'Life' drawing again

New Year, new habits...

Going to see if I can get back into 'life' drawing again. (By 'life' I mean from photos). It always helps my drawing when I do this regularly - it's like practising scales.

 

Looking at my sketchbook I don't seem to have done any for 5 years, so I was pleasantly surprised that it worked - it helped that it was an easy pose and easy body-type to draw. I used the pose app from AdorkaStock and just drew the first one that appeared.

 

Purple crayon, so I couldn't rub anything out or even smudge out mistakes!

 

 

Fake inks

Working on a freelance project with a tight deadline that's going to be hard to meet.
I suggested I could just do finished pencils (quicker), but the art editor wanted inks.

Then, in the middle of the night, I remembered that Jason Brubaker just pencilled most of his reMIND comic, and then tweaked the levels in photoshop to look like ink.

After a bit of trial and error (I needed a much smoother pencil* than I usually use) this is what I got.

It's a small background figure, which is why the lines are so thick.

I think this is going to work!

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* By 'pencil' I mean pencil tool in Clip Studio. I usually use 15 point 'chalk', with its standard settings, for pencilling, but for this I used a 25 point 'rough pencil' and put the texture density way down to 29.

Last week's 'life' drawing

Kept it up every day so far...

And I found one of them useful for a Jonah drawing!

Drawing practise

Thought I should be good and start 'life' drawing sketches again. My drawing's getting rusty! Was actually surprised how well these turned out, considering how long it is since I've done it.

I used this app.

Now I just need to do this every day...

Teenage artwork redrawn

Thought I'd redraw one of my children through history. Good to see I've improved in 23 years!

Need practise

So I thought I'd revisit what I learned in the Cognitive drawing course.
Started with the 'draw a man from memory' activity.

Here's what I did straight after the course:

Here's what I did a month and a half later:

Well, I remembered some bits...
Think I need a bit more practise  :-)

Cognitive drawing - results!

I finished the Cognitive Drawing course yesterday, and I did actually learn something! It didn't really feel like it while I was doing it, as it seemed to go out of my brain after I finished the exercise.

Before: Draw a man from memory

After: Draw a man from memory again

Some bits, like the pecs, were repeated multiple times through the course, and this helped, as each time you were building on what you'd learned.

It would be good to try the final guy again in a few days, as I had just done the final 5 pages, which meant they were in short term memory.

And then go through the whole thing again in a few weeks.

Cognitive Drawing - Learn to Draw Faster

I signed up for the beta testing of Jason Brubaker's Cognitive Drawing course.

By the end of August I should have a basic understanding of the anatomy of the whole front view of the body. Here's hoping...

Because it's for the beta test, you have to do it regularly to get it done on time. A commitment like this is a really good incentive do actually do it.

If course, I do have a basic knowledge of anatomy, but it's very shaky in places. The idea is to memorise it so you don't have to rely on reference for every little thing. If only I'd had this before I struggled with this.

Accurate drawing

Don’t choose to be more expressive simply because you’re not capable of accuracy yet. Expand your abilities so that you have the choice. 

Stan Prokopenko

Thought for the Day

The greatest artist you can think of started of drawing like this.