Quick sketch of a young woman with GREAT hair - I'd say almost Cinnamon-style hair, if there hadn't been a woman with almost EXACTLY Cinnamon's bi-colored hairstyle at the same Barnes and Noble about a week ago - whom I decided to sketch after finishing my last drawing.
She moved too fast through the store to get a really good picture, and from where I was sitting it was hard to see what she was looking at, but I think you've got to go beyond just drawing from practice books and start drawing from life, or you're just regurgitating other people's drawings, like an AI.
And I like AI, but regurgitating other people's drawings is NOT why I am drawing every day.
Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for sharing this mnemonic for understanding the lengths of the parts of the hand. This has helped me more than anything I can think of to understand how the hand works and how to draw it. Knowing that the length of the fingers is half the length of the hand - and that the knuckles of the middle finger are half that, and half that again - has taught me more about the hand than anything I can think of.
Also, and not explicitly said in your breakdown - but something anyone can confirm, by placing one hand over the other at a 90 degree angle, or placing the middle finger over the back of the opposite palm - your diagram taught me that the WIDTH of the hand is half the LENGTH of the hand. This has been equally useful in setting proportions so, again, Mr. Goldman ... thank you.
Me drawing from yet another Midjourney character sheet for Porsche. Misproportioned, and I am still having trouble on the eye placement and face proportions, something I've seen on a fair number of old drawings; once I finish the hands and feet book I think it's probably time to go back to practicing faces.
This certainly is rendered better, but if you look closely at the edges of the hair, especially where it meets the armor, it doesn't make too much sense. Oh well, it's still inspirational.
Which is not actually true at all. What I am ACTUALLY doing in "drawing every day" is drawing several day's worth of drawings all at once, then posting them one at a time, trying to keep a large enough buffer that I am always drawing when I have time to sit down and really draw, and am not scrambling to sketch at 2AM.
More Goldman studies. Drawing sort of every day, at least rate-wise.
Again from Goldman. You know, I've noticed that in a sense I've become less ambitious this year: when I look back at the early DED posts, I see things like the following - Dad drawn on toned paper:
Or this, done on my Wacom Cintiq and Photoshop:
But the more methodical approach I'm taking this time seems to be having more effect on my drawing skill: I feel more confident about some of the things that I'm drawing, even if they are less ambitious.
So, I think I'm going to keep up the methodical approach and hope it goes somewhere! Wish me luck.
This time, I'm using one of my own drawings as a reference, the old "Stand Your Ground" t-shirt image, for which I recently found a scan of the original art from WAY back in the day (the scan was a BMP, !):
This is from 1997 (!). In some ways it's cruder; in other ways it benefits from the larger aspect ratio (I suspect this was done on 8.5x11 paper, or even larger). But my little notebook has been helping me draw every day:
My rendering of the last pose from the DALL-E character sheet for Porsche:
Not entirely terrible, though I can see my proportions are a bit cartoonish. These systems can't take art direction yet - I had to clean the character sheet up in Photoshop to really make it suitable, and even then the middle pose should have had the legs more spread apart, which it tried to do erroneously on the right-hand pose with a fifth leg - but they sure can render the heck out of an image.
Another sketch of Porsche, this one based on a "character sheet" I generated with Midjourney based on my own character descriptions. Yes, yes, I understand there are many issues with AI art generators, some of which are real and some of which are not; my own writing has been used to train large language models, I know artists who have been discouraged from art by generative AI, and I expect the use of these systems for final product will be very disruptive. HOWEVER, there are some things which AI generators can do which can't be feasibly done by any other method - such as producing character sheets for your own practice.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I managed to convince ChatGPT / DALL-E to cough up the above "centauress in a spacesuit" drawing after many iterations, then got it to transform that image into the following character sheet of Porsche from several different angles:
It ain't perfect - note she has five legs on the right, and the perspective differences aren't really that well done - but it's close enough for me to use these as reference as I do my own drawing practice, shown at the very top. Seeing these "drawings" gives me new perspectives on how to render my own ideas at a higher level than I can currently do, enabling me to bootstrap my artistic skills.
There's a long way to go for AI generated art to be able to respond to art direction - but it is helping me chart a new direction in my own art, which is great, because if I can draw it, I can then art direct myself.
"There's no individualist so rugged they were born being able to change their own diaper." That's a quote from a story in progress that I thought was good enough to hoist up into the blog, just in case it turns into a "darling" and I need to cut it. The point is not to be against individualism - our world is better if most people are capable of pulling their own weight most of the time - but that none of us, literally none of us, are truly autogenic: self-made men who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
You cannot fake reality in any way whatsoever: No matter how rugged an individualist is, no matter how much a person has made with how little, there was a point in their life where they could not clothe themselves, feed themselves, or change their own diaper. And yet we've cultivated a mythos in this country that deifies the self-made individual to the point where it has become fetishized - and signaled through purchases and action, as in the residential construction worker who purchased that huge truck, parked it on our grass in the rain, and proceeded to rut up our lawn and track our driveway with mud on the way out. Not even the neighbors doing that construction want this to happen - but it keeps happening, as this patch of our driveway is just out of sight from the office where I work, and we don't often catch them.
In contrast, we have no problem working with our neighbors across the street. When a package was mis-delivered due to a missed digit, I could have kept it, or mailed it back (to Ohio!) with the note "No Such Person At This Address". But I took a few minutes to find them by phone printed on the pacakge, and we quickly worked out that they were a short walk away. On the way out the next day, I dropped the package off, hidden slightly behind their porch columns so it wasn't visible from the road. Working together, we made sure they got their package quickly without it having to be shipped halfway across the country.
I'm all in favor of individualism, even the rugged kind. But we shouldn't fetishize it to the point that we run roughshod over each other to the point that we pretend that other people aren't there or don't matter - we should work together to make sure we have the best world possible.
-the Centaur
Pictured: a construction truck, for which our responsible neighbor apologized - yet once every week or two, the construction trucks creep back onto our land when they think I'm not looking, leading to torn up grass as in the second picture; also pictured, the package I left for our neighbor, rather than shipping it back.
