Thursday, April 30, 2009

Airliner


Quickie today. I'm leaving for Germany on one of those tomorrow. Will be back on sunday. I'll compensate for the lost sketch days.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Killing off some tabs


I have this bad(?) habit of leaving lots of Firefox tabs open with random reference images that I find and would like to draw "at some point". Today I found myself with nearly 40 of them so I figured I'd better work my way through some. The initial idea was to spend very little time on each and kind of rush through, but I knew I wouldn't be able to... With faces I just have to spend the extra time to tweak stuff around until it looks - well, better than it would if I rushed it. Ended up with around 10 minutes on each I guess. The top-center girl is hideous, messed up from early scratchy rush combined with lines too hard to erase. I'm relatively pleased with the rest though, being as sketchy as they are.
There are some more tabs open with cars and stuff. Perhaps I'll be able to "quick-sketch" them to a greater degree than the human subjects. I will give it a go tomorrow.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Bat revenge


I looked up some bat wing reference and it helped me figure enough out to draw that little 3D fellow without further aid. Their anatomy is very similar to humans, and the wing is basically their hand. One site said that flying for them is like swimming through air, which is a neat way of putting it. Makes it possible to imagine all kinds of dynamic poses based on experience with your own hands. Fun stuff.
I also tried a new female side shot from reference to see if I could spot some immediate differences compared to what I did on my own yesterday. Measured proportions are pretty much equal, but the end result is very different indeed. Mainly it's the size and shape of individual components more than their relative placement, I think... I should definitely do a round of reference-free-reference-free back and forth of the same angle to figure out what's going on.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Less random

...as in fewer instances of random. Still no particular inspiration or effort. I've drawn a million pages like this. Every bit of repetition does its own little part I suppose, but I'm still not happy with the look or consistency of my "generic female faces", so I probably need to do more focused studies than just sporadic free attempts and the occasional referenced angle that may or may not correspond to what I'm trying to grasp. Repeated fail is still fail.
I also scribbled some thoughts/queries regarding bat wings. I need to look up their anatomy once and for all, for those situations where you really want to fart out some kind of flying monster.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Randomized

Yeah... nothing sensible. Heads in profile are always fun though, can't go wrong with those.

New ambition

I guess it's not "inanimate objects" anymore. I'll leave it at "anything I please" until further notice. Will probably do a period of "non-referenced people" at some point, since that's one of my ultimate goals with this drawing thing, and I don't try it often enough.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

Toon time!

Have had some light discussion regarding cartoon/comic stylization and how I typically never attempt such. Figured I might as well. Went better than I had thought. Not too creepy.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Ellipses


More boring stuff today. Sorry. Trying to get a better feel for ellipses and tilted circles. Once again the main purpose is to draw better wheels and rims. I will probably do another one of these focusing more on differently sized cylinders layered inside each other.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Wheel studies etc

Not much of a "real" sketch tonight. Mainly did some thinking on wheel/rim construction to help me when drawing cars. They're mostly a set of layered cylinders, but spokes can be kind of confusing at times, bending through the depth axis of the wheel. Drawing on a slightly larger-than-thumbnail scale would no doubt help here...
Also, some weird concepts of frog creatures crept in on the same page.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Bathroom


Yeah. Was going to draw my shower drain cover, but dang it was more full of holes than I remembered. The initial sketch here doesn't even show nearly enough lines to hint at their number. It was like 8x8 intersecting plastic circles acting like a grid. Yuk. Drew the floor scraper instead. Turned out nice except for the fact that I wasn't paying attention initially and thus crapped the perspective/proportions a little bit.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Lamborghini

It's terrible. I've made better before, and I'll make better ones in the future. This one is all twisted and scratchy. I had no patience at all. Too tired perhaps. Don't look at the wheels.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Telephone

Nobody says "telephone" anymore. Maybe the remote nature of communication is implied, and the only interesting part is that you're talking about audio? Not extremely happy with the sketch, it turned out kind of chubby and odd. Some lines were entertaining. Referenced from physical object.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Spoon


It's a spoon. I'm tired.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Rough Tesla


Someone requested sketchier sketches. I try to please. This one was kind of fun to draw, although I messed up the wheels again. Should have refrained from filling in shade. Also the whole thing looks rather skewed when seeing it small-scale. Very quick process, maybe 10 minutes total, with all the general shapes done in the first minute.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Morgan roadster


Was off to a rocky start with this one, had some proportions way off. Managed to correct most of it, but wheels are still a bit all over the place - as is symmetry in some areas. Fairly ok though.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Pressure helmet


Some neat helmet from mid-last century. Either british or german, not entirely sure. Looks cute at any rate.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Coca-Cola


Some typographical exercise. Hopefully recognizable. Had to adjust the circle to fit snugly around the text after it was done, and that might have been the hardest thing. Very tough to isolate the roundness when there's a huge asymmetrical object in the middle throwing off your judgement.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Roman architecture


Some 17th century roman structures, drawn off an image in a book of mine. Attention to detail is rather uneven, as was my patience. As a result, parts got kind of wonky. Old buildings are fun to draw though.

Monday, April 13, 2009

X360


Something less complicated today. Again from life. Was kind of tricky to fit all the details in, I probably squished it a bit. You should be able to see what it's meant to be though.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Tree



Biked out to a relatively remote piece of woodland (as remote as you can get in such an urban area as this) and sat myself on a rock to draw this here tree. It was horridly difficult, and the result is terrible, but the whole experience was fun. Weather was really nice and I even ran into some wildlife, as can be seen in the image. There were also little birds in another tree right above me eating some nuts or seeds, dropping stuff onto my paper (fortunately neither wet, sticky nor smelly).

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Shoe

I was going to draw both shoes but ended up spending so much time on this one that doing it all over again for the other seemed like a bore.

On another note, I realized that categorizing trees as "inanimate objects" might have been a questionable thing... but after checking some dictionaries it seems that the word "inanimate" is sometimes used to differentiate between moving animal-like objects and stationary ones without any obvious signs of life (with plants given as an explicit example of this). I will let it slide. Perhaps we'll see a tree tomorrow?

Friday, April 10, 2009

Ambition

Will try to make daily sketch posts here on the topic of 'inanimate objects'. Stuff like buildings, trees, lamps and computer mice. Starting tomorrow, of course ;)