Belated Sketching for September

It's been a while hasn't it? I skipped the first whole month since the blog began (actually closer to two months at this point if I'm honest), and I've not done much art in order to say "Well yeah, but check this out!" either. You may be thinking I've been resting on my laurels after that book cover, or that I've just been slacking. Those in the second group would be closer to the truth; I've totally been slacking, but not without reason.

Some of you already know that the beginning of October (and the end of September) is a particularly hard emotional time for me, and this year saw an anniversary that made it especially so. Before I could get over that little funk there was another emotionally trying time (Mostly for my wife, but obviously what effects her rubs off on me to some extent), and then my Son was sick, and then my wife was sick, and now I'm sick - but it's now more irritating than "feel like death", hence my finally writing a post.

So the emotional stuff basically nuked my inspiration and drive so I did very little for the month. I did enough to get some more posts, but no speedpaints and not much sketching. There goes my one speedpaint a week intent - I'll get back on it soon. Anyway, before all this I did scan in September's sketching, so I have that to show at least...

Free Sketching
I may as well start with some reasonably good stuff. These are the best general sketches I did back in September. If the girl with the straight blonde hair looks familiar it's because I realised afterwards that I had inadvertently drawn her looking quite a bit like the girl in this post, except there she was drawn from a reference, and here just a random sketch that looks amazingly like her. Kinda creepy that. Other than that just another month of general sketching. I do quite like the blending on the chap in the top left, although her looks slightly creepy (the hair doesn't help either).

From Reference
These ones are taken from reference. Unfortunately the three on the right are takn from Pins on pinterest that were un-credited and "uploaded by user" so I don't know where they came from - they're just lose interpretations anyway, I don't think they look much like the original photos. The girl on the left is based on Megan Morris, but is also a poor likeness. Megan was on America's Next Top Model once and got kicked off early. I think she was robbed personally.

Focus Task 1
Focus this month is profiles. This was for the Open Art Group, but that's slowly fading away unfortunately - I'll have to keep doing these sort of things just for myself (now I'm getting back into it that is). These aren't in order, so you can't really see the improvement through the month unfortunately. My favorites are 'Asian looking science guy' and cap girl (both on the second row).

Focus Task 2
I also did some arms. I find arms abnormally difficult to draw, so I gave them some focus time. Most of them are wrong, but I think they're an improvement on what I was drawing before. Some of the hands turned out okay too. Since I've not drawn much since this I've probably forgotten everything I learned. So it goes.

Gesture Drawing
Just some gestures. Highly variable quality. Nothing much to add except that I haven't done any since. I must rectify this shortly.

Sketching Failures
I think the awfulness speaks for itself don't you. Basically revolting.

Well, that's all for now. I'll try and get what little I did in October compiled soon, and there's also the painting class I'm taking to talk about (plus my terrible paintings to show of course), and after that I should be basically back on track. We're planning to visit my Wife's family for Thanksgiving, and that usually gets some dreadful sketching out of me, so that's something to look forward to. Until then, excelsior!

Sketching for August (and the OAG)

Well, yeah. So I haven't been posting much in the past few months as you may have noticed. This isn't because I don't like posting (although prepping these sketch posts can be a real drag), more it's with me just not having much to post.

August was an especially dry month, it seemed to go by extremely quickly and I didn't do much in the way of sketching; I thought - Turned out I did more than I expected, just not the usual stuff, but more on that in a minute. I had promised another post last month, but in the end I felt that the contents of that were better blended with my regular sketch posts - the aims are similar even though the results are less exciting.

You'll notice some changes this time around - they may stay, they may not. Only time will tell. Oh, The ORG? Read on MacDuff!

Sketch Practice

So the most obvious change is that I've switched from a white background to a noisy grey for the sketches. This is because the new scanner introduces noise I can't fully get rid of without far more cleanup than I'm willing to spend, so the noisy grey hides some of that. Additionally I'll be using white more often than I have previously, and if the background is white you won't be able to see it. It's better than th epink I used to go with though right?

You'll also notice there are only two images (and none of them is the usual "bad" one. Well, I said it was a dry month, so with the exception of a couple of ones that were scribbled so quickly that of course they're bad this is pretty much all I actually did in the traditional manner last month. It's telling that it's now September the 7th, and I've already done half the amount of sketching I did for the whole of last month! So this is pretty much it.

Thankfully (and unusually) I'm pretty happy with most of it. Highlights (for me) are the high-and-tight haired guy in the lower right of the Free Sketch picture along with the three women in a triangle to the center left, also the girl to the left of the figure practice image came out OK.

High and tight looks a little like my cousin (unintentional), while the lass with the Afro was inspired by a girl serving at Little Caesars on the day we got our new cats, but nothing here is drawn from any direct reference.

Open Art Group

I mentioned Focus posts in the last sketching post (without actually explaining it seems), and then didn't post a follow up. Well, this is what it was about; the OAG or Open Art Group, aspects of which I'll be rolling into the regular blog posts where relevant.

Ben, one of the guys I work with (and a ridiculously good artist himself - puts me to shame) came up with the idea about six weeks ago. You have a group that meets once a week that consists of people who want to improve their art. Every other week you have a (fairly vague) Focus for people to work on, and then you all get together the following week and discuss them. Not necessarily critique them, just discuss.

We opened the idea up to the company and got a range of people attending, from our concept artists to programmers who've never held a pencil. It's nice to have such a good spread (amusingly the programmers are the most consistent attendants :))

So, the first focus was "Shapes & simple objects" the second was Gesture Drawing and so on.

For "shapes" I chose circles, and just drew lots of them. This was to loosen up my wrist and get the curved flow going as well as to just improve my circles -apparently this is recommended by Vilppu in a book I have yet to buy (shame on me). Lucky you, you get to see all 15 pages of circles (various media) shrunk down into one big image (click to expand of course).

So I didn't go completely loopy I also did a houshold object (our TV remote - photo for your reference, though it was drawn - badly - from 'life'), and a set of common 3D primitives (I messed up the lighting, though it took Ben to point that out)

The next Focus was Gesture Drawing. You've seen this in the past if you're a long time reader, but I let myself slide doing it, to my detriment it turned out. If you're new the idea is to get the feel and 'gesture' of an image in a short time span. This time it's ten pages condensed into one image. I should point out that reducing the size like this does make some of them look rather better than they did originally. Some of these, even at this size, are standing in for this month's "Bad" image (some are OK though - click to expand).  The time on all of them was one minute per figure and I used a range of media (Charcoal, graphite sticks, pencil, ink brush and Sketch Book Pro)

And that's it. I think part of the reason I did less of my usual sketching last month was because of all the OAG stuff on the side. This is likely to continue to greater or lesser degrees and so I'll continue to include them at the end of regular posts, or even mixed in with them where relevant (there'll be some in the upcoming speedpaints posts for example, as one of the speedpaints was for the OAG).

Let me know what you think of the idea of including the Open Art Group in with the posts if you have any issues (no comments will mean "I don't care it's fine").

Sorry this one was so wordy, the next one will likely be less so.

The Best and Worst Sketching of August

Sometimes nothing goes according to plan. Take this last weekend for example. It was a long weekend, so plenty of time to do plenty of things, right? Wrong.
I had plans. I planned to speak to a friend in the UK, paint a couple of speed paints, paint with some real paint, finish the book I was reading, play video games and some traditional games with my son, make burgers on the grill/barbecue, go for pizza as a treat for the kid and so on. Almost none of this came to pass. It wasn't that anything major went wrong, but a few little things did, like my Son had a tantrum and injured my thumb with an unintentionally well aimed kick, reducing my gaming time (it hurt) and sketching/painting time (it hurt) and so on. It wasn't a bad weekend, just unproductive. I did get everything setup for a blog post though, but it hurt too much to type for long, so here it is today.

I didn't sketch as much in August as I usually do. I'm not certain why, but I put it down to a combination of Jet-lag followed by illness followed by gorilla scale allergies and the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which has been mentioned here before of course), but if these excuses fail to please you you may inset the usual excuse instead (that I'm a lazy bum). But enough of the excuses - I did enough to post, so here they are, starting with some general sketching.

Sketching

The Good
With the exception of the woman in the lower right none of these were from reference, which is sorta cool. It would appear that I'm back on a "drawing women" kick, but the figure with their back to the camera is a man... admittedly one with a slightly girly backside. Other than the uncertainty regarding the gender of his posterior though I think it's an OK figure. I don't know why I gave the fellow in the bottom left wings, but it worked out looking cool and it seemed like a good idea at the time, so that's OK. The girl in the top right looks a little like River from Firefly but isn't based on her - I like it, but I really messed up her hand, poor girl (I really need to work on hands again soon). Oh, and the woman on the right is based on a small thumbnail of the cover of an old Beauty and the Beast DVD (I think). I like how she came out (because there's nothing wrong with coming out now is there?).

The Bad
To be fair, none of these is dreadful, with the exception of the punk looking fellow on the left (the less said about him the better), they just lack a little something here and there. The girl with the huge head amuses me, and I like how her body came out - she was in fact supposed to have a slightly enlarged head, but I overdid it, quite a lot. The portrait in the bottom right is of my friend Cath, and while it's a fine portrait (and does look a bit like her) I'm not at all happy with the way I drew her mouth, so it goes in with the bad. Sorry Cath.

Random Pose Studies

The Good
I'm not going to talk about these much as the images pretty much say it all, but it's been quite some considerable time since I did these timed pose sketches and I really need to get back to it to stay in practice (and learn by doing of course). I'll post the bad ones too, prepare yourself; these really are quite terrible.

The Bad
Speaks for itself doesn't it?

And that's it for this evening. Lots more to come, despite my lack of productivity of late. Oh, and one other note, I just got a pair of brand spanking new monitors. More about those some other time, but I thought I'd mention them now because they're really rather spiff :)

Sketchy Von Sketcherson

I've been putting off updating the past few weeks because I didn't feel I had enough to warrant a post. Eventually, yesterday, I thought I should probably just gather what I could so it didn't look like I'd gone to Bermuda and been lost in the Triangle. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a huge amount of stuff to post. Well, alright, not huge, but far more than I've happily posted alone in the past.

A further surprise was discovering that very little of it was all out bad - this is funny because while drawing it I thought most of it was dreadful, and bemoaned losing my mojo to sickness. Perhaps I just lost my perspective... Or perhaps I've lost it now because I'm sick, again (I know, this winter's been crazy for teh sikcies). Either way, there's no good or bad this time, just "Not so bad" and "Not so good".  I'll start with some portrait sketches.

Not so Bad
Some of these look nothing like the folks they're based on, but look like quite nice pictures in their own right (That's supposed to be Robert Duval int he hat for example). Others, like Jezza Clarkson in the middle there, look quite like themselves. Still more, such as the girl in the top right and centre left, aren't based on anyone, but I still quite like them.

Not so Good
See? None of these are truly dreadful, and those that come close to dreadfulville are detoured away by having an odd charm to them. I have an especial fondness for the thumbs up chap with a mustache for some reason. Only one of these is based on reference. I think it's obvious enough that I'll let you work out which for yourselves.

Now it's time to move on to some figure and gesture sketching

Not so Bad
Nothing terribly exciting here - most, though not all, are based off reference such as the random pose viewer or anatomy books, but while not being terribly exciting they are fairly good. I've even used perspective on a couple of them...

Not so Good
Now I'm looking at them again I think there are some that should have been in the Not So bad image and some of those that should be here. Lots of these are borderline "okay" (despite that poor woman in the top right's hideous visage). I quite like the little fight scene, and Mopey Joe in the top left looks oddly like someone I know.

Next up, prepare yourselves, it's time for something horrible!

Feet
Feet are gross aren't they? Except for you, with your foot fetish; step back please and try and hide the grin. So, kinda icky, but also considered rather hard to draw. You'll not that I've rarely drawn them over the last year. This wasn't a conscious choice, I just didn't have need to, but it did mean I needed to practice. Expect quite a few feet and the occasional hand from now on because practice makes perfect no matter how boring it is for the observer.

Regardless, some of these look fairly good, some of them are a little freakish. Only two are based on real feet (and I mean real, not photos, no photo reference for once). One is mine, and one is my wife's. Don't ogle the wrong one mister fetishist please.

And Finally
Just some random sketches that I thought were fun. I now realise I missed one, so that can go in next months round. Why a dinosaur pirate with a robot parrot (Though at least one person thinks it's an alligator - I can live with that)? My son's birthday is rapidly approaching and he wants a pirate dinosaur robot party. He's turning 4, what can you do? I like him (Dino Pirate, Son is a given), though I wished I'd used some reference for his hat as it looks a little wonky to me.

Top right is a demon/fairy/bat-girl thing. I don't recal why I drew that one, but I sort of like her - maybe I'll do a more finished piece. Finally there's Guffaw the Mighty... I mean Thor the Mighty, from the upcoming motion picture experience. I'm quite looking forward to it, even though I evidently can't draw him.

Cold in the Lazy Bones

By my reckoning it has been about three weeks since I posted anything. This isn't very good at all. In my pathetic defense there was a week in there where the entire household got sick, but this is sort of offset by much of my time being taken up with playing video games. Fallout: New Vegas and Little Big Planet 2 are both sink-holes for time, and it's easy to lose track until you realise it's too late to do what you actually mean to do, such as draw, or update the blog.  All that still leaves a week unaccounted for... perhaps I dropped it down the back of the couch...

As a result I've not only not posted, but I haven't done much in the way or art either. Oh, I've done a little sketching, which I'll cover here, and I've done two ArtRage paintings that I'll cover shortly, and some speed paints, but not a lot in comparison to previous months, and very little in the way of actually improving. I really need to get on with it or I'll never be any good. Anyway, on to the feeble number of sketches done this month.

OK, to be fair I have done slightly more than this, but these are the best and the worse. Not only that but they're a mix of referenced and "out of my head" doodling. I didn't do enough of anything to make it worth breaking them up into other images. I'll let you decide which are the best and which are the worst - This month I honestly can't decide myself.

That's it, move along.  I'll try to get another post with something fractionally more exciting in it done soon.