stroan's sketchbook

[stroan]

~~ Critiques are extremely welcome! ~~

I've been told a lot of nice things about this forum, and there is so much cool work going on here - it's really inspiring. Going to kickstart this sketchbook with some of my stuff from the last few weeks:

[Kaffer]

Hi Stroan, welcome to the group! Nice start you got there, I especially like the approach of making bulidings from silhouettes, seems interesting! Keep them sketches coming! :)

[stroan]

Cheers Kaffer :) Doing a lot of lurking, looking forward to getting involved!

[stroan]

A few master studies. I haven't done these in ages.

[stroan]

Some studies from the last few days.








I've spent a few days over the last week working on a small game, to get practice at making art assets, so here's a screenshot of how that's looking :)

[EduardoGaray]

welcome stroan! these last studies and the screenshot are looking really nice, i'm looking forward to see that game asset finished. I love those platformers myself, even if i suck at them.

[stroan]

Some studies from the last week. I really need to do more of these.

[stroan]

Getting back in to the swing of doing studies every day. An hour of portrait sketches. Drawing digitally still takes me a lot longer than pencil and paper, but the practice is speeding that up.

[stroan]

Today's studies and a start at a new illustration. I'm trying to draw everything out neatly to force myself to get the structure right at the beginning, instead of massaging things in to place at the painting stage, like I normally do.

[stroan]

I was away for the weekend, with no internet or computer and just pencil and paper. So I get some sketching done in the hours between doing things that weren't sketching

[clockodile]

Great work, I can see you are thinking a bit more about structure in these latest sketches as well as those hands. I really like that you are pushing with trying different angles of the head too! Actually the general variety to your work is nice to see.

I have a couple of crits that are sort of anatomy-structure related. Firstly, with the hands, the fingers look rather uniform in width through their length, and a bit too cylindrical. In reality, they have a slightly squashed cross section that changes through the finger due to the joints/tendons and fatty tissue between them. There are a lot of little anatomy details to hands, but I think that after getting to grips with the proportions (good to see those finger-guide arcs!), it is helpful to start thinking with 3D shapes to understand their structure - cubes/cylinders and their variants.

The other thing I was going to mention was that the eyes don't recess into the face far enough in a number of your pictures, and the brow ridge above them appears too flat as a result. It was something I had a lot of trouble with too - a few things that I found helpful were: drawing skulls to learn the structure (free skull reference pack over here), drawing from photos and then drawing the skull over the sketch in a different colour, and my favourite, getting a photo or master painting, and using it as a guide to construct the face from the skull up.

Finally, as a general tip, it helps to identify 'corners' - or approximations to such - on hard areas where the form changes direction abruptly (common ones are the temples of the head, and boney joints like wrists and knees) as you draw through the forms, and use them to place boxes that help you understand their orientation/add shadows/etc.

Sorry for the long post, I hope it made sense. Keep up the hard work with all these studies!

[stroan]

@clockodile Thanks a million for that crit. I had known something was off with the faces, but wasn't quite sure what it was. That is definitely something I'll work on over the next while. That skull reference sheet you linked is really neat, I did a few sketches from it tonight by way of warm up. I'll do a few more days of skull sketching and then try my hand at another portrait, and see if I can sink those eyes back in to their sockets :)

I see what you mean about the fingers as well, which is great. I hadn't seen any big issue with them, but now I have something to work on there!

Also started on an illustration based off the floating guy / dragon sketch I did over the weekend. I like this composition a lot more, and I think it'll have more heart. Really not sure about the colors though. Seems a bit flat at the moment.

[stroan]

Some more skull studies, and more work on that illustration. Tomorrow I'll hop over to doing some portrait studies and see if I can really sink those eyes and get the brow looking right.

[stroan]

Some portrait studies after having done my skull studies. And more work on that illustration.

[stroan]

Think I'm finished with that illustration. I want to move on to new things and I've been working on it for about a week now. Also some more studies. I really messed up the head painting. I think I'm going to do a series of 2-3 value painting studies of heads over the next while. I'm just not seeing the values correctly.

[stroan]

Trying to do some 2-3 value portrait studies. The 2 value ones worked better than the three value one. I'll have to do a whole bunch more for sure. And the starts of the next illustration :)

[stroan]

I've been doing most of my work traditionally for the last while. I find I take my time a lot more with traditional work. It's made me realise that I was trying to race with the digital work. I guess from watching all those videos online I had a weird idea of how I should be able to just splash out the colours really quickly and have the work just appear. Probably going to be sticking traditional for the next while. Some stuff from the last few weeks:

[stroan]

I've been managing to get up a few hours before work for the last few days and getting my studies done early in the morning. It's pretty great - there are very few social events at 6am that I need to excuse myself from in order to get my work done.

Some anatomy studies, from a combination of photo reference and copying drawings. I know you're not really meant to copy drawings but I've been finding it very useful to mix a little bit in, to figure out how people approach things I'm finding difficult. Also been trying to do material studies in water color. They are pretty awful at the moment. I can do them far better digitally.



A few unreferenced mini-portraits.



Some portraits copied from a set of drawings I saw on pinterest, but unfortunately I couldn't find the original artist since the pin was uncredited. Also another more slowly done material study.

[stroan]

A drawing for the current CHOW: The Giant I did last night. I'll paint over this later if I get a chance.



Some hand studies, and another little bit of watercolor material practice I did before work this morning.



I also did a page of portraits from imagination at lunch, but they turned out so very awfully (so awfully that I don't want to even upload them), way worse than my last page - in part because I tried to go for pretty extreme angles. I guess I don't really understand the forms of the head well enough. Thinking I'll stick with portrait studies for the next while, try and get that down.

[stroan]

The last few days have been a bit of a mess, I haven't managed to get any decent studies done - but I have managed to get a bit further with my CHOW entry. I very rarely paint from imagination, so this is being quite tricky. I'm really having fun though, and the studies are definitely showing through in the work.