Alex Danila's Sketchbook

[alexdanila]

Man, you're doing the same mistakes I did. You spent a huuuge amount of time on that portrait and instead of focusing on lay-in, proportions, shapes, construction, you focused on render, which is exactly zero if you miss everything else.

Yesterday I said I'm gonna sit down, take an hour or so and do a nice self portrait, have fun. So I skipped all that shape design, lay-in stuff, and quickly jumped to rendering after a very quick line sketch. From one hour I got to 3 hours, because I was constantly pushing paint around.
In the end I realized how lifeless it is, how much I had missed by not doing the simplifications, boxifying, corners, everything that helps add structure.


So if you want my advice, spend 3 hours on the lay-in, check proportions, rhythms, see how features flow one into another, find corners, even the subtle turns, and at the end, even if you have a line sketch and no paint whatsoever, you'll feel a ton more satisfied because it's an amazing, energetic line sketch.

Check out Nicolas Uribe, he's doing a lot of portrait sketches for his KS campaign and yesterday I was looking through his stuff and noticed how instead of using a straight vertical axis on a front view face, he's using an S curve, and the nose has a curve and flows into the mouth, then the chin follows the S and turns the other way. And that's super expressive, I can't believe I missed that so far, I was always focusing on doing a symmetrical face - https://www.facebook.com/nicolasuribeart...e_internal

And now about the Arnold study, you're pushing too much, try to focus on either anatomy or values, because they're both very hard. And again, lay-in, man, lay-in. You've lost a lot of angles in his pose, assuming I'm looking at the correct reference.
Notice the shapes at the scapular region, how they connect and flow, then try figuring out what's up with the muscles, origins and insertions. Deltoids are all over the place because of the multi pennate fibers and that's why they're very hard to understand, so you have to simplify the shit out of them. This reference doesn't help you, so you have to use your knowledge.


Here, had some fun with this one. This is what I would love to see in a study
I would spend even more time adjusting asymmetries, proportions, curves vs straights and stuff but I really have to work on something else now. I do hope my point is clear enough.

Thanks walent. you always give the best feedback. for the portrait i tried  starting from imagination and correcting it with reference on the go. I spend a good 6 hours on it, and yeah, i was proud in the beginning, but all i can think about now is that i messed up the proportions and could have done a better job. 

For Arnold, i used a different refference but this one is very close, starndard arnorld pose i guess, and did a lay-in for the muscles, but i didn't fiddle with it enough. i passed to quickly on to rendering, and was struggling with the values near the end. 

Right now i'm kind of a spinning wheel. i set out to study anatomy in more detail, but i keep finding different resouces and information is hitting me from all directions. I started studying after Proko, after i went a little into M. Hampton and now i bought a scott eaton anatomy course and trying to finish it.

We will see.