Kimonas: That means a lot coming from you my man! I really appreciate you stopping by, it kinda made me day TBH!
I'm up to 540 on these and I'll probably bite down and crank the rest out tomorrow. I looked back through bridgeman and some of his scribbles actually made more sense now. I've found a way to crank these out efficiently and smoothly and the rest outta be much faster.
Bridgeman draws the foot as a blocky gesture, similar to Hampton but he gets two of the big shapes in one motion, kind of like a sock. Also drawing toes is pretty fun, there's lots of teeeeny little forms to pay attention to like the front of the toenail creates a slope that goes down. Huston points these little things out and along with the overlap principle of like leading a line into the next form it can be quite an exquisite toe!
triggered: I have a fetish for every part of the human body... Specially the ASS!
Finally got this over with, need to rest my arm tomorrow lol, i will try to do some examples of how i draw feet now with digital; should be interesting!
That and I'm gonna start reading Succesful Drawing by Loomis, seems like a good read!
aight, i feel like i understand how to lay in the perspective of a foot, now i just need to learn the anatomy of the foot, like the large forms and humps and stuff. The ones i can draw look kinda blocky and robotic, i mean they could work in an illustration if no one payed attention to it, but you know... that's half assed. I hate seeing great illustrations that have just shitty feet thrown in there. Ears and feet are a very overlooked thing... Idk why i'm thinking of this so much lol!
Read a bit of succesful drawing by Loomis, had a lot of things in the beginning especially he said i philisophically had thought of and was amazing to see it in words... and 100 year old words at that!
These feet are constructed from imagination and using a bit of reference, still look kinda weird, but its an anatomical issue, so that's good it isn't the perspective that's bothering me now. Anatomy should be a much more comprehensive fix
Doing these skull studies today i realized if I get really decent with these i could essentially draw and make anything cool! Still struggling with proportions, but i am getting much more consistent with measuring and i am happy i can get the same angle relatively on these last couple skulls. Feet are fun too :)
I see so much in these skulls, mainly progress, but not in that they are correct. They are flawed, in different ways, mainly a jaw being flat, a cheekbone being skewed, the elipses of the teeth being incomplete, the jaw sitting skewed, the forms receding incorrectly. I see it all lol, and in that i see how it should look. This is good news to me hehe, need to do some more lol
Some merry chrishmash timesh today hehe. some quick portraits to test how i draw now and it's wildly different how i did it. I remembered that Proko just layed in the head and went for the proportions the best he could without stressing over a 100% perfect likeness match of the reference. Just sticking with a sketch, tweaking a few things can really work if you have a decent foundation under it instead of throwing it out just cuz its a little different and not necessarily incorrect
more stuff, been listening to a lot of debates with this guy called Darth Dawkins who is a Christian Fundamentalist who uses like webs of impressively verbose sophistry to try and have "gotcha" moments on atheists. Really entertaining stuff and learning lots about philosophy!
I feel like this skull is more accurate than the background behind it. May have a few too many teeth but the proportions are getting there. The perspective of the background is wrong though as they are sitting in slightly different positions. It's been fun doing these portraits, i made an attempt to do a basic head lay in and just make the proportions placed fairly correctly, then render the planes. I wanna get better at seeing where the perspective starts and measure the angles better.Things end up being tilted in a different way or losing a good bit of the likeness.
Pencil is way more fun when i have a thing to start with like a loomis head lay in! shading with the side FTW hmm
Hornbro: Yeeea man, Darth is a trip lmao! I watched most the Dawkins Greatest Hits channel it was insanely entertaining hearing his sophistry nailed down and even put up against his influences like William Lain Craig and that Bohnsen guy... probably spelled both those names wrong lol. I only saw Dawkins because he came into the Ask Yourself Discord which i hang in most the time and tried to prove God exists with his Presuppositional whirlwind hehe. He got pissy and left when two of his "Stalkers" showed up and wanted to ask the "pal-talk power ranger" questions lmao
He's just soo... interesting and such a pitiful little man that he has done this for a decade. I want to get into more philosophy but it's tough... I've been into debate for years and only learned bits and pieces of philosophy just due to necessity of it coming up in debates on ethics/epistemology/veganism. I listen to debates and seldom engage as entertainment, so its tough to absorb raw philisophy that is absent of context as i just get bored and would rather learn more art. But maybe soon I will develop more an attention span for it, as I'd love to read some Hume and Schopenhauer stuff as well as anything that could help decipher the extreme epistemological apologetics of Darwin's Deity. But thanks for the recommendations bro, I put them in my very long list of things to look into haha. Neo-paganism is in there somewhere hehe
"Keep doing what you're doing!" Don't get that a lot LOL!
Did a bunch of composition studies today that are just scribblies but found some interesting theories for composing a scene with multiple characters. So basically the eye lines of characters is crucial, but also the interactions of their limbs/objects etc. The more overlaps/touching limbs/objects the more story you can convey and it can really help getting the idea for the rest of the scence. I think Algenplfeger said once that the hardest part is just coming up with a scribble to represent your idea and the rest is crafstmanship. Ass in chair time. I see what he means.
You can take a scene and just spin it from different camera angles using simple scribbles if you have a rudimentary gist of perspective. Also Bill Perkins is pretty beast and im finishing up his composition stuff on NMA. This sketch is from the film RAW, but everyone i showed it to thinks it's a guy lol, owell, probably the neck size in comparison to the head/jaw; that and the hair is pulled back and there isn't many female cues in the reference anyways!
Vic: xx thanks so much! The classics is where my heart is at, i find it tough to engage with your typical commercial art regardless of how well its done. You can blame NMA for that!
alright so i drew a lot more today than you see here, mainly sketches for family for the holidays and a few little cartoons. But I notice the more i draw this skull the more i can "see" the angles its sitting on and for once i feel this skull is properly sitting in perspective. The way i rendered this reminded me of Albrecht Durer and those gorgeous hands he would draw and I'd like to make some studies of those.
I think it was Huston who was looking at one of Durers hands and said even these fingers tell a story, of just like a hand holding a ball. I'm thinking of going through his vids on heads on NMA, as there are some new ones. Then once i get a decent level up on heads im gonna probably bite the bullet and redo Karl Gnass' stuff since it helped me so much a few months back.
This first one here is a good example of what not to do, as in rendering a study as you're laying it in. I found this cool photo of a lady hidden in these nice rock formations and i totally ruined the contrast and balance in my copy of it. Bill Perkins talks about this on NMA like you have to design the values instead of letting the reference tell you what to do.... better luck next time right? Notan is imporant, local value, not just form, fuck form, value rules... Azevedo said that in an old post on CA.org finally makes sense. I think that's what he said lelelele
I like how you mapped out the shadow shapes on those last ball point sketches Fedo, a really quick and useful technique for suggesting 3D form.
Quote:I remembered that Proko just layed in the head and went for the proportions the best he could without stressing over a 100% perfect likeness match of the reference. Just sticking with a sketch, tweaking a few things can really work if you have a decent foundation under it instead of throwing it out just cuz its a little different and not necessarily incorrect
Interesting point here. I've recently started to not stress so much over accuracy as well. My main goal at the moment is to be able to draw from imagination and I think your thinking here about building a decent foundation and sticking with it is more important than 100% accuracy - if the goal is to be able to invent rather than copy.
Good stuff! Keep it going fella!
“Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day.” -- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Loader: Ya man, and i was watching some Huston today that only confirmed that statement. He is showing how in portraiture the goal is often to exaggerate and design a head, to say a certian thing. Say make someone handsome, or friendly, or whatever reason, you push certain lines in the design that will end up almost being caricature. He called the greatest caricature artists Sargent and Ingres because they did just that, exaggerate. It's all built, its all an expression of a face. Thanks for stoppin by!
Watched some Huston today, and as i was sayin to artloader i got a new perspective about drawing in general. For instance the first one here is a drawing of the same reference where i stylized the head using curved vs straight lines. The end result is a completely different character. its a cool experiment to take a ref and draw it several ways and design the head a different way everytime using the information it gives you. It's such a freeing thing to consider hehe, so i had this idea to draw some bridgeman tomorrow as if i were hogarthe or an artist opposite his style with more curvy round shapes as opposed to boxy shapes. should be interesting...
Your grinding is so sick <3 and i love how you write when you learn anything it so interesting to read! But i think your studies look a bit rushed. Maybe try measuring more or taking more time for one thing
Loving the sheer effort put into all these drawings! You've inspired me to dedicate more time to construction/perspective. One thing I see that could be worked on next is accuracy and proportions. It seems that the facial features related to the head feel a little off, same with the values. Perhaps doing a dozen or so Bargue studies can help tackle both of those issues at once. Hope this helps, and thanks for inspiring us to work harder
tried really taking my time laying in this last one and it think it had a lot better quality. Gonna try and make more intelligent line choices from now on the red one is the reference