Week Eleven: 'Big Book of Drawing' II, Plus My First Portrait!

In non-art news, I took part in several karate demonstrations this past week.  This is significant, as the 'threat' of these shows demanded concentration and practice, which took some time away from other pursuits, namely drawing.  Well, with that out of the way, I could again focus on drawing this week, and focus I did.  Here's my second week of working from Lee Hammond's 'Big Book of Drawing.'

Last week I did noses and mouths.  Here, both together, plus some teeth.  The teeth were interesting; at the time I thought they sucked, but now I kinda like them.  Most attempts at teeth like like white bricks or tic-tacs, but these curve enough to suggest real teeth.  The nose and mouth are less good, at least the nose.  Well, it's supposed to be on a slight angle, but I ended up drawing the mouth straight.  The mouth looks great.  The nose, well, I really struggled.  Oh well.

Time for some eyes.  This almost looks like a before and after comparison, but not so: the left image was a basic outline, and then the other went into more detail.  I don't care about the left one.  The right one is fantastic.  Interestingly, as I was drawing it, I thought it looked freaky -- and then I added the eyelashes, and suddenly everything came together.  It actually looks incredible.  Unbelievable, even.  So much texture.  Only  the eyebrow serves as a negative, but I can live with that.

Now for some ears, the final facial feature.  You know what?  Ears are pretty freaky looking.  Here are two attempts.  First of, wow, I need to learn how to use my erasure for highlights better.  The right ear's 'highlight' likes more like an incomplete area.  The other ear, though, does look pretty decent, even if the one lob arcs in a weird way.  Can't complain about either.  (Though maybe I should complain about my photoshop skills. Why there's a patch of paper just floating in-between the two images is beyond me, and I made it ...)

Finally, I then took all the lessons I've learned over the last two weeks and put them together, creating the following:

By all that's holy, it's perfect.  Well, no, it's not perfect, but if you compare it to my first attempts at faces, comparatively it's perfect.  Before I kill this with praise, I should point out my mistakes: the one pupil is smaller than the other one; the face is slightly longer and out of proportion on the far side; the shadows could be darker and more even.  Honestly, that's all I see.  Time for praise!

For starters, it looks like a real face.  You can tell it's a person.  Also, it looks startlingly close to the reference image.  As in, the girl in question would recognize herself if she looked at this.  That's unbelievable. I thought it would take years to reach that point.  I spent about 20min trying to get the eyes right; I have a habit of drawing one great and then the other off in some respect, usually too big or a different shape or lower on the face.  These work.

And the hair!  Do you see the hair?  It doesn't look like scribbles!  It looks like hair.  Holy cow.  I still need more practice with lifting out highlights (actually, I need to find a youtube video or something to demonstrate, because I doubt I'm doing it right...), but I did create the rough effect I was looking for.  All in all, it only took two days to get this baby done, or about 3-4 hours.  I planned on making WIP again for this, my first portrait, but when I was 70% done after the first sitting, it didn't make much sense.


Once again, my goal is to capture reality on paper, graphite realism.  This book has helped me so much in so little time.  I'm astounded, really.  Time to push through, forge ahead and hone these new-found skills even more.  Unless I am unable to renew this book, next week should have even more portraits and other realistic goods.  I can hardly wait.

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.

Week Five: Superheroes, Go!

Good news!  I got a part-time job.  This is, in general, always better than the alternative.  The only drawback is less drawing time.  On three days this week I had to struggle hard to manage just 20min of sketching.  The other four days, though, were fairly productive.  Let's take a look:

Wow, X-Men! I went to the library and grabbed a few 'How-to-draw' books. I grabbed X-Men because they were a childhood icon and I need to draw full bodies at some point. It worked fairly well, I think. You'll notice that all of the drawings are outlined in black-pen. This is because of the huge amount of guidelines that needed to be erased, and it's easier to use pen and erase everything else than to manipulate an eraser around the lines I want to keep.

Wolverine looks good. His arms in the right-image aren't in proportion, but oh well. He looks much better in the second image, his head the only unfortunate part. There are LOTS of details here. Each drawing took 2+ hours, spread out across multiple sittings.

The final image is my first abandoned project. I spent three days trying to turn this into something good, and I just never liked it from the beginning. Rather than forcing myself to complete something I already dislike, I gave up. It felt good.

We've already met Joey before.  We also have Storm, again from X-Men.  You'll notice that the darks on her are very dark compared to my normal.  This is because I invested in some soft pencils.  That's about $15 now invested in this year-long challenge.  You'll also notice, if you look carefully, some pen slips.  I was very tired when I tried to outline Storm with my pen, and I accidentally inked a few spots that shouldn't have been.  Oh well.

At the bottom we have three separate anatomy studies.  The scan here doesn't show up that great.  Apparently studying anatomy is really important for artists.  I did this and didn't get too much out of it.  Then I drew a giant, bulging bicep.  Why?  Because if I ever draw my own portrait, I need to know how to make giant muscles.  Haha!  Joking.  Maybe.


Some decent work this week.  I find I'm erasing a lot less, which must be a sign of improvement.  It took five weeks, but I feel more confident when I sit down, pencil in hand.  I had more fun with superheroes than faces or animals, so I'll probably try them for another week and see what happens.  See you in seven days.