Joseph's shiny new sketchbook

[John]

Didn't know these were done in pencils. Looks dope!

[JosephCow]

Finally finished with my first full charcoal figure drawing. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, except for the pillar is drawn kind of meh especially at the bottom, which i'm honestly kind of kicking myself for only because I was thinking to myself, gee if there's anything up there I should be able to draw properly it would be that pillar! But anyways who cares. It's spring break now, and I feel like I need it.

[Zorrentos]

Wonderful work on that last piece. I would have probably gone crazy on the reflected light, but I presume there wasn't really much of it there on the model as you were drawing and rendering it out?

[Skeffin]

I love the charcoal drawing and tbh I like the lack of detail in the pillar, I think it works

[wld.89]

man this charcoal is just yummy, those soft/almost lost edges in the shadow part of the legs and butt ... love it !

[JosephCow]

Thanks for the nice words, guys.

Wonderful work on that last piece. I would have probably gone crazy on the reflected light, but I presume there wasn't really much of it there on the model as you were drawing and rendering it out?

Yeah not in particular. There's other light sources, but you'd generally want to compress most of that out of the shadows anyway to give more room to model. I kind of prefer having large solid masses compositionally, anyway, so I'm not really about that reflected light.

[JosephCow]

Been a while since I done a self portrait. One of my favorite subjects to study, the color shifts as the face turns are so interesting and subtle. I did this in one sitting.

Your own face is something really hard to draw objectively, though. As soon as it starts looking a bit like you, I tend to just celebrate the parts that bear resemblance and ignore anything that is placed wrong or drawn skewed. I notice that there are various placements of the eyes or brows that still look kind of okay, so I suppose that's where switching to the more academic and analytical drawing techniques can help decide what is right.

[JosephCow]

This kind of looks like nothing, but it's actually a POV sketch of my cat sleeping on his little blanket. 

Very weird composition, I thought it would be fun to really try to look at something abstractly

[Who]

Every drawing is getting better man, good stuff. That last figure drawing, was it vine charcoal you used?

[JosephCow]

Every drawing is getting better man, good stuff. That last figure drawing, was it vine charcoal you used?

Thanks Amit! It's a combo of vine, compressed pencil, and Nitram.

[JosephCow]

Finished a pencil pose at the atelier. I feel like I learned quite a bit with this one, a way to express form with pencil without doing literal values and uniform shadows. Instead I change the edges around lines and fuse them with the surrounding mass. There's so many different ways to draw with graphite, I have had trouble knowing how I want to go about it. Most things I've tried that involve complex or heavy shading are kind of just a bad look, so I think I will continue experimenting in this direction.

[Zorrentos]

The last few pieces look great! Im looking forward to see how it will reinforce your imaginative work!

[JosephCow]

The last few pieces look great! Im looking forward to see how it will reinforce your imaginative work!

Thanks! But I'm not entirely sure that it will haha! I feel like when i'm not drawing from life I just use an entirely different set of muscles that are way weaker. I think I may do the next creature challenge for practice and just lean into the fact that it's not something I'm super strong at.

[Peter]

Damn Joseph your last few posts have been absolute killer! Flexing those atelier skills arelady. Really digging your self portrait man, would love to see your process for it. :)

[JosephCow]

Damn Joseph your last few posts have been absolute killer! Flexing those atelier skills arelady. Really digging your self portrait man, would love to see your process for it. :)

Thanks, man! 

THe self portrait I only have one in-progress because I just paint on like 2 or 3 layers. I tried it a different way than I normally would. Normally I would do a sketch with line, and then fill in the shadow with dark grey and then kind of try to paint on top of that. But instead I first went for the color and value straight away, without getting the drawing. So it makes this crude painting but the colors are right when zoomed out. 




I think I made the final painting by starting with a drawing over grey on a new layer, and then pulled the colors from the sketch when I had something a little more accurate. At the end I ended up selecting and shuffling things around a bit because I didn't feel like I had it right. I don't think this is the best way, or even a very a good way to do things, but that's what I did.

[JosephCow]

got a couple fresh drawins here hot off the press

[Zizka]

Loving your traditional art. Starting to grow a resounding love for charcoal, will it end up getting the #1 spot and replace ink in my very heart? Who knows.

I’m trying to build up a collection of artists at crimson daggers to put on my wall. If you have a minute, think about things you’d be interested in selling or giving. I want to frame them and put them on my wall. I already have one from Who eventually coming and I’d like one of yours!

I'm especially interested in anything drawn with charcoal.

[one_two]

Really nice progress on these last two pages, looking good!

[JosephCow]

Loving your traditional art. Starting to grow a resounding love for charcoal, will it end up getting the #1 spot and replace ink in my very heart? Who knows.

I’m trying to build up a collection of artists at crimson daggers to put on my wall. If you have a minute, think about things you’d be interested in selling or giving. I want to frame them and put them on my wall. I already have one from Who eventually coming and I’d like one of yours!

I'm especially interested in anything drawn with charcoal.

I'll consider it, PM ne about it. 

And personally charcoal is kind of a means to an end to me. It gets 'er done. But it's slow, messy. For academic work you must fill in a lot of the pores of the paper to refine charcoal into a flat, even shape and that is very tedious.

[JosephCow]

Speaking of charcoal, I have another long pose drawing done with a couple progress shots. This one was pretty challenging and I definitely don't think it's perfect, but actually I think it's probably more correct in value relationships than my last one. I think my last one of the year will be my best. 

I'm trying to lose the overly grainy look to my drawings, but I don't think i'm there yet.