Pretending to paint

I figured that I need to work on my painting a bit, see if I can loosen up and not worry too much about immediate details and flaws. Rather being on top and drawing through the mess on paper/screen, towards what I want regardless of what is currently there.

Anyway, these are obviously not paintings - yet. I noticed that, by focusing on the purpose of painting over them later, my sketches became more effortless and easier to work on. Since they are not the final result, it doesn't really matter how they turn out, as long as it's a useful base for painting. So it's not a drawing meant to be pretty, but rather visual notes for me to use at a later stage. As a side-effect though, they can in fact also be pretty. I need to make sure the character and expression shine through as strongly as possible, at the same time as pointing out all the important features and shaded regions/transitions/borders. Basically getting a framework onto which I can attach strokes of color later, but also having a simplified overview of what the end result should be. It's sometimes easier to visualize the key elements of a picture from a simplified drawing, compared to looking at a reference photo directly.

Hopefully following this post will be one with the finished paintings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?