Friday, May 7, 2010

50 more faces


This time from reference. See previous post for further explanation.

For viewing reference images, I set up my iPod on a hacked-together stand made from cardboard and tape. It works quite well. Drawing from reference is fun, but I look forward to the next page of free sketches. Let's see if I learned something.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

50 faces

I recently went through my whole collection of old sketches from the last four years, and noticed that I've deviated somewhat from my original goal of learning to draw good stuff without reference. Over the last two years I've increasingly drawn from photos, and it's been a long time since I really tried to do anything "free". As a result, I tend to still struggle with those things.

To remedy this, I've decided to do more of it. Starting with this page of 50 faces drawn without reference. I scribbled 50 circles over the paper and then drew an improvised face/head on each one. Most of them took 2-3 minutes.


The process and results were actually better than I had feared. It was kind of fun, and not too difficult. My plan is to do another page of 50 faces from reference grabbed out of a video clip, featuring the same person from different angles. After that I'll try another page of 50 from my head, attempting to get some of that person's character/look into the sketches.

As a fun comparison, here are a few similar head sketches that I found from almost exactly four years ago. While I still haven't mastered the human head, I think it's safe to say that I've at least improved considerably.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Hughes and photos


Dug up a few old Adam Hughes sketches and drew from some of them. Also worked through a couple of photos I found. Particularly fond of the bottom-right woman.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Force it


Random stuff today, of course. Was initially inspired by an image of some Mojo (not ppg) 3D model, but quickly detoured into very unrelated stuff. The bottom-left head was done most recently, and I added a little 2-step animation of that since it started out pretty bad, yet I was confident that I could salvage it. Click the link to see it. Line quality is terrible as usual, and the scale is really tiny.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Slow start



I haven't been completely out in the drawing department lately, but evidently the blog hasn't seen much action. The last two months have been busy with code, but I'm trying to ramp up sketching a little bit. Currently I'm mostly doing a few scribbles just before bed every night. At least it's something.

These are two from yesterday. Just the old random female head, side view. No reference, and some agony with non-erasable lines (a couple of which I've actually erased after digitizing the image, yay for computers).

One problem I have with this view is that I consistently mess up the size proportion between head and torso. Whenever I go down beyond the shoulders, I end up with a torso that's ludicrously small. Not sure why, but I don't really have any solid experience and "inner reference" there, so I will probably have to find and draw a bunch of photos.