Posts published in “Sketchworks”

Sketching (pencil and ink) skulls from Andrew Loomis's Drawing the Head and Hands. This seemed familiar, and as it turns out, checking through my files, I had actually tried this exercise of rebooting my drawing skills before, in early 2019, without the forcing function of "Drawing Every Day".

In some ways, I seem to be getting better, but in others, I feel I am getting worse. I know I'm specifically optimizing for quantity over quality, and on top of that, optimizing for enforcing the habit and getting over my embarrassment over doing a good rendering - using a Sharpie if I have to - but still, some things just seem worse to me now. I know I was limited by the above to what I could carry with me (back in the days when I did this over lunch, usually out) and that I'm cheating on the above by explicitly using extra-dark lines to emphasize the outlines, which is a crutch I am trying to stop leaning on; but still, compared to my recent drawings, I feel like I was getting closer in some ways to what I want.

I skipped the hands and cartooning sketches this time through the exercises, though I may loop back to them. Nevertheless, I can see good things and bad things about my more realistic earlier renders. The renders are definitely nicer than the quick Sharpie sketches, but, for example, the eyes below are too big compared to the original, and the hair is if anything too large. Clearly, I need to keep up the practice.

Nevertheless, drawing every day.

-the Centaur

Quick Sharpie sketch of Patrick McGrath as photographed by Sally Soames, taken from the book Writers. (Mostly because I didn't have time to do a full start on the next page of Drawing the Head and Hands). No roughs or anything; just a straight sketch. While there are obvious errors, the hardest part was figuring out what to render as black or white against this fairly dark black and white photograph:

A direct comparison shows there's no easy way to line up what I drew with what was actually there. The nose and mouth fit best, leaving the hair and chin almost not terrible, but the cheeks are lopsided, the eyes too high, the forehead just ... wrong ... and the left shoulder shoved down while the right shoulder is up, I think because the hair came down too far. Not sure how I missed that, but it's just way off.

Also that weird "1 line out of 3-5 goes kazoo" is in full force, though in reality it's more like 1 line out of 20-30, lulling me into a false sense of security before the chin goes all wonky just when I think I've got it all under control.

This is why roughs are important. Next time (when I'm not already up late due to work).

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

A sketch of the frontispiece of Loomis's Drawing the Head and Hands. Not going to include a scan of the page for comparison, as you should buy Loomis's book for that. I tried and abandoned 3-4 different half-finished roughs, finding problems like: squashed heads, bad jaw lines, squashed heads, and ennui. In the end, I flipped it upside down to get the "landscape", then back over to get the details.

While this isn't terrible, a few things stood out:

• First, I need to work on my patience. "Real" artists work over the entire surface that they're rendering, and while I started to do that here, I lost patience before I reviewed the child's eyes (though, in my defense, I was trying to do a quick sketch after those 4 false starts ate my time).
• Second, the wandering line thing I have going was in full force here: several times my lines just jumped, and while I noticed that flipping the page around to get a better angle helped, sometimes the line I drew was what I wanted, and other times it just fricking wasn't. It's really weird, as sometimes I can create really long, precise lines, and others ... zoom across the page.
• Third, I still have trouble with the relative size of eyes, and with the fine details of nose and mouth, but especially, the size and fine details of the eyes. Also, my eyes suck. Eyebrows can use some work too.
• Fourth, and this is a general thing, my shapes are primarily 2D, not 3D. This makes everything too flat.

Another thing, not seen in the finished work, is that I noticed I was making things too symmetrical; real faces almost always have a slight yaw around the neck, and that tilt means the eyes are closer to one side or the other; this meant I often was squeezing / moving the eyes around incorrectly, trying to create the wrong amount of space. Another thing to look out for.

Also, and I'm happy about this, I've noticed some triangular formations around the eyes / nose (I have seen these in art books) and the lines of the mouth (not seen in art books, but you see a little of it in the shapes of the mouths in the Simpsons) as well as curved rectangles between the lower lip and curve of jaw, and to a lesser degree between eyebrow and hairline on some people. All put together, they helped me get the landscape in place better this time, making the overall thing look less borken.

But not completely. Once mirror-flipped, some of the lopsidedness is more clear, especially on the kid:

Ugh. Well, back to the drawing board.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

Quick Sharpie sketch of the cover of Drawing the Head and Hands by Andrew Loomis. Whenever I'm having trouble grokking something, I usually do best if I go back to the beginning and review my fundamentals, so I searched through my collection of drawing books and started with this one. I like Loomis's work: while it is old school, he draws well and communicates well about how to draw. In this case, I'm going to try to methodically go through the book, as I started to a while back with his Figure Drawing For All It's Worth, which is perhaps my second favorite art book after Wizard's How to Draw: Getting Started.

In this case, I haven't even cracked open the book, or even tried roughs: to free up some time to chill on my Saturday night, I just started with a quick Sharpie sketch to warm up based on the cover. It's tricky, as you need to make bolder choices on what is shade or not when using a Sharpie, and Loomis is using several levels of value here. Nevertheless, the result is ... not terrible, though Sharpie resolution limits the drawing, and I missed some delicateness of the face's features. But on a closer, side-by-side inspection, you can see some of the flaws more clearly:

Lining up the nose and mouth (which matched best, shown in light grey above) revealed three or four things right off. First, I had missed a tilt to the head (corrected in the side-by-side above). Second, I had made the mouth too small and high compared to the jaw (in the correction, this shows up as the jaw being too low, but the real problem was the reverse, as I started with the jaw; the eyes being too high is another part of this overall misestimation of facial features). Third, the hair is too small, showing I'm decent locally, but not great at getting the overall page distances - what I call the "landscape" - correct. This means a feature may be OK, but their relationships may be bad.

Fourth, I'm still having control problems on drawing lines. You can see this most easily with the left eyebrow. Three out of four of my lines land where I want them to, and the fourth seems to pop to a wholly different place. Perhaps this is just a need for practice, practice, practice, but given that I have a history of RSI issues, I plan to keep an eye on this.

Nevertheless, I enjoy the Sharpie sketches, because they're quick, you have to commit, and you get near-immediate feedback about whether the ideas you're trying are working, as opposed to various forms of full render, where I can get lost in the trees without realizing I've set the forest on fire.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

Not quite so quick sketch of Gal Gadot, roughed in non-repro blue. I have to say, I'm not so happy with this one: the thing I do where the face gets squashed is full in force here, this time even drawing the hair down on it. And this is with me working on the face proportions a few times to avoid that.

Even flipping it upside down didn't help. The problems are clearer to see here:

The hair's too big at top and too small at bottom and the whole face gets pulled down and to the left. Again I think experimenting with tracing might be a good thing to do here to help me re-learn the landscape, and now that Camp Nano is over perhaps I can do that.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur