all the main points of her other books and places them in one cover, often verbatum.  I would know, as the library had several books of hers there.

Anyway, this book focuses on drawing realistically with pencil.  Hammond relies on using graphs to get accurate line drawings, a step I've ignored.  Sure, graphs work, but that won't help me draw when I don't have a graph, which is always.  However, I can follow all the other techniques, and here's my first stab at it.

The first lesson was a sphere.  I begrudgingly did it, thinking such an exercise simply, but I actually had fun doing it.  At first, it looked like a circle, but then it really took shape, pun intended, and a 3D object started popping out.  Interestingly, this scan leaves a bright stab of light through the middle, but it still looks good.  I like it.

Here are some noses.  Earlier, I declared my undying enemity towards the nose, but these weren't that bad.  By knowing how to shade the sphere, I should now know how to shade the round nostril areas!  Or at least in theory.  The one on the left isn't anything special, but I really like the one on the right.  This is easily my best attempt at producing a rounded structure, and the shading is quite nice.

From noses we move to the mouth.  I struggled with mouths before, but Hammond lists two tips: don't outline the lips, ever, and the shape of the upper lip is a squished M.  Those two helped immeasurably.  The first mouth is angled slightly to the side and was hard to draw.  Mostly it was hard to accurately do the highlights in the bottom lip.  I found I have very little control of my kneaded erasure, and much more practice is needed!

The second mouth looks great.  The shading is consistent, the highlighting is better, and the little flaps of skin just above it really complete the image.

Finally, I present to you this image.  Tell me, what do you think of this nose?
 

Not bad, eh?  Thing is, I don't see a nose at all.  I can only see an evil hat.  As in, the black nostril area is a pair of eyes, the rounded nostril area is the brim and the bridge serves as a cone, a sort of wizard's hat.  This isn't entirely my fault: the more I look at the reference picture, the more I see a hat with dark eyes.  Maybe that's a good way of seeing the nose: an evil hat plastered in the middle of the face.


Once more, my goal is to eventually draw hyper-realistically.  This book will show me how to get started along that path.  None of these images looked cartoony.  As far as realism goes, especially concerning facial features, this is the best I've ever done.  I'll be sticking with this book for the coming weeks, until I finish it or run out of renewals, so expect less Lion King and X-Men and much more realistic awesomeness this month.