Crimson Daggers — Art forum

Went to London today, so no time for studying or projects or anything. Trying to make a habit of taking sketchbook everywhere and drawing something wherever I go - when feasible. Here's some quick sketches from a buddhist meeting:

Some stuff from today:

Poses from imagination, scanning them cause they turned out quite nice for me:



Heads... still struggling but gonna stick with this path of learning the planes and not move on til I got it locked down:



And some more work on my siege engine project, trying to design straight in orthographic view and see what it looks like in perspective after:




Updated my study plan as well, trying to expand my visual library in a structured and focused way.

Some skulls, from ref then memory:





Warming up for architecture studies; taking advice from How to Draw chapter 7 (environments). He suggests using a perspective grid from a photo, I drew on a photo in photoshop to find the VP's and horizon lines then stuck a piece of paper to my screen and traced them - much quicker and less wasteful than printing / tracing / etc.

It took bloody ages to do this, so many little bits and pieces to construct. I left out a load of detail, wore me out doing this much. Few things are off but that's ok, still learning.

The amount of improvement you show over the course of the sketchbook is awesome. Keep it up man!

Antmora Thanks so much! and thanks for looking at my stuff!


Few things from today; more skulls, did one from reference then memory bounced back and forth til I'd filled the page.





This image is pretty crummy but trying to try at least once all the approaches and exercises from How to Draw. This is with markers, I like this approach it makes a nice clean final drawing, I just went in without any kind of starting point, just drew things in a bad way so it came out bad. I'll definitely do this way again though. Damn those copic markers... they run out so fast >.<



My mission is to expand my visual library, I'm focusing on a new topic every 2 weeks, mainly architecture, starting right at the beginning around 4000BC with this stuff:

Some studies


Some imaginative:

Felt that my lack of digital drawing skills was holding me back, so challenged myself to go all digital today, wasn't as painful as I thought it would be once I'd organised the brushes I like. Lazy Nezumi is probably helping, it's an awesome plugin, well worth the $20.

Ellipses:



Gestures / poses:






A digital skull:




Some perspective exercises, tracing grids from photos (will move onto chapter 8 tomorrow: drawing aircraft):





Will also start to do value studies and try to get my head around those.


And some more visual library research, will aim to do a drawing using this stuff tomorrow:

Pen only today, gestures & poses look rubbish since I was a little rusty:





Some loomis planes:





Some more stuff with neolithic buildings:

Some more thumbnails, trying to work with marker and pen like Scott Robertson suggests in his book. Focussed more on composition with these:

Accumulated pages and pages of stuff while CD was down, just gonna post the highlights.

Worked through the aircraft chapter of How to Draw - just one chapter left really - but I'll spend a bit of time practising aircraft for a while probably. Also, some really rubbish heads, but I'm starting to be able to deconstruct a reference photo and draw it with just the planes. Gonna work on that for a while. Lastly some more neolithic research - looking at the wall detailing / texturing - will have another batch of thumbs finished tomorrow I think. Enjoy!

Man, you have jumped forwards lately! Those perspective studies are really paying off for you, they're making pretty much everything seem more 'solid' or three dimensional. It couples up well with the visual library study too, there is some nice stuff going on with those Neolithic village perspective and thumb studies, just in terms of translating the input information into an output.

As you get more comfortable with the perspective studies and the Loomis head planes, you may want to try to marry the two concepts together a bit. Heads don't need to have ultra tight perspective or anything, but it helps to think of the parallel lines (such as those making the brow line, cheek plane, chin, etc) in the Loomis constructions as doubling up as perspective lines. The effect of perspective is small for a head, but it is a handy tool once you get used to applying it to different things. :)

The improvements in your line quality and drawings from imagination are a real testament to the volume of work you've done as well - I suspect as you keep doing the perspective work you will just steadily build on this. The Scott Robertson book seems to be clicking well for you too. Keep up the good work!

Clockodile Hey man! Thanks for stopping by and checking up on my progress, I appreciate the comments! Yes I'm really trying to make everything look and feel solid - I looked back on gesture drawings and figure drawings from the past few months, even ones that I was really happy with at the time, and just saw garbage... like stuff warped and skewed, limbs floating, all kinds of wrongness going on (at least if getting a solid, 3D figure is the goal anyway). Kinda happy that I can see that now, been pushing to get my figures and stuff to follow suit, which is a challenge, but a good one!


Some stuff from last couple of days:

Neolithic thumbs; gonna pick one out of the last two weeks of thumbs and do a bigger ink drawing of it sometime this week:



Some more planes, and starting wheeled vehicles:





Poses, a figure and some faces using planes. I think probably the first time I did a page of heads and scanned it and flipped the canvas and they weren't all skewed and warped, pretty happy with that!

"And he kept going and going and ..."

Man , things are starting to look way better. Keep at it ^^

Adrian yea! like the duracell bunny (energizer bunny for other nationalities) Thanks man!

Mariyan I don't know if it's variety in style by choice, I'm not really able to consciously decide on that yet... thanks for the comments though! I do try to vary things up by switching medium a lot, I can recommend it as it forces you to work in different ways.


Need to master these ellipses and drawing cylindrical stuff before I move onto the last chapter in how to draw - the wheeled vehicles chapter - it just ruins them if the wheels are wonky. So just focused on cylindrical things today. I've learned that an ellipse is very much like a beautiful woman... you need to go in with confidence but then treat her with care and tenderness, take your time to make sure she's responding... moments of spontaneity keep the passion alive but don't go too wild or she'll run away from you... do it right and she makes your life amazing, do it wrong and suffer miserably (wondering if you'll ever meet a perfect ellipse again).

I'm starting to develop an unnatural attraction to the elusive and mysteriously beautiful ellipse... I must tame this wild circle!

Trying to push myself to do an illustration, I stick too much to little sketches and quick things. So far this has been a real challenge, got really miserable after the first drawing, didn't know what to do, then got happier again after the next set of thumbnails.

Initial thumbnail from last week:



Tried to make a straight drawing from it, wasn't happy with it:



More thumbnails without much clue about direction:



Back to the other drawing, fiddled in photoshop to see if I could find a way to make it work:



More thumbnails, was happy with the last two:



Did a bit bigger 'thumbnail' to see what kind of details I could add to make it look more lived in (also practised inking since I'm a bit rusty).




So I'm gonna go with this kind of composition I think. Need to do a few more thumbnails to nail down totally where everything is going to go - if anyone has any advice / comments / criticisms about this please tell me!

Cars and heads from the last couple days - feel like I've made a kind of breakthrough with the heads, they are feeling more solid now and getting them down more consistently. Still got a lot to do and most of them are a little skewed but making progress^^

Cars are from the last chapter of How to Draw - cars / planes / vehicles etc. are really not my area of interest, it's quite a struggle to go through this all properly, but then quite fun when a nice picture comes out.





Researching Sumerian architecture for a while, this is based on the Ziggurat of Ur:



Caisne did an awesome paintover for my illustration (thanks my friend!), it is below here, I took lots of notes and then tried again with my thumbnails:





The scaling is really out but I like the idea, will try to draw it again tomorrow and keep all the scale of the buildings / fence / bridge / trees etc. consistent.

Just messing about with this one, gonna save it til I do the How to Render book and paint it nice:

Working hard buddy! I really like your previous thumbnails, looking good. :D Keep em coming!

thanks for the comment on my sketchbook!
lots of studies here. keep it up and youll get there in no time! just dont burn yourself out too much. take a break . trust me

Lale Merci beaucoup ma chère!

Foxfire Thanks for checking on my new stuff! I'll try not to overdo it... although I am all or nothing type of person <_> I'll try to be careful ^^


Heads weren't working for me today, it's really elusive, sometimes they feel ok other times nothing at all... switched to some digital work for a change, thought it was about time I started to tackle values. Some studies of Bierstadt and Caravaggio followed by trying to apply some of their lighting and composition principles:





I never realised how sensitive values were at the lower end of the scale, like most of the variations are just 1 or 2 percent apart on the white -> black scale, with very huge jumps up the scale after 15%. No wonder my stuff before looked so washed out.


I gave up on trying to do my illustration traditionally, I just don't have the skills yet, so I switched to digital as well. Watching Caisne do my paintover really inspired me too. Painting over my thumbnail from above, still WIP, still not so sure about the values, I tried to limit myself to ranges of values from the Bierstadt paintings for the fore / mid / background. I did a quick gradient map over the top just to see about colour, I quite like it.

First go at cars, did the first one in photoshop to see what the process was like - it took ages and the result isn't that much better, even with the nicer ellipses on the wheels. Second one on paper (a little colour on photoshop).