Leysan's Sketchbook

[Leysan]

Thanks Artloader! I find it difficult to find the minor axis on the high degree ellipses, also I'm not sure what degree an ellipse should be.

A friend does pole dance and I could do some life drawing from her, but she's really fast so most of the sketches are referenced from her pose book.

[Pubic Enemy]

Nice action in those sketches; studying from pole dancing turned out to be a great idea.

I like the values and large brush strokes in your self portrait. Was that done in Clip Studio?

[darktiste]

Next time just ask her if you can take some picture for later reference.

[Leysan]

Thank you Pubic Enemy! My new digital stuff is in Clip Studio. All my old digital stuff was done in GIMP.

Thanks darktiste! There are a lot of great photos online, but life drawing has just this more alive feeling for me.

Some studies from today and a T-shirt motive I'm working on for my husband. It shows his various hobbies. Any thoughts on it so far?

[Pubic Enemy]

Nice (deer?) skull studies. Good job of decisively placing the orbits and alveolar process in that top drawing.

That T-shirt design is precious. I have abysmal design skills so I can't give real feedback on it, but I can tell you what I get from it: He likes Linux, Pokemon, playing Go, spending time outdoors, teaching music (or conducting?), and reptiles. If I missed or misunderstood anything, that might be an area for improvement. The snake might look better with an eyeball; he looks a little spooky right now.

[chubby_cat]

Cool sketchbook you have so far, Leysan. Pole dancing is a great idea for a drawing exercise to try and capture movement. If you find your friend moves too quickly, I'm certain there's hundreds of youtube videos you could study from. Video is kinda a good middle ground between photos and life drawing.

In terms of your most recent post, the t-shirt graphic is coming along nicely. My main crit would be that the very first thing my eye is drawn to is the image of the board. The style is contrasting to everything else in the space, which makes it look like it doesn't belong. It's just a nit-pick though. If it's intentional then disregard everything lmao.

[Leysan]

Thanks chubby_cat and Pubic Enemy! I have never designed a T-shirt before or learned it in any way...

You got almost all the hobbies right Pubic Enemy, except for Python and Choir. I'm not sure if there is a particular kind of python associated with the language, but I'll look it up.

I'm not sure if I should paint over the board. The important part is that it is a particular move of a particular game, and I was too lazy to draw all the stones in perspective myself. It's certainly not intentional, but can I pretend it is? He does love go a lot. I will try adjusting the style and compare...

Today I only have folds studies with Hogarth's Dynamic wrinkles and drapery.

[Leysan]

I've been doing line-of-action.com studies again and I'm really growing dissatisfied. I feel like trying to do it fast I'm only learning to do it messily and I don't like my messy lines at all. So maybe I should do longer studies instead.





Some more drapery: For these I used a short video to look frame by frame how the folds change when the person moves. Some are from life and imagination.




I stumbled upon Amit Dutta's http://crimsondaggers.com/forum/thread-6851.html in darktiste's sketchbook. So I'll try to go through that in the future. Here's my first go at a notan of Lady of Shalott.

[Pubic Enemy]

Yeah, if you want to improve line cleanliness, longer studies are the way to go. Although, I've seen short studies which looked very clean because the artist only used like 5-10 lines, so that might be another approach to try.

Drapery studies are looking good. Doing frame-by-frame studies of clothing is a very good idea. I've also read that Hogarth book; it is helpful even if only for giving a very clear and exaggerated depiction of folds, and for providing easy terminology for different types of wrinkle patterns.

[Leysan]

Great idea Pubic Enemy! I'll try that, restrict the number of strokes instead of the time.

I've continued working on the T-shirt design. Thanks again for the feedback chubby_cat, Pubic Enemy and thanks Don Kringel and Nicole from the other community. I'm not sure what to do with the go game. I don't want to reduce it to a 9x9 game to make it less crowded because the position of the stones was actually important, but maybe it is better to sacrifice the game for the sake of design.

[JosephCow]

Hey your sketches are looking great! And I love that painting you did the notan of, the lady of shallot.
With the notan, though I feel like you didn't really capture the composition so much, and tried to make sure every detail stood out from each other. For example, the window would definitely be a light value since it's the lightest thing in the scene, but you inverted it so it reads better.

Here's how I would do this scene.



I used three values, and went a little fancier with some gradation, because I feel like the picture more makes sense as a 3 value composition. The dress is clearly darker than her face, but lighter than the wall. but it could be pared down even more by just making all the grey areas white.

If you put an artsy filter over your composition you can really see the important shapes of light and how that's working in an abstract way.



There's different ways you can interpret it, and do a value study. Like I'm sure Amitt's would look better still, but you get the picture. The key is you're trying to simplify it and group things together, not separate them apart.

[darktiste]

Well a common technique to simplify value is to squint to group value by squinting you compress the value you see and you reduce the noise to bigger shape.Notan aren't about capturing pretty picture they are good to analyse how other artist create contrast in many way how they use value to bring attention to certain point in there composition how there positive and negative shape balance each other .Those are some example of what can be extracted from doing those type of study.

It up to you to try to extract some knowledge out of those study.One can do so many of them without intent and that a trap to avoid setting intention can be a great way to work toward a better understanding of some concept.Note taking can be as effective as doing notan in extracting knowledge from master but some people learn better by imitation they learn intuitively from doing will some other learn from observation.What i always encourage is a mix of both whatever make you retain the most information will be the way to go.

2 value notan are better suited for ink artist in my opinion will more than 3 value seem to be more valuable for most other type of artist.

[Leysan]

Thank you for your advice on notan Joseph and darktiste. I'll try it next time.

For now I've switched my gesture studies to frame by frame YouTube videos. And I tried to reduce the number of strokes I use per pose, which the animation kinda forces me to do.

Here is the reference video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX7QNWEG...tu.be&t=32

[Zaulta]

Animating your figure studies is a nice way to improve your lines and you did a great job with it imo. The gif looks really smooth. Going off of what JosephCow said, try to use 3-5 different values to group when doing studies like those and try to always think why the artist placed those certain values there (like to show atmosphere perspective, show separation of different things, or the focal point) Also, thanks for coming to my sketchbook, I appreciate it < 3.