Castiel's Sketchbook

[Castiel]

Dear all,

I once aspired to become an artist, but another career path came into the way.

After a break of almost three years, I started to draw again a few days ago and the passion from before was only dormant inside of me!

So I will use this sketchbook as a way to motivate myself a bit more and also to get some feedback :)
I do not have a clear goal in mind. I just like to draw portraits and am trying to get better at it!

Here are two pieces I did over the last two days :)

The first one was done solely digital and definitely needs more shading. 
The second one is traditional but I took a photo and working on shading it digitally

I also started reading through Loomis 'Drawing the Head and Hands' Book and will practice a bit with that. Maybe my perspective skills are too bad for it though. We will see!

See you,
Castiel

[chubby_cat]

Hey! Welcome to CD!

A great place to start learning to draw is over at https://drawabox.com/ Lots of really good exercises to follow that will help build good foundation skills.

I would also recommend taking a look at Proko's face drawing tutorials over on youtube. He pretty much summarises Loomis' method, but it's great to watch alongside doing Loomis' book (especially if you are more a visual learner compared to reading text).

Looking forward to seeing more :)

[Castiel]

Hey!
Thank you for the suggestions chubby_cat! 
I took a look at drawabox and I will probably combine it with Scott Robertson's How to Draw Book. But for the dynamic sketching of plants/fanimals I will stick to drawabox. That stuff looks pretty cool!

Over the past two days, I read and watched some Loomis/Proko and copied some of their stuff. In order to be able to apply it, I tried to apply the framework that is taught to some reference pictures. 

It is really cool to see how the drawings immediately look more 'human' in a sense. Although the specific features look a bit off compared to the reference. I suppose I have to work further through the book to get a more proper grasp of the individual features. I suppose I could also spend more time on the individual faces as I only put in 30 minutes each.


As far as perspective stuff is concerned I finished the first homework of the howtodraw lesson. It became a bit tedious haha so I drew some more faces :)

Regarding 'drawing from the shoulder' thing when I draw longer lines my shoulder definitely moves my elbow joint around 5-10 centimeters but I don't know whether that is sufficient for the technique and necessary at all.

A question regarding the uploaded pictures: How large should they be so that the page does not take too long to load and yet are still visible? And is the forum attachment the way to go or should an external service (e.g. imgur) be used?

Thanks for stopping by and looking at my stuff! :)