Sketching - October to December '14

It's a bit ridiculous that I simplified posting sketches so I could more easily keep up with it, and then haven't posted any for 5 months.  I shall post now, although this still puts me a year behind.  Same rules as last time - Scan page, adjust levels, post image.  Edits allowed for rotating something so you can see it better, or cutting something out you're not supposed to see (for work or whatever. Not because it's bad - you get to see the terrible stuff, or there wouldn't be much to see). So, let's see what I was up to a year ago...

October 2014

Notes:  I quite like TV man, and sweater girl, as well as knife woman on the bottom image.  Jack-o-lantern on the central image wins it though really.  I need to do a painting of that one day (maybe for next Halloween).

November 2014

December 2014

Notes: Chap in the middle of the lower one is based on my Brother (not a good likeness).  It's the only one based on a photo I think.  I quite like a couple here (especially fur collar Aria up there), but nothing is really standing out as amazing.

I think next year I'm going to do with sketching what I did with Speedpainting this year, since I've been sketching less but painting more.  Next year I'll give over that time to more sketching, but it will be study sketching, rather than free form stuff like this.  Hopefully that will get me out of the rut I think I'm stuck in right now (really, this years sketches, few as they are, are no better than these from last year).

All New Year Old Sketching: July to September '14

Despite having quite a lot to post about, I do seem to have fallen behind on the actual posting bit.  This means that for the first time in a while I have quite a few pieces that need posting about, rather than just a handful of speedpaints.  I'm not going to be doing much catching up today though, instead I'll be doing some catch up a little on the other posts I've fallen behind on - the monthly sketch update.

From here on things will be done a little differently.  Usually I scan the sketchbook pages, and then cut out things of note for the month and compose them into a new image.  This has two disadvantages though.  Firstly, it takes bloody ages, and I don't think there's really enough feedback to warrant all the work I put into it (this time sink aspect is the main reason I've fallen behind so badly).  Secondly, it means that consciously or not I end up cutting out a lot of the stuff that's crap.  This gives a false impression of my current progress (actually, my progress about 11 months ago because I'm so far behind).

To combat these issues I'm going to take to just posting the sketchbook pages mostly as they are when scanned.  There will still be some minor edits, and the colour and contrast adjusted for legibility, but instead of a couple of hours per sheet, it's more like a couple of hours per post, which is  a lot more manageable.

Edits will happen for the following reasons:

• I drew something that's directly or indirectly linked with my day job, and might get me into trouble for posting (even if you don't know that it's associated and there are no clues that it might be), or is something I'm working on outside of that job and I want to save the sketch for the final review post.
• Something I like is upside down or at some other odd angle, and I want to show it off better (this will not apply to things that are crap).
• I am so unspeakably ashamed of something I've drawn that I just can't bare to share it (this will be far rarer than editing by omission as mentioned above).
• A piece I like got cropped off during the scan (the sketchbook is larger than the scan bed by an irritatingly small amount), and I want to include it in the main image.

Other than that, you'll get the lot - including the ones where the cat sat on my arm while I was sketching, or my son injured himself headbutting the coffee table and I had to stop, or I was half awake at the time, and so on.  I won't be giving explanations (unless it's an amusing tale, which I doubt), so if it's crap, just accept that it's crap and move on - there are occasionally good things.

JULY 2014

 

 

 

Notes:  None really. This was a fair time ago, so I don't recall a lot of what I was thinking when drawing these.  There's a head profile in the middle of one of them that may be the worst profile I've drawn in recent memory though.  Yuck.  The spaceman planting a flag right at the bottom is sort of adorable though.

AUGUST 2014

 

 

 

Notes: That page with the Minotaurs might be the best single sketch page I've ever done.  No references either, which amazes me when I look at the head on the right side and the decaying fellow next to them.  Other than that, nothing terribly exciting, but quite a lot of it.

SEPTEMBER 2014

 

Notes: A very disappointing month.  I drew more than this (finishing off that half page for one), but it was mostly things for work, so you don't get to see it.  Quite like some things on the full page, such as the chubby businessman the girl in the dress and so on, but it's not exactly exceptional stuff. 

Feeble Sketching - April to June '14

Far from catching up with my sketch posts, I appear to have fallen further behind given that the last one was in August <shudder>.  That's inconvenient, and not terribly well planned.  So in an effort to catch up, I'm just going to post some from the next three months (April through June last year), because there's really not that much to say about them (or, if there was, I've long since forgotten).

On the plus side, I did do a marathon scanning session recently, so I have everything up to last month scanned, I just need to compile them (or, if worse comes to the worse, just adjust the levels and post them as is - eek).

Though based on my current track record, I'll get the next batch uploaded sometime in July...

Feeble Sketching - January to March '14

Well, I have no idea where the last 6 weeks went.  I know I've been busy, but it's not like I have a lot I can show for it.  3 speedpaints since the last speedpaint post (I think that's an all time low), so I need at least one more before I can post about those; a book cover - which was a fair time sink, but not that bad - and again it'll be a little while until I can post about that; and a whole bunch of work stuff that's off the table for years to come, if I can ever show it at all.  So I've been busy, and when I haven't been I've been spending my time playing video games and watching TV.  I have sketched too, but not in a terribly constructive way.   All in all it's been a bad few weeks for anything worth putting on the blog, and let's face it, it's not been the best year for it either.  Hopefully things will smooth out soon.  Until then, here are some terrible sketches I did between January and March of this year.

So January was the most productive month of the three, but as you can see, there wasn't a lot of quality in with the quantity.  Of all these sketches there's only one I actively like (the woman close to the top left corner), and the rest is downhill from there.  I've been told the more fleshed out sketch on the right side (near the top right corner) looks a bit like 'Flowers' from Agents of Shield, and while I watch the show it wasn't consciously supposed to be her.  The only other sketch of note is the large headed tentacle fellow near the middle bottom.  He's actually based on a pattern of condensation I saw on the garage window one morning.  I should probably take him further one day, but for now this is as good as he gets.

February had some moderately better stuff than January, but not a lot of it.  This is basically everything I drew that month, bar a handful of thumbnails so faint I couldn't scan them.  Really not much else to say about any of them really.

Again, this is basically the totality of my sketching in March.  Well, I say that, but it's only if you don't include all the robots.  Nothing exciting, though I'm quite fond of 'bewildered superman' near the left side, and I really have a soft spot for the woman in the bottom left.  For some reason she reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer, despite looking not a jot like her (Hmmm... I should do a Michelle Pfeiffer painting soon).

So that was it for three very disappointing months. I think the next handful were fairly sparse also, but things do pick up a little further along.  Maybe I'll get around to posting the next few next month, leaving only one post before I'm back up to date.  I actually finished off my latest sketchbook today; the first one that took over a year to fill (which should tell you something).

Sorry for the lack of, well, anything, recently.  I'm hopeful I can get that turned around fairly soon.

Sketching - October to December '13

Yes, I've managed to go almost another month between posts, and in all honesty I didn't get as much done in that time as I would have liked in order to share with you over the next one.  It's not that I've been doing nothing, just that not much of it is the sort of stuff this blog covers.  One thing that is related though is that I've been doing some general 'housekeeping', and I'll get into that further down.  Part of the housekeeping has been to actually start compiling the 8 months of sketches I'm behind on sharing, and that's the focus of today's post.  There are also some speedpaints for me to share, but that will probably be next week's entry.

I'm ditching the usual format of these sketching posts until I get caught up.  Usually I compile all the sketches for the time I've been lax and they're organized into different images by what they're of.  This time there's one image per month, with everything lumped in together.  It's marginally more manageable this way, so I'm more likely to do it.

October
It's been a while, obviously, but I don't believe I used reference for any of these, which means that I'm quite pleased with a couple of them (for a change).  Not all of them, and most of them have issues that I will now address.  One thing you'll see wrong with a few of the sketches here, and in the next two months below, is that I do a poor job at getting the angle on the far side of the head right.  You can see it here most obviously with the chaps head on the centre left there, and the girls next to him.  It's like the far side of their head is half as wide again as the side closest.  It's something I've been working on correcting, but it still happens an embarrassing amount of the time.  The  backside on the figure near the top right is also severely malformed, as is quite a lot of the unfortunate woman bottom left.  These things I know.  Things I'm happy with are the portrait in the top right (She's odd looking, but fairly believable), the girl in the bottom right (I'm really happy with some of the cloth creasing there, even though her nose is a bit strange), and the robot, because who doesn't like robots? Yes, this was long before the robot mania of March this year.  The rest all falls somewhere in between.  Oh, and the reaper?  Well, it was October.

November
I didn't sketch all that much in November, so this is actually a good percentage of what I did.  Not much to say, except the arm and shoulder area on the guy top right is appalling, but I really rather dig the hair on victorian dude at the bottom there.  The rest is just somewhere in between.  I guess I was getting better at the torso stuff here, but I've back slid since then, which is a shame.

December
Used some reference for some of these.  That's probably obvious given Luke Skywalker hanging out on the right there.  Two above him is a girl I found on Pinterest.  Sadly I have no idea who she is or who took the picture.  Reverse image search just returns "Dyed Hair," and sure enough she's on the top row of that image search.  It's not a great copy, but I quite like it anyway.  A couple of the other small sketchy portraits were done on the plane when we were going to my Mother's for Christmas.  Pretty par for the course, and this time I did barely any sketching while away because Christmas meant having surprisingly little time to do so.   To the best of my recollection the rest were with no, or minimal reference.

Housekeeping
You probably didn't notice, but there have been a number of small changes to the blog; specifically in the sidebar.  Mostly this was just some reorganisation, but under Pages you'll find two new links.

One is to my other "blog" The Art of James A. Taylor.  It's using Blogger and it's fancy new interface, but it's basically just a gallery of some of my work.  Some of what I consider to be the more successful pieces.  Each post has one image, and where relevant there is a link back to the corresponding post on here.  Not everything I do will go up on there, but what does go up might be up there before it's up here, but I suspect I'll partly be using it as an easy access index to the posts back on this blog.  I've had the blog and URL for ages, but only got around to adding anything to it a couple of weeks ago.

Secondly is the My Useful Links link.  This is more for me than you (in case I need to reach my list of links on a computer I'm not logged into), but it is public, so feel free to take a gander.  It was actually a surprising amount of work to organise it and make it presentable, but I figured if it was going to be public I should at least make it pretty.  If you have any links you think I should add, or that I might be interested in, let me know in the comments, where the tumbleweeds usually hang out.

Other than that I also started going through my Anatomy board on Pinterest and labeling things so they actually turn up when I search them.  I haven't made it very far through that yet, but it's a big board, so it will take a while.

And that's all I have for you today.  Back soon with those speedpaints, and maybe some other things I've been working on.

Sketching for July/September '13

With over a month since my last post, you'd think I'd have lots to show.  You would be wrong.  It's not that I've not been active (though I've not produced anywhere near what I should have - almost no speed paints for example), just that much of that I either can't show, or can't show just yet.  Mostly though this month (and the end of the last) has just been a fairly tough slog.  Long time followers will know that October 5th marks an unhappy anniversary for me, and  as such the two weeks around that date are usually a pretty horrible time for me emotionally.   This year though I also had two friends pass away in the time since I last posted.  The latter was very close, and died on Thursday.   I won't post my thoughts on that here - it's best left to other places, but obviously it's affected me deeply.

But on to happier things, at least for this post.  We've had a house guest for a few weeks, and he's likely to be around for a while longer.  While his presence is obviously a minor distraction from the art thing he's also the model guest, and we're very happy to have him. I do also have some things coming up soon - I'm taking a new painting class, and I'll be posting the results before long.  One of the pieces seems to be fairly popular, (though of course, being me I can't see why) and overall there should be three or four paintings by the end of it.  I've also been working on a new book cover for Dr. Sandifer, and that should be hitting the electronic store shelves in the next few weeks - I'll have a post about it ready when it does of course.  There are also another two covers that are essentially done, and just waiting on a final page count.  Those I'll probably blog about in December and January when the books go live.  So yes, things are happening, even if it's not quite in the places I would hope (anatomy practice, sketching, that sort of thing - I've had no mental time for it the past few months, but hopefully that will change soon).  For now though, let's get the sketching up to date...

Two sheets of heads from July through to September.  Varying quality, obviously, although there are a few I'm really pleased with (yes, that's a rarity - mark this date in your diaries).  The profile of the woman (used n the thumbnail of this post) turned out quite nicely, as did the closeup of the eye to her right.  Below the eye is perhaps the best face I've ever drawn while not referring to a photograph - He just looks very natural to me (albeit like Bill Clinton's younger sibling).  On the larger sheet I like the stylization of the chap in the top left, and the expression of the girl below him.  The arm of the girl to their right turned out okay too.  I've also put a little work into drawing some more diverse ethnicities.  Hopefully that's apparent here.

And here are some figure based sketches. I like bits of many of them, but almost none of them as a whole. I still have a long way to go with this stuff evidently.

And there you have it - Not a lot to be going on with, but it won't be over a month until I post again, so there's more to come fairly soon.

Sketching for May/June '13

I've not been terribly good at keeping up on the blogging of late have I (and long term followers will know this is nothing particularly new)? To be honest I've not been terribly great at keeping up on the art either. That's not to say I'm not doing any, but a good chunk of it is for work, so you'll either never get to see it or you won't for a few years. The work stuff is a big learning curve right now, and as a result it's having a knock on to the art-as-hobby area. In all honesty this last week I might have gotten back on the horse properly, but Saints Row IV was out and I was too busy playing to actually draw anything (I did work on it of course, but even so there were plenty of surprises in there I'd somehow missed during development, and I had a blast). Plus it's right in the middle of allergy season, and I hate drawing when everything is slightly blurred from the results.

So yes, the art and the blog have not been my priority of late (there have been other things going on too, but I won't bore you with them), but now SR4 is done and dusted and there's less pure knowledge being assimilated at work I should be getting back to it. But not this week - I have a deadline of sorts this week.

Anyway! Sketching.

Only two images this time, of which this is the first. There's nothing terribly great here, but there are some areas that even I can tell are showing improvement. There's an improvement in the way I'm defining twisting motions, I think my representation of the abdomen is getting better and even hands and feet are showing a slight improvement from where I was a year ago. So that's all good. The only reference used here was for the lower abdominal and legs image in the lower right, where I worked from my anatomical figurine, but had a go at making the results more feminine (it's a masculine figure). Not perfect, obviously.

I did draw quite a bit more of it, but it's not so much that it was 'bad' as it was quick. The figure in the top right is representative of the stuff I've left out. Just quick near gestures to focus on small things (in this case the jut of the abdomen as it meets the pelvis).

Not much to say about these. Some of them were very successful (I particularly like the girl in the top left and the one with the mohawk), some were pretty disastrous(There's something very Shelly Duval like about the girl in the top right - but not really in a good way). Not much else to say really. No references used across the board, and facbook friend identification though the woman in the lower centre was the same as the person leaning against the fence in the first image when I uploaded these to my gallery there. I'm not sure if that means I've fallen into a rut of drawing everyone the same, or if facebook just plays really fast and loose with it's facial recognition (I suspect a bit of both).

And that's your lot. For now. There will be a little more coming, very soon indeed.

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!

Sketching For March '13

I don't have much to say today.  Yes it's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, and yes this sketching post is a bit late this month, and yes I have yet to complete part two of the last A Musing post.  I could give reasons and excuses as I usually do but what's the point?  Sure, my wife was sick last week but since she spent most of that time in bed I could still have snuck off and written a blog post, but obviously I failed to.  No, I was far to busy playing video games (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider mostly, I preferred the later, but they were both pretty solid, even if I preferred the original Bioshock to Infinite), and watching TV.  And sketching!  I did do a lot of sketching this week (though you don't get to see it until next month of course).  OK, more at the bottom, lets go look at some "Art."   I'll keep writing it to a minimum until the end of the post though.  Most of it would be what I say every month anyway...

Free Sketching

Given how divided my sketching topics have become of late I'm thinking of simply calling Free Sketching Head Sketching or Face Sketches from now on.  Nothing terribly exciting came out of March, but there's some reasonably solid stuff and I'm getting better at necks and positioning the head on a pair of shoulders (I've done well at that a few times in the past, but it was usually more down to luck than judgement I think).

Figure, Anatomy and Form

Again, nothing earth shattering here, but some half competent stuff all the same.  Very happy with the progress I'm making on twisting forms and a feeling of solidity, but it's clear there's a long way left to go before I'm actually happy with most of what I produce.

Sketch Failures

The only really good thing I can say about most of these is that 18 months ago these would have been in the other sketch collections and something far worse would be in the failure image.  It's an odd way to gauge progress, but it's the only objective one I really have.

I realized that the only way I was ever going to improve at this anatomy m'larky was to just draw, and draw, and draw some more, and refer to my books and such as I went along, and I've been really trying to do that over the last few weeks, even when I've not really wanted to.  I still have a long way to go, but I'm doing better with the abdomen and chest and a little better with the hips.  You can see a little of that progress in today's images, though not as much as I would like.
I need to work on poses a little, and a lot on the back, and then a huge amount on the legs (I'll probably get to that in earnest next month).  It's slow progress, what with me pushing 40 and my brain not being as fast to pick up on things as it was, but I'm hoping that this time next year will see me able to draw a full figure as well as I can draw a head now.  Not perfect, but much improved.  Time will tell if I succeed in that goal.
Okay, for someone who had little to say today I've sure just said a lot.

And that's it for this month (probably).  Next month will mark the third anniversary of the blog, and I plan on looking back at some of the progress I've made in that time (That may be a short post then ;)).  Until then, have a good one, and stay out of trouble.