So this is what I've got today. I'm making a birthday card for my friend. She likes corgis :l not really related to what I'm trying to learn but yeah. I'll post some head stuff tomorrow and probably try to finish the card, or at least the front of it.
Thanks for the welcome and encouragement crackedskull. I'd decided to move back home so I'll have more time to draw so I'll be able to go pretty significantly bear mode in about a month.
I've been on my own for about 2 and a half years and I'd wanted to hold on to my independence but my "independence" pretty much entails living with roommates and working minimum wage jobs. So it's really more like co-dependence. I decided to swallow my pride and ask my mother if I could move back in for eight months to get better. That's gonna happen in about a month. I'll be drawing a minimum of eight hours a day and posting it here. I'll need help given that I don't want to waste my time studying inefficiently but I don't know what I don't know.
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
Hey man, I like the variation in what it is you are doing, particularly that last work in progress, the expression is great. I would probably say you could go a bit darker in places with those pencil works, though that could just be me. Best of luck with your future endeavours!
Nice stuff, dude! Your studies are pretty impressive, good job on doing so many! Now...do more!! Keep on trucking. Also, I love your screenname, hahah. Bears with friggin' lasers attached to their friggin' heads.
Thank you for the critiques and encouragement guys :D I actually want to do a bear shooting lasers out of his eyes or something in the future and use it as my picture lol
I lied about the updating tomorrow thing :l. Sunk about an hour into the puppy with embarrassingly little progress. I want to get it out of the way because it's for a friend's birthday. It's fairly detailed for how small it is and I didn't want to fuck it up so I was kind of turtling :/
I can't wait till August
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
I missed the tilt of the head in the initial construction, it was actually looking alright a little bit ago but then I tried to indicate more subtlety in the shadows and screwed it up more than it was already screwed up. so yeah :D
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
That last one actually looks pretty nice I think. Cool, your learning those rhythms of the face- I think they will come in handy for you. One thing I notice is that your heads seem to be consistently elongated, just something to keep in mind. Keep on practicing, and good luck with your new living quarters. :)
Thanks for the crit and well wishes Jonas. I've recently been trying to make them 3.5 units tall with 3 being the standard divisions which will hopefully fix it; I was kind of setting the distance between the hairline and the top of the head in arbitrary fashion.
Sorry I haven't posted in a while guys. I went down to Colorado Springs(my hometown .__.) for my cousin's wedding. The reception was at the Fine Arts Center, which I had never been to. I was kind of just showing face; I love my cousin but weddings aren't really my type of scene; you guys probably know how that goes. Anyway I saw that they had a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit called "Eloquent Objects" so I veered off from the reception to check it out. On the way to her exhibit I saw a lot of pieces by other artists. I didn't care for most of them, but then I don't like most modern art. There was a lot of beautiful glass sculpture. All of the paintings before the O'Keeffe exhibit were pretty shitty(in my opinion :l) with the exception of 2.
I consider myself a beginner and don't think highly of my technical abilities but made me a little sad to see the lack of fundamental skillsets in the art. I think there's a difference between communication and expression. For example an infant can express dissatisfaction by crying but you don't know specifically what's wrong with it. It could be tired, hungry or maybe a bug bit it; who knows? In order to *communicate* a specific intention a set of standardized concepts(in this case language) is necessary(though shape and color psychology suggests that some visual elements may be intrinsically linked to certain emotions or experiences). I think that the fundamentals of art are much like a language in this regard. So many of the pieces I saw seemed like they were struggling to communicate an experience or feeling that would have been more manageable had the artist been more knowledgeable in the fundamentals.
I was feeling kind of meh about the place wondering if I'd see any art I cared for more when I saw a couple of early Renaissance pieces in a room I hadn't been to yet. The rest of the room wasn't visible from where I was so I got pretty excited about what might be in there. I turned the corner and boom: Sargent, Moran, Bierstadt, Hopper, and others I wasn't familiar with :D I was so fuckin excited. I couldn't believe they were tucked away in a tiny corner room and no one gave a shit. I was the only person in the room. I had seen some of the paintings before and had saved some of them on my computer but seeing them in person was completely different. Some of the Hudson River School painters used optical mixing in their backgrounds while keeping the foreground sharp, but from a few feet away it's seamless. Sargent's brushstrokes were more impressionistic up close, especially on the hands but the strokes followed the planes of the form. I don't know. It was just cool. I had to go back to the reception after a while but I came back the next day and did some studies while I was able to. They even let me take pictures so long as I didn't use a flash.
I'm still trying to get over the fact that the most impressive shit there(in my opinion) was just in a tiny ho-hum corner room on the first floor. It's like when you go into a bookstore and see something like Twilight heavily advertised meanwhile Seneca is in a cardboard stand off in the back.
I tried to do a study of Sargent's portrait of Elsie Carter(who incidentally is one of the daughters of a founder of the city in which the painting is currently located). I ran out of time and failed but it was fucking awesome being right there in front of something made by Sargent(this was extra cool given that I've been trying to focus on heads with the goal of getting good at portraiture lately).
I'm moving back August 3rd and I'm fucking pumped to go back and do a more finished study. I fucking love art.
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
So I'm gonna try to learn how to do this particular head from memory. Then I'll do some studies of other angles followed by attempts at recreating them through memory
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
Alright so the move is done. I'm pretty much unpacked, a few odds and ends still. I'll be drawing 8 hours a day for the next 8 months and posting my stuff on here. I've got a schedule but I haven't blocked out my art time yet. I'm not sure how I'm going to structure it. I might start streaming. Idk
Ilidan is starting to yellow and wrinkle so I'm gonna have to finish him up and maybe get a print made even though the head is too small. I kind of rushed the corgi because I was sick of drawing corgis :l; not doing any more gift art lol.
I drew a cat face and was messing around deciding what I wanted it to be. I tried to turn it into a paladin but it looked weird. I think I like the creepy shopkeeper one best out of the ones I did(not all are posted).
Drew for about 9.5 hours today. I know it doesn't look like it. Going back to basics on perspective. It was mostly review. I haven't been through Scott Robertson's book but I've studied some other resources; there's a lot of overlap but I picked up some useful details(like using a 50 degree cone of vision for 1 point drawings).
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
WIP, used a photo on the tree. Critiques appreciated as always. The values are different on my desktop than my laptop but I don't think either as correct :/
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
Thanks Bookend :D it's an honor to be compared to Mr. Butkus in any way. I'll keep truckin :).
*finally* done with this thing. I'm not gonna add the chains but I'm just glad to be through with it. Took it into photoshop and tried to correct the head size as well as upped the contrast to be more similar to how it looks in real life. Added a little bit of detail but most of it is charcoal and black prismacolor still. I desaturated it because the purple walls of my room(which used to belong to my little sister :D) gave the photo I used a blueish tint in some areas; this is why the color of the newsprint was lost. I kind of liked the newsprint color but w/e :l.
Respect and apologies to Wei Wang, who is a baller.
It's just a study but I have a lot of satisfaction from finishing this image :D
I'm probably not going to do another piece as extensive as this after another artist's work. It's too easy to just fall into copying shapes and not learning anything. But, like I said, I wanted to get it out of the way given that it's wrinkling.
NOW I CAN ACTUALLY STUDY :DDD
I'll come back in a few hours with some Robert Beverly Hale stuff.
^This was a lie. After watching two of his lectures I've decided that I'm going to come back to them after I have more of an anatomy knowledge base and can actually understand what he's saying given that I can't see what he's talking about because of the video quality
This is my sketchbook if you're up for trying to help me flounder about less...yeah .__.
I find that when I'm drawing from life, it helps to look at landmarks on the figure/head/whatever, and compare it to another landmark. Like, how far is the edge of the nostril from the corner of the eye? Where is the tip of the ear relative to the lips? And so forth. If you look closely and make these mental measurements, it may help. Hope it does! Keep going.
I absolutely love that last head and bottle. I don't really have any critiques, but I can definitely see improvement from your first post till now. Keep up the good work! :)
Hope it does! Keep going.
