Day 4 - Log Cabin

A quick sketch of a little ginger fella :) On a second thought, he looks more like a snowman. Probably should have made the shapes a bit more organic and less symmetrical :(

My figure drawing exercise for the week (one day late, but still). There were a lot of tricky curled-up poses in this session. One I struggled with particularly was the one that I posted the reference photo of. How would you guys tackle it? It's supposed to be 1min pose. Would be super helpful to see different people approach this. Anyways, have a great week everyone :)

I started this exercise with the ninja mantis with which I had fun trying to curl the antennae. The drunk elephant was fun more because I liked creating this unbalanced gesture than because of difficulty of the cross contours. I didn’t draw big enough to be able to do a clean j9b of the cranium. Doing the elephant ears, I thought about a third subject: drapery with cross contours but no shading

Here are some gestures from today and the past few days. Hope everyone is doing well. Take care.

Yesterday's gesture drawing practice, 1-5 min poses from a NMA youtube video.

Last picture drawn was the stag beetle. Felt my line quality was pants on the ginger, seal (ahem the face caused me trouble) and the foot is my own flesh and blood drawn whilst sitting down. Changed from HB and 2B pencil to HB and 4B for the stag beetle as I was pushing really hard to get the outline on the ginger, seal and foot. Felt like I was holding on for dear life... Tried to relax more to improve line quality. Think my shapes are generally OK other than the seal face. Contours I give myself a B.

Yesterday was a classic, "Bad Drawing Day," for me. Does that mean I draw worse than usual? A bit. It mostly means I automatically hate on anything I do. My brain is not my friend. Anyways. Drew some, hated myself, then went for a walk to clear my head. That helped. Came back and worked on a longer drawing at a snail's pace just to see how it went. The end result was a heavily truncated rendering with far too light of a value scale and a billion other things wrong with it. I think my tendency to elongate forms made me overcorrect the torso in the opposite way. Anyways. I enjoyed drawing it. This image is from the 300 Academic Female Poses bundle here on Proko. Lot's of wonderful images to work from.

I dropped the ball on my weekly gesture practice :( I know that sometimes life gets in the way, etc. Sometimes enough unexpected things pile up that something just has to give. Still :( Eh, no point in beating myself up about it. Better to just get back in the saddle, right? Here's some 1min-5min sketches.

Ginger warmup and an octopus exercise. I used the photo for reference but then designed most of the tentacles just to play with the twists etc. I'm not sure if it's anatomically correct, but I'm imagining the tentacles as flat on the inside and rounded on the outside and that's what I tried to indicate with the cross contours.

Travelling today but can't skip my gesture practice Monday! 1-10min poses in Procreate

Sketch from today. I like the line quality on this one better than the previous ones. We'll see if it was a fluke, or if it's something I can do on the regular.

Another quick session with youtube NMA figure drawing. Tried using a ballpoint pen this time and I'm not sure about the result. I like how loose it feels to draw with it, similarly to charcoal, but on the other hand I end up with a hundred of lines instead of one or two. Also, this time I was drawing flat on the table and I think this didn't help with my judgement of proportions - all of these figures seem to have very short legs ;)

136th Day of Proko and counting. 30 second, two minute and five minute sketches.

Here are some gesture drawings from the last few days with a couple random bits at the end.

I am having one of the worst drawing weeks of my entire life. My hands are trash. I have essential tremor always but it has been unhinged this week. I am house sitting so I don’t have a scanner and everything is awful. You’ve all been sharing such fantastic work I feel obligated to balance it out with my failure. I’m just struggling. Raving over.

130th Day of Proko and counting. 10 second gestures. Okay, this was pretty ridiculous. I found my self laughing a lot as I fumbled through them. Still fun, though.

2nd post of the day in here. A little while back @Martha Muniz was nice enough to give me some feedback regarding shading. She pointed me to a video on shading by Dorian Iten on YouTube that was very helpful. I revisited the video tonight and took a crack at it with digital tools. Shading is a big area of growth for me. I've done a lot of t-shirt and comic book illustrations, but the style I work in is far less subtle than what I'm trying to develop. Dorian has a shading course here with a lot of free lessons. I delved into those a bit tonight as well. The figures I've drawn after watching a few videos were done with the intent to find the terminator (where the form light meets the shadow shape), which is an exercise Dorian recommends. I'll eventually buy the premium course because Dorian clearly has an approach I want to get deep into, but I'll wait a little while until I finish a few of the open courses I'm in.

Feel and convey, feel and convey.. think i over-felt. It was my first time to gesture draw with an older model. Doublespeeding the vid amplified his instability during the pose which, to my surprise, got translated into my lines unintentionally. Fascinating, but got a bit freaked out so i did another session with a totally different model to shake that off. i started with 30s w/ these. Still lagging so much after being out of practice for a while. 

My gesture drawing practice for this week. I tried NMA timed video on youtube and did it twice. I feel like the second time around the poses turned out better. Once again, sorry for the quality of the pics. I have to figure out some better lighting so that the whole page is lit evenly.