Week Twelve: 'BBoD' III, with lots of Hair

Another week of following Lee Hammond's advice in her book, "The Big Book of Drawing."  This week focused on several different hair-styles, much to my pleasure.  Drawing hair, and having it turn out well, is a real good feeling.  Let's take a look.

First we have a cool pony-tail.  This was my first and best attempt at hair.  It took a long time but never felt difficult.  Just lots and lots of lines, then drawing over those lines with more lines, and then 15-min later you have the one section done.  Highlights are getting better.  I drew a fairly good face as well, but my ear somehow ended up flipped the wrong way.  Weird.

The bottom hair-style is supposed to be wavy/curly, but it mostly looks like a mess.  I'll admit that I rushed this one.  Part of the reason is that Hammond's step-by-step approach starts slacking off at this point in the book.  Paraphrased: Step one, draw the outline.  Step two, do a bit of shading.  Step three, everything's magically done.  As is, you need to approach each wave as a small, separate entity, and when you complete them all everything will fall into place.  I lacked patience or something, and the rest is, um, I don't know what.  I do like the highlights at the top, though.  Yeah for some positives!

More hair!  This is perhaps my personal favourite, straight hair, the kind that flows in the wind so nicely.  It turned out okay, but I know what I did wrong.  The middle section, the anti-highlight as it were, doesn't curve in the same direction as the bottom-part, spoiling some of the effect.  I should have turned the paper around, allowing the natural curve of the wrist to flow in the proper direction.  Oh well, still decent.

The bottom one is your standard office haircut, I guess, parted off to one side.  Again, the instructions basically amounted to, "Draw an outline and let your innate artistic talent do the rest."  Notice that the ear is much better this time!  The left side feels a little flat.  The right side is better, though the front feels much thinner compared to her final output.  On the plus-side, I think my highlights are the best I've ever done.  I'll accept that.

Here's my portrait this week!  Can you guess who it is?  If you can, then I must have done a good job.  I'll give you a moment to look it over.  Here's a hint: it's George Washington.  I only finished this a few hours ago, so my thoughts won't likely be the most objective, but here goes.

It does mostly look like Mr Washington, though I don't know how or why.  This was a much harder drawing than the girl from last week, which kind of shows, but it was also a challenge I mostly met.  Eyes were hard again, but even though the one eye looks off in a slightly different direction I'm happy.  I actually really like the left one.  The nose, oddly, I struggled with the most.  I was never fully happy with it, but I had done too much of the rest of the face to alter it, and I didn't want to start completely over.  The face is a little too round and the chin is a little too short, but these are relatively minor.

Took three days, at about five hours total, give or take.  The clothing was a last minute decision, and I'm happy I drew it: only took about 15min, and it looks much better than just a floating head on paper.  Lastly, look at the bottom corner: I've updated my art signature.  It's now a JZ intertwined, with the 'roof' of the 'J' doubling as the 'roof' of the 'Z'.  I think it's clever.


This just about wraps up the portrait section of the 'Big Book of Drawing', which is good.  I'm thrilled at my progress, but faces every day for a month is starting to get a little dull.  I may or may not do one more portrait, and then it's onto animals!  Yeah!  Even if not, I'll just skip to the animal section.  I think this is the longest I've gone without drawing a cat, and that needs to be rectified.

Week Seven: Manga??

I'll be honest: I'm not a huge fan of manga-style art.  To be more specific, I really dislike manga-faces.  They seem distorted and uninteresting; take away colour and I find every face looks identical.  However, my local library has a huge selection of How To Draw Manga books, and I grabbed a few.  They had detailed instructions on drawing full-body characters, including a special section on hands, and so I grabbed them.  For one week at least, I'll be a manga artist.  Let's take a look:

First, let's laugh at the first two images.  I call the first one 'the gargantaur,' because this 'teenager' somehow ended up with the largest shoulders in the history of the world.  Seriously, I followed the instructions exactly, but I created an ogre.  It almost looks like I stopped trying on this one, and that's probably not far from the truth.  The middle image is much better, but it's such a ridiculous pose I can't take it seriously.  Who stands like this, honestly?

The final try isn't bad at all.  If we ignore the hands, this is probably my most well-proportioned and defined upper-body yet.  The flip-side is that the legs are among the worst I've done yet, but that's okay.  You'll notice that none of these three have any sort of shading: I was more focused on getting the outline than a finished project, especially for these three uninteresting poses.

Here are three much more interesting poses, and I spent probably twice as much time on any one of these than all three combined.  Collectively, the hands, faces and feet are all quite good (for me at least).  I begrudingly followed the manga-head advice with noses, but I refused to make the pointy, pentagon-style heads.  The middle character was shaded very roughly, similar to my wolf from last week, but I'm again surprised at the results (in a good way).  The 'karate girl' as the books calls it (though it's clearly kung fu) was supposed to teach my foreshortning, but I didn't make the front foot big enough.  Still quite happy with the result, though.

The big success, though, was the 'running girl.'  I love drawing capes, and I think this one turned out splendid.  I spent a long time on both the cape as well as the skirt, and both achieve that wavy, clothing look.  I'm most impressed with the hair, though.  This is easily my best attempt at hair yet; just compare it to the other two.  I really like hair, and I'm hoping I start to like drawing hair as much as I like drawing trenchcoats and capes.

Here are my hands.  Please note that the book only included the outline, not the shading or interior definition, which was somewhat disappointing.  My bottom hand (supposed to be a clenched first angled slightly up) suffers from bad shading, shading that turns it from hand to blob.  The middle fist is better.  The first hand isn't bad for a first attempt, and the final image is quite a valiant attempt at a difficult pose.


I have about six or seven different hands I want to still draw, but my manga session is now over.  I will never be known as an anime-artist.  That said, I found the manga-style steps to creating bodies involved less erasing than with the X-Men, mostly because of smarter guideline placement, and I like that.  As the three girl poses showed, I became much better with my proportions as the week went on.  When I eventually create an original character (with a cape and/or trenchcoat and long hair!), I'll probably follow the manga-build and use a realistic-style head.  I'm not near that now, though.  See you next week!