Alex's Sketcbook

[dracken]

Just posting some of my most recent stuff.

Thanks,

[dracken]

More stuff.

[dracken]

Guess I should update this sometime, eh?

Mostly work from January here. More will follow soon.

[silverkeeper]

Love it! you have really cool stuff here. Keep practising !!

[dracken]

Thank you, thank you.

Here are the rest of my perspective studies for Isra's class

[dracken]

Long rant (mostly so I remember what the hell I'm doing when I read this later.)

I've been following Isra's perspective workshop for about a month now and while I'm learning a lot I've come to realize my ability to draw straight lines or confident ellipses is pretty close to 0. This is incredibly frustrating after almost 2 years of doing art so I figured I should sit down and do something about it.

After some quick searches I found the Dynamic Sketching master class on CGMA. Since I'm poor taking the class is a pipe dream, but with some more searching I think I can pretty much figure out what the homework for each week is and what the main ideas behind the class are so I'll try my best to follow along.

For (my) future reference here are some student blogs talking about the class and the homework.

Gina Florio
Tyler Chow
Creative checkpoint
Jonathan Nagel

Unrelated but somewhat interesting class course

Anyhow, here are some quick sketches of the 5 basic shapes, a bamboo (Plan to do a plant a day for the next week) and some old portraits I forgot I drew. Probably photo reff.

[dracken]

More perspective work, trying to understand round objects and texture and a quick life study. I tried to draw most of the objects in the perspective study by hand.. and failed quite a lot, but hey such is life.

[dracken]

God, almost 10 months since the last update. I have so, so much crap to upload. Been doing mostly traditional life studies, but I want to have a few pages of older stuff so I can compare/ see if I improve.

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Older post, sorry for the double post.

[dracken]

More traditional BS. This is all from the last month? Two months, something like that

[dracken]

More traditional stuff. If I keep posting a bunch for each update I should be up to date pretty soon. Sorry for somewhat older images. I just want a record of my work so I can monitor my progress.

These are mostly charcoal and conte stick, the last two are china marker and pencil. Done on and around 12-14 or 20-21 so a bit earlier than the photos above. All from life.

[dracken]

For a change some more work from life.

A few laptop digital paintings and a few scribbles trying to understand proportions/ how to see the human form.













Saving some good advice for later (from newcalibre in this thread http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-4359.html)

If you're looking to break bad habits, it's not enough just to correct this painting.

Your ability to render and polish is good, but you're using this to hide your flaws. You're also painting too much of what you think you see, instead of what you should be seeing. No amount of polish and finish can make your portraits look realistic if they're fundamentally flawed.

The best way to grow out of this habit is to do more studies of heads from all angles.

I highly recommend reading 'Drawing the Head and Hands' and 'Fun With a Pencil' by Andrew Loomis. These will help you construct the head from imagination. But it's not enough to just do loose line drawings.

You should do some basic value studies using 4 or so values. Find a reference image (of a real head, not of an artwork) and try and reproduce it using these 4 values. Keep the brush at 100% opacity & flow, turn off transfer, and map out the light and dark values as if it's a cell shaded comic.

This method allows you to learn without getting distracted by halftones, polish and rendering. It'll teach you to simplify your paintings to important forms, so you can make proper, efficient use of your value range. If you feel you don't have enough values to describe the details you want, it's either because they're not important or because something else needs to be simplified for these details to read clearly.

Spend 10 minutes on it. Find another head, do it again. Repeat as much as you can, observe how the features change in different angles and stop painting when you've stopped learning.

When you're done, chuck them in a folder and keep them for yourself to look back on in future. Don't post them online or you'll get too caught up with posturing instead of learning.

Hopefully this helps.

Also this http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-4239.html

[dracken]

Are you not entertained?!

A bunch of quick charcoal studies and some stuff from early in December

[Jaik]

Man those are some serious updates!
Thanks for stopping by in my SB, your idea about a laptop and small tablet are a good idea, I might give that a shot.. See if I can source a spare battery for the old thing.

Your values are getting better. But I think they would get better faster if you did some value studies (I have to do these as well). It looks like you are hitting up life drawing sessions really often which is good. But dont forget to do some anatomy study so that you have something to apply when you get to the sessions. Drawing from life isn't enough if it isnt accompanied by studying the muscles and landmarks. Unless you are getting instructed life drawing sessions then ignore this.

Keep kicking up a storm and improving man. Next year is another year and we all gotta improve together :)

[dracken]

Thank you for stopping by, You are 100% right about doing anatomy on the side. I'm currently going over Hampton again as well as some Hogarth for his bubble muscled people. Will post some of those studies soon.

Also taking a class for life drawing but that's on the weekends. Gotta push hard!

Here is a portrait I finished today and some older stuff.

[dracken]

Here are some of the anatomy studies I do on the side.

[dracken]

Just a few more thingies.

Happy new Years :P

[dracken]

More more more

[meat]

Awesome hands! Also really like your architectural drawings. Do you like architectures?

[dracken]

Thank you, I really need to do more architecture/ perspective studies. You'd be surprised how much studying architecture can help with anatomy.

And here are some older pieces. I spent about 12 hours yesterday at life drawing, will take photos tonight and post those bad boys.

[dracken]

A few shitty shitty charcoal studies.