Week 15: RAWR!!1

First off, disclaimer: my summer hours at work have soared.  This is a good thing, I guess, in general, though it really cuts into my drawing time.  I've been averaging nearly an hour per day over the last little while, and not being able to do that hurts.  We may have to expect less quantity in each installment.

Case in point, I drew only one image this week.  It's sorta-but-not-really from Lee Hammond's 'Big Book of Drawing' again.  She has the picture there, but she gives no directions on how to draw it.  None.  Worse, I don't even have the book: I returned it to the library.  I drew a quick sketch and an even quicker outline and then spent the rest of the week trying to turn this into a finished product.  I'm quite pleased with the end result, all things considered.  Here's the sketch:

I quite like this, to be honest.  I try to sketch in pen, as it largely overcomes my obsession with erasing my very first few lines because they aren't 'perfect.'  It's clearly a lion, the form is easily recognizable, the face has depth and character.  For less than five minutes of sketching, I call that a winner.  Now let's see what I turned this sketch into:

Again, standard disclaimer: ignore the wavy lines from the crappy paper, except where the wavy lines look good.  Then don't ignore them.

There are lots of little things wrong with this picture, from proportion (the mane is far too big, the ears are too close and in the wrong spot) to tonal values (the right eye is darker than the left, while the right ear is lighter than the left) to overall composition size (the mane shouldn't be half hidden in page-less land) to a whole bunch of little areas.  And yet none of that matters.  I love the final product.

(Actually, I really should have taken a scan half-way through drawing this, before I added the mane.  It's amazing how young and feminine the face looked, and equally amazing how just adding a few hints of hair turns it into a dominating, powerful male.)

I spent four days doing the face and finished the whole mane in one sitting.  Yes, I rushed that part a bit, but it still looks good.  My favourite part is the area around the nose (though it could be darker) and my least favourite is the mouth and cheeks.  I don't know why, because I think the highlights are cool and the lower mouth has awesome fur shading, but something is off.  I never bothered to add whiskers, which I think suits the image fine.

My hair work is getting better.  At least on top.  The layers, the highlights, the contrast from light to dark, I think it's the best overall job I've done yet.  I love it.  I love the whole thing, warts and all.  Maybe it's because it's my first cat in over month.  Maybe because it's my best cat ever.  Mighty lion, you have a special place in my heart.



And with that, I think I should take a break from my realism practice.  I'm worried I'm spending too much time shading and not enough time drawing form and outlines.  This is actually an interesting question: is it better to spend five days working on one big project or on five smaller ones?  Which is better for my art development?  I don't know, but then, I'm not complaining about my results so far!

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!