StardustLarva's Visual Explorations

[Adam Lina]

Nice job on that value study. You werent going dark enough in your previous stuff but thats a good improvement. Just dont forget to keep the full value range in mind for your future stuff too. Keep it up!

[StardustLarva]

Thank you, Hypnagogic.

More carvings:



A couple of quick dung beetle drawings.

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A preliminary for a ink and watercolour piece I'd like to do. My scanner messed it up a bit.



Lastly, a whip scorpion study.

[StardustLarva]

Also, here's a large study of my human skull, Winston. I plan to get around to labelling it at some point for future reference for my other studies, like Hypnagogic suggested.



The photo is shitty, I know.

[StardustLarva]

Couple more visual projections.



An updated skull study sheet. As I said, I intend to label the bones comprising the skull for future reference.



Another greyscale value study, this time of a centipede's mandibles. Oh how I would love one of these beauties as a pet... Reference used here.

[StardustLarva]

Quick painting, I attempted to be a lot looser and go for an appearance reminiscent of cave paintings such as this one. I think it looks terrible. Anything to suggest, other than burn it?

[StardustLarva]

That study from before I was working on. Reference used here.

[StardustLarva]

Here's a graphite hand study, starring Odin, one of my pet fruit beetles. It's been a long time since I've worked in graphite. I don't really like this one.

[StardustLarva]

A small collective of regurgitations:



First piece of a triptych drawing depicting a life cycle.



A study of a soldier ant, Camponotus gigas. This one was difficult because of how small the specimen was.

Lastly, a couple of preliminaries of a self-portrait I plan to do. I want to try and achieve much looser, thicker and abstract-looking strokes with it, perhaps not too unlike the work of people like Francis Bacon.

[StardustLarva]

...Here's the finished result.

I'm not too pleased with it, though I feel somewhat satisfied with the messiness of it, which is something I intended to achieve.

[StardustLarva]

Here's a detail from a larger piece I'm working on. I realise the symmetry of the insect isn't good. Any thoughts?

[StardustLarva]

Phew, done with this one!



Seeing as the photo isn't great, here's some detail shots:





I realise the symmetry isn't all that. Any thoughts?

[Flo]

Hey Larva,

I think what you should start doing is "drawing through the form"http://www.artandinfluence.com/2011/06/drawing-through-form.html

This helps in working 3dimensional as it shows where stuff conncets. I don't see it in your pencil work so I presume you don't do it.

Try it, I think you'll like it :)

Keep it up!

[rainbowsorknives]

Hey Larva, i like the insect top down scientific drawing pages :) keep it up

Small suggestion, something that helped me alot was drawing from life, drawing the most redundant thing that was on my desk, and really trying to draw it correctly, pushing yourself to draw correctly is very important when you are pushing ahead.

Hope this helps :)

Ben

[StardustLarva]

Flo:Ah yes, I intend to focus more on this actually, as three-dimensional form is something that has been suggested to me on a number of occasions. Thank you for the link, but that only seemed to define what drawing through the forms is. Do you have any good tutorials or books that focus on it? I've been linked to some before (which I intend to look at again), but are there any that explain it in a particularly simple fashion? Anyway, thank you very much for your feedback, it is appreciated.

Rainbowsorknives: Thank you. I am focusing a lot on drawing from observation, as you would deduce. A lot of my insect drawings I've studied from resin paperweights with specimens encased in them as well as papered specimens. I do intend to try and broaden my horizon in terms of the subjects I study, at some point I'm planning to focus on anatomy of other animals, including humans. I believe this would help me with my illustrations from imagination.

Once again, to save this from being a wall of text, here's a quick study I did, experimenting with amalgamating stippling and graphite. I think I overkilled it a bit, so if I use this method in future I'll make sure to use lighter tones. Reference used here.

[JyonnyNovice]

Hey Stardust! I really love your use of traditional mediums, love how you make the canvas's out of pages from books and, is that a kids toy box on the self portrait? Really creative man!

Since 'drawing through' was mentioned above (sometimes called 'constructive drawing'), I'll share what helped me the most - aside from doing the exercises in Dynamic Sketching 2 video it was 'Figure Drawing: Design and Invention' by Hampton that has made it really click for me. It's about human anatomy but the process can be applied to anything - if you have a desire to study human anatomy anyway I'd really recommend it. Going through the steps and doing the exercises suggested really develops that kind of thinking.

Using the Hampton approach on the ant above, you'd first capture the gesture of the body with lines, the legs, the rise and dip from head -> abdomen -> thorax, then use a straight line to represent the tilt and lean of each of those three parts, then place a sphere / egg shape over each straight line, then use wrapping lines over the sphere's to give each part some volume, then represent the legs with three or four cylinders each, using the degree and direction of the ellipse on the ends of each cylinder to show if it is moving towards or away from the viewer. That's the underdrawing, and since it's simple shapes you can tell quickly if something is wrong, once you get that down tight you can go in and carve out the details. Also, since it's built with simple shapes, figuring out where the light will fall is a much easier task as well.

Hope that made sense - obviously the book presents it in a much better way than I can. I couldn't see any good youtube video showing this kind of thing but if you watch the last 7 minutes of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIiqgXqjWCw

It kinda shows the process from a gesture drawing adding the simple shapes in the correct places.

Hope that's useful for you! Keep drawing brother : )

[Farvus]

Hey

I like your insect drawings. Especially the ones with dotted ink shading look good.

I think at this point I would suggest focusing a lot on fundamentals. I see you're already doing some life drawing and that's great. Maybe try doing more self portraits. I used to do one a day and I progressed a lot from that. Other than that try still lifes with a lot of focus on basic shapes - boxes, cylinders, spheres and so on. Then you could progressively move to more complicated shapes while still keeping the basic forms in mind. With good sense of form you could make your insect drawings much more 3 dimensional :)

[StardustLarva]

JyonnyNovice: Thank you very much for your kind words! By your recommendation I watched the demo of the Dynamic Sketching 2 video, which I feel has started to give me a bit more of an idea about drawing forms. I'll also check out that book, too, though it does seem a tad on the expensive side at the moment. I'll make sure to watch that video soon too. Thank you very much for your helpful response, Jyonny!

Farvus: Yes, that is an intended focus. I plan to do some still lifes at some point to work on this. Thank you as well.

Here's a couple more scratchings:



A painting I'm currently working on. I plan to detail in the background as I progress, though I realise this probably isn't the best method of working.



My notes from the session in which I watched the demo video of Dynamic Sketching 2. As you can see, I've practiced some of the exercises that Peter details in the video regard lines and such. At some point I intend to try and integrate the stuff to do with contours and shape construction into my further studies and such.

[JyonnyNovice]

Thats great man! With those dynamic sketching exercises, whenever you have a little time to kill just do those on a bit of paper - especially the lines; straight, curved, wavey; the ellipses and circles; and the volumes / wrapping line shapes. I usually do them everyday - eventually you will internalise that stuff and how lines wrap around objects will just come without having to think about it. It's really worthwhile habit to get into, it'll help your drawing no end!

When you nail the volumes, you can try attaching multiple volumes together. Good luck man!

[StardustLarva]

Thank you, Jyonny. I do intend to practice it more.

Anyway, here's a couple of things.



An ink and watercolour wash study of this photo.

Also, the first of a series of paintings that and other studies have contributed to:

[Archreux]

Hey Stardust! Nice stuff. I'm really like these watercolors of yours and traditional paintings. They're looking solid and clean. Also, appreciating the focus of your craft. It's not too often we see things like this, it's all very interesting so far.

Considering what you want to use these illustrations for eventually, it would be nice to see some mock layouts of what they might actually look like alongside information regarding any specific species of insect, etc. Just a suggestion. Hope that helps with a little bit of direction! :]