Jaik's Sketches & Thoughts

[Jaik]

EDIT: Smrr, look at you being all ninja and sneaking in while I was writing the update.. Thanks :D Yeah, I was happy with the overall skin tones, but it was just something about the features >.<

Archereux: Yeah, the face was bothering me too. A lot. There was something off but I couldnt put my finger on it so I reworked it like you advised :)

Samsym: Thank you! Changing the paper made all the difference with charcoal. As did getting a chamois, and vine charcoal.. so this week was much easier to do. The tools all require a heap of practice but until then I was using very toothy paper and only compressed charcoal pencils. Thanks heaps for pointing them out to me!

Thanks Rio :D

Haha Lyraina, yeah. Pretty much have repeating shapes and figure drawing down obviously :P
Thanks for pointing out the under shirt thing, thats a good idea, I will really need to figure out a way to use it again somewhere.

Cracked: The face D: its always the face! Yeah I totally went through and reworked the face.

Thanks War! :DD Im glad you think I am improving because it is sometimes hard to see when you are in the trenches every day.

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Thanks for the support everyone. Every comment in this sketchbook helps to motivate me and make me feel like I actually am doing good.

This week was kind of a shit week. It started out okay with some really good news earlier in the week, which has since turned out to be an opportunity that I cant pass up, but it will take up a lot of my time, a lot more time than I was anticipating (probably 15+ hours a week) for the foreseeable future. So the time spent arting will be reduced for at my guess 6-12 weeks, since I have to keep up my part time job as well.
Then on Thursday I had to take my dog to the vet in the middle of the night to be put down. Pretty much the shittest day ever... But she was 13 years young and in a lot of pain so it had to be done.. Oddly enough, telling myself that doesnt help...

TL;DR - Hardly any time for art :( Working out a time management schedule will probably be my goal for this week since before I treated it like a shotgun and just did the work purely by doing a large amount of hours, now it is going to have to be focused like a sniper...

Another reason for such a pathetic update is that I put 2 or 3 days worth of work into reworking Itachi's face about 3 times. Each time crashed and burned. This is really showing me how little I know about faces and how much practice I need to do. They aren't even worth showing they are that terrible lol.

Form studies, all from imagination, eggs are strange shapes..


Spoon still life, this time featuring protein:


Life drawing, these range from 5minutes for the first couple, then slowly increasing to 20min for the last few. Big thanks to Samszym for suggesting different paper, vine charcoal and a chamois, made it soo much easier. I am using newsprint now, I think next week I will also add in some white charcoal, but I have realised the problem I have with lighting is because they have one spotlight, then banks of florescent lights on either side, so essentially there is no dark and light side. This is because it is a local art gallery who is mostly full of old people that cant see in the dark -_- Does anyone have any suggestions on how to combat this?