Showing posts with label sketching.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sketching.. Show all posts

Monday, April 13, 2009

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.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

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.


Wednesday, April 1, 2009

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.