Knight's sketchbook

[dimensional-knight]

These are awesome studies! Very nice masses, especially the skulls. Are your hands doing better now enabling you to draw this much?

Thanks! I used to be afraid of drawing skulls, but having a method that clicks turned them into a fun warm up.

They're not super long drawing sections so my hands can manage most days. Although I still experience some stiffness and pain I fully recovered grip strength once moving on from pro work.

That said I had to let my hands rest for week midway these dailes (I'm on week 4 now) because they started to go into the red zone. The dip in quality/time spent is noticeable.

Woah..the sketchbook fill with each pages is quite impressive.

I've got to make good use of them before they fully rot!

Welcome!  Great to hear you getting back to fun and chillaxin with drawing. Uber important.  Interesting that we all find preferences on doing things a certain way like your mouth and nose first thing. I may have to give that a go. It was a pleasure to see your sketches. Keep em coming

Glad you liked these. Not gonna lie, it feels weird to start by the middle. I'm still wrapping my head around ignoring eyes for as long as I can but it also makes sense from a construction angle.

Eye sockets are important and I am ghosting them right away. The eyes themselves don't have much weight in the head structure, they're a product of it. They're the first detail to go when you see a face from a distance. Eyelids got a little more mass to them but again can't change the head silhouette in most cases and when they do it's a localized effect. Eyebrows are a product of forehead, nose and temples.

But the nose? The nose is one of the last details to be abstracted away from a distance. It's right in the middle of all cool things going on with the surrounding bone. The mouth is pure structure; save for moustaches obscuring it you won't have an upper lip that doesn't hug the skull. Thus for someone struggling with building a solid structure focusing on features more intimately tied to the underlying bone yields better results than fussing too soon about the features we obsess over for cultural reasons that actually have little impact on the general object shape.

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Minor update since I need natural light to take photos of the sketchbook.

Confidence Building Practice

The way I struggled with the head of the fat guy yesterday made me realize I have little idea of how to hang flesh from bones you can barely see (and that I struggle with bald people too heh). I mostly know what's going on under the skin, it's just that drawing this sort of curve and volume pile-up in this region feels unnatural. So I picked the same thick brush to try to avoid going into details and looked for heads that aren't angular bony like I'm used to.



Sketches are numbered in chronological order. I hid each one after done and it's interesting how they increased in size without me realizing. Talk about confidence-building exercises.


More gestures. Really set out to exaggerate poses, hence they ended up truer to the ref than when I don't. That's how stiff my poses usually are. :'D




Plus the bane of every artist: Hands!



Sanity check to see if this type of scribble has any use. Yeaaah I think I can jump to shading from these reasonably well.