The Three Year (and One Month) Retrospective

As I mentioned last time, I did have quite a lot planned for the blog's third birthday.  I had images of all the major stuff I've done laid out for comparison, a sketch from each month since the blog began laid out in a time line and a few things more.  You don't get any of that.  Firstly the drive with those images on died, including the original scans from the sketchbooks, but that was OK since I had all of them uploaded.

Unfortunately on the day I went to get the uploaded images Flickr (where I uploaded the first years worth of images for reasons I've now forgotten) changed how things are linked so those early images also appear to have gone.  I have lower res versions on facebook still, but you can imagine I was a bit fed up with the whole thing by this point.  Oh, and my sketchbook fell apart, which really capped my lethargy for the whole thing.

Over the next few months I'll slowly transfer the images from facebook (those I also placed there) back over to the blog so there's still a record of the first year of progress.  No point having a blog about progression if the first year is a blank after all.  So after all that I've cobbled together two images for discussion below.

Sketches
So improvement is most apparent here.  The sketches from 2001 are from the first couple of months, 2011 about a year later and so on for the latter two images.  In terms of poses and form I think I've actually backslid since 2012, which is a bit depressing.  This may be because I haven't been keeping up on gesture drawing, or maybe for some completely different reason, but elements of the anatomy are improving.  I'm hoping it's a case of two steps forward one back; we'll find out next year.

In terms of faces and such there is steady improvement though, so that's good.  Before next year I hope to have made more progress with expressions as right now everyone looks  a bit blank faced.

I am happy I went through this though as even I can see a clear improvement between the 2010 and 2013 sections.  It's slow going, but progress is definitely being made.

None of these are from reference by the way - since I hadn't done much from reference recently I figured I would stick to the stuff I sketched without any.  I most certainly need to do more stuff from reference again as it helps improve other areas.

Speedpaints
Each row here represents a different year (and at the bottom right you can see my latest, which I have not yet blogged about).  I think there is less obvious improvement here than there was in th sketching to be honest, but there is some.  The time taken over these varies wildly, with the latest one taking much longer than almost anything else.  It's possible the improvement is only because I'm more likely to take my time now, but in fact the last one took longer because I used ArtRage 4, and the controls for painting don't lend themselves as well to speedpainting as those in 3.5 Studio Pro - at least not until I'm used to the differences.  It's still a contributing factor though I'm sure, but I am making some progress.  Now all I have to do is produce more of them.  In the first 6 months of speedpainting I cranked them out, now I can go a month an not paint anything.  Wonder why I've lost the desire to do them all the time...

And that's it.  Teeny tiny retrospective for the third anniversary.  I'll try to do something better next time around.  Hopefully there'll be more to show :)

Next month I'll have a speedpaint post at some point, and hopefully my second post on optical illusions.  Not much more than that though - I'm going to do the sketch posts a little less often because they're a lot of work and they rarely get read. I left an unresizable image in the last one that I only just noticed and apparently nobody else did either (or they did and didn't bother to let me know).  That sort of shows how worthwhile doing the layouts for those is given that it takes me ages to do ;)  So yes, I'll post when there are things worth posting still, but I'm not going to bust my hump just to have something to stick up here - if I keep that up I won't enjoy it any more, and then I won't post anything...

Sketching For April '13

So first of all there was supposed to be a retrospective this week, celebrating 3 years of the blog.  No, that's not a long time compared to some, but for me it's a very long time indeed. Unfortunately the hard-drive with all the images for it, as well as some for my next post on optical illusions, died.  There was more on it than that of course (a terrible speed paint and vast tracts of my reference material - most of my art was backed up though), but those are the two that most have an effect on this blog.  So I still plan on doing both the Retrospective, and the other A Musing post, but that'll have to wait until I get my act together again.  I'm not sure why the drive died, but it's probably because of a static spark or getting jostled wrong when I was trying to transfer it over to my new PC.  Yes, I finally got myself a new PC; built it myself in fact. Other than a handful of small issues (and the large one regarding the drive) it's been a relatively smooth transition.  Far smoother than I thought it would be at least.

So other than ll that this has been a good moth for sketching, even though there are only two images in this post.  I filled about 10 pages in the last three weeks of April, which is rather more than I have been achieving.  None of it is directly from reference (although much of it is inspired by photos and the like, but not drawn until much later), and some of it I'm quite pleased with.  You'll note the lack of an image woth the worse sketches of the month - that's because while there were some hideous ones they were all ones that were mostly rushed.  Those below are ones I either spent a little time on or that turned out well despite being done very quickly.  OK, on to the images.

Head and Face 
Just a bunch of heads, more or less replacing the old "Free Sketching" heading which tended to be mostly heads anyway.  I'll still use the old title if I draw anything more varied, but for now it's bonces. I was mostly focusing on necks and unusual head angles this month (I still can't draw them well from above and below - I'll get there.  You'll note I did a little bit with the hair as well - not much, but more than usual. Hair is something I have terrible trouble with - especially finding styles to use.  Most of the guys are bald, but I think that's because bald guys look slightly less odd than bald girls (nothing wrong with bald girls incidentally, it's just not that common).  The skull in the top left was for the retrospective, but since that's delayed I've shoved it in here as well.  I'm quite pleased with the large portrait of the girl in the top right too.  It's not perfect, but I think she turned out better than almost anything else I've done thus far.

Figures and Anatomy
Less impressive than some of the heads, but still progress I feel (I have been focusing on this stuff a lot less than the heads after all).  Not really much to say except for the self evident bit that there's still a long way to go with my more extended figures.  Oh, you'll note I've gone back to noisy grey as a background - saves time setting these images up as I don't need to be quite as extreme when cleaning up the original scans.

I really do need to do some from reference this month so I can begin tweaking where my errors lie and that sort of thing.

And that's all there is for now.  Apologies again for the delay in this months other planned posts - I'll get to them as soon as I can.  Until then, happy birthday Blog!