I guess I'm trying to say thank you? - Part 1

This will be the first painting in a set of twelve.

Here's a teaser.
(No post-processing this time, sorry.)

the Devil

Just a quick test of shadow play. I intended this to be a tonal sketch for a watercolor but kept going with it. I'll have to redo this in water sometime after my interviews.

I did this with HB lead on 90 lb watercolor paper. I then coarsely chopped off the area around the figure using a photo editor.

Size matters

Most of us have drawn people-like figures only to have created a horribly disfigured person. Sometimes this is intentional most often, not. For those of us who don't have the artistic flair to produce exaggerated figures that can pass for art, basic proportions of the human figure are a good place to start.

I wanted to stray away from cartoon style drawings and so picked up a few pointers from Loomis' book.

A male can be drawn 8 head-heights tall. Partitioning the figure head-height-wise, other features of the human body can be placed. It'd be faster if you just look at a picture. Having drawn a few of these, I was able to alter them a little bit to fit in with whatever artistic style or action I want without the reference lines.

Proportions are great, but we also need to correctly present the weight distribution of our figures. I simply copied some mannequins from Loomis' book. I'll be playing with these mannequins until I am comfortable with weight distributions.

Pierot'd be sad too.

A lesson learned the hard way. Water coloring technique is a LOT different when compared to graphite, pastel, or other paintings. The fact of the matter is, water coloring is not supposed to be precise. You simply direct the flow of water and let the paint playfully settle where it wants to.

I started out this painting by laying down broad washes then waiting before laying down another layer to darken areas. It is very important that the previous layer be completely dry if you want to avoid back run and inadvertent color mixing.

In painting this piece, I've discovered that I have no idea how to control the tinting strengths of paint. So the next few pieces I'll be doing will hopefully teach me a bit more about how to control tone.

Three spaces.

The first painting I'll be working on is based on this.

It's a fairly simple model, monotone, and simple shapes.
This should give me some good practice on tonal shading.

Ignoring what I know about anatomy and sketching what I saw, the eyes are a tad bit farther apart than I'd like them to be. Good thing it doesn't matter. (Hamm suggests in his book that you should fit a third eye in the space between the two.)

Sometimes being just a little off gives off a very uneasy feeling that can either add or detract from a painting or drawing. The pencil sketch doesn't mean anything though, there's still time for corrections when I actually paint the thing.

For this sketch, I used a 0.5 mechanical pencil loaded with HB lead on student grade 90lb cold press.