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.

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!

January '13 and (December '12) Sketching

They say it never rains but it pours. I don't know who 'they' are, but they've been saying it for an awfully long time. Right now, with the rain streaming down the windows this seems a particularly apt term, as I do seem to have rather a lot to be getting on with after a month of relative artistic calm. Much of this comes from work, and so you may never see it dealt with here (though it's not out of the question eventually), but some of it I'll be dealing with here eventually. Eventually is an important word there, as I won't have much time to update the blog or do side work to show for a little while, so if this is the only post during February I hope you'll forgive me. But you're not here to hear me bemoan my work load, you're here to see art (come to the wrong place I suspect), so lets get on with it.

I did rather a lot of sketching in January. This may be the first time I've ever had to leave out "good" stuff because there was actually quite a bit of it. Usual fare here, although I really like the girl on the right, she turned out rather well. Here hair is actually based on hair I saw in a photograph, but I don't consider it from reference as I did the sketch sometime after seeing the photo, so I didn't refer to it directly.

The second set of Free sketching is more experimental than the first I guess. Quite happy with the Elfish girl with short hair, and the more cartoonish fellow to her upper right. The chap with the extra large nose didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked, but it's fine enough I guess. But anyway, this is more a sheet of characters than I might usually do.

The final free sketching of the month (and yes, mostly portraits this time), and I have to say I'm really pleased with these ones. I especially like baldy at the bottom there - the scan doesn't really do the shading on him justice because he really came out rather well (in my opinion).

I realised I'd been slacking off learning anatomy and such, and so during January I made an extra effort in that regard. This sheet is mostly my trying to visualize high level shapes and forms and how they fit together. I've done nothing really from a direct reference over the past 2 months, so this was a nice way to find my weaknesses so I can focus some reference drawing time on them this month (if I get any time anyway). Twisting and bending (and combinations thereof) seem to be especially weak, so that's a place to start when I next approach this sort of thing.

More of the same, but this one also features the focus I gave to the muscles of the upper torso. I still need to do some work on these, but I'm also going to move on and work on the musculature around the hips and upper legs soon. After that the back, the legs, arms (again) and so on. That lightcycle is based on a toy I own - technically that's from reference, but I didn't see the point of having a From Reference sheet with only one thing on it, and also the angle it's shown here was not the one I was looking at - it was an exercise in extrapolation.

And lastly, as always, the sketching disasters. Some of these don't look as bad as I remember them looking, but really it's a great sheet to look at in order to think "must do better". Top Right and Middle left were an attempt to try something a little more Picasso like. That didn't go so well.

And that's it. If I don't get time to post again this month I'll see you in March some time(really, circumstances beyond my control and all that - not that I'm really complaining). Next month is also the Blog's 3rd anniversary, so I'll try and put something together for that. Not like a cake or anything, but maybe a progress so far type affair.

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 July

Life's funny, full of little jokes. After my last post saying I wouldn't be taking any commissions for a while I remembered I'd already told someone I would do one for them. So I had to do that one obviously. That's done, and there should be a post about it this coming weekend. So with that out of the way I renewed my vow, and then had an offer I couldn't refuse, so I'm probably doing another. You won't hear more about that one for a while, but really I quite literally could not refuse it without kicking myself later.

So with all that going on, as well as other things (New kittens in the house, son being sad because his best friend's moved to Canada, wife starting college in a week etc) I've barely done any sketching so far this month. Luckily last month I was a mite more productive...

Free Sketching

I'm really going to try and get through this one with a minimum of writing, honestly (TOO LATE!), but I think I should point out the ones I really quite like. The Two guys to the left of the Troll (lower left) came out pretty well, as did the guy to their upper right (past the sketchy woman). The girl almost in the middle, who's darker than those surrounding her is pretty good too (and done in Charcoal for a change), while the rest are varying states of "not terrible".

Figure and Perspective Practice

Nothing outstanding here, but some fairly solid ones. I'm quite pleased with the poses on the guy and the girl (and the dog) in the top right corner, as well as the bowing figure below them. There's also a quite dynamic looking figure over on the left hand side; very sketchy, but I like the weight and balance of it. Have I mentioned recently that I don't copy these from other pictures? I think I need to reiterate it on occasion for people who don't regularly read the blog. Sometimes they're based on the memory of a picture, but usually they're just made up. Same with the free sketching.

From Reference

These on the other hand are most definitely based on photos. The two girls were based on a couple of thumbnails on pinterest, the headless chap in the middle is from some old photo of a bodybuilder back in the 1940's and in the lower right it's Jean Luc Picard (but not a very good one. Charcoal again though).

If you're wondering why some of the sketches look choppier than usual it might be down to the new scanner. It's a lot harder to clean up the general noise of the paper grain that it was on the old one, so some of them still have "dust" around them. It's pretty minor, but if you notice it that's why it's there.

Oh Dear

Okay, so I though this one came out really well, right up until I finished it and stood back.  At that point I gasped in horror because I'd buggered up her eye in the most amateurish way possible - one is far higher up than the other.  She's a Frankenstein's monster!  I did worse sketches in July, but this was far and away the most disappointing.  I've not even cleaned the image up all that much, so you get to see that paper grain I was talking about.  Blech!

And for this month that's all you're getting. The focus posts are probably moving to another post (at least this month they are), so watch out for that in a few days.

Oh, all right, have a bad sketch of one of the new kittens done in Sketchbook Pro (which I bought last week but have barely used).

The Best and Worst Sketching of May and June

This one's rather late in coming, and for that I apologize (you're used to it by now I'm sure).

Since I last posted I've had another virus infect my machine, I've upgraded windows and re-installed twice (partly due to the virus), gone deaf in one ear due to allergies (which cleared up - but now it's happened to the other ear) and discovered my scanner no longer works (Windows 7 incompatible, there's nothing actually wrong with the scanner itself). There was probably some other stuff in there too, but if I don't remember it it's probably not important.

Thankfully I had the good sense to scan sketches before that first re-install, so I do in fact have something to show today.

 Figure and Perspective Practice

I really need to work on my anatomy properly soon (and I'm taking steps to make that more likely to happen - but more on that some other time). It's improving, and I have a general idea of it, but I regularly forget some of it when I most need to remember (mostly on arms) and other parts I have very little knowledge of at all (legs). Still, some of this turned out okay.

I particularly like how the girl in the lower middle turned out, as well as the guy in the upper right corner. Other than that, fairly average stuff.

Free Sketching

Lots of free sketching this time around - much more than I would have expected, but I guess if you post two months worth at once that's what you get.

Not much to comment on except that I think the sketches in #1 are far better than in #2. And yes, that is a chainsaw; it's a prelim for a work I'll probably never get around to painting (but there again, I might.

Focus Sketching

I didn't really have a focus during these two months, but I did draw more hands than usual. Many of them are attached to people and can be seen in the other images, but this is a small selection of free floating ones. Still bad, but improving.

Work From Reference

Not a great deal given the time period. I need to set some time aside to do this more often - they're rarely very large and don't tend to take long when they're at this level.

Anyway, I had a link to the image the first one is based on, but it got nuked by the virus. If I find it again I'll add the link here. The guy with the hair is based on this image by Random Acts

I don't recall where the other two came from, just random images on the web I think.

Oh Dear

And as usual I'm finishing on a low note with some of the worst (as in, most disappointing) sketching of the time period. I really don't have much to say about these - they sort of speak for themselves (admittedly spattering you with phlegm as they do so).

Anyway, hopefully less of a delay before the next post. I have some speedpaints lined up to show, and a new scanner is winging it's way across the country to me so I can scan this months sketches for next months post. Whoopie.

Grave Yard Haunt

There is a saying, allegedly of Chinese origin, that goes "May you live in interesting times." It's thought to be a curse rather than a blessing. I've had an interesting month.
Nobody has died (yet), or ended up in hospital (well, once, briefly), or lost their job (That I know personally), or have gotten a divorce (thus far) but a great many things have occurred to lower my priority on updating the blog. I can't go into all of them, so I won't go into any of them, but this is the reason I've not updated the blog so far this month, and why I've barely sketched at all recently.
That said, I have painted a second commission and I'm working on a third - This entry covers the second. It's not a particularly mature subject, but you should be warned that zombies walk below.

And there they are, walking. Why are they walking? Well, they're zombies, that's what they do. Not for nothing is the comic turned TV show called The Walking Dead. But looks can be deceiving, for these zombies just look like they're walking, when in fact they're standing very very still.

"Can you do me a painting?" I was asked by a friend at work (We'll call him "Moby"). "Depends," I replied "I'm already scheduled for one piece by the end of the month, so I can't do anything complicated."

It turned out that he wanted a painting of some zombies for his wife's birthday, "in the style of a horror comic cover." You may find this somewhat strange, but you're not familiar with Moby and his wife. They live for Halloween. Each year, starting in August, they begin construction of a "Yard Haunt" for All Hallows Eve. Over the years this has grown into quite a display, with witches cackling over cauldrons, transforming werewolves, giant spiders, custom made gravestones for fictional characters and a red lit vampire overseeing it all; but the center piece is the zombies - lots of them.

A couple of years ago I based this speed paint on the vampire in their display, and Moby's better half was so taken with it I was asked if they could print a copy, which I believe is now hanging in their hallway, so naturally as a dutiful husband Moby felt that if she liked that she'd like a more polished piece even more. Enter me.

There was a catch though - it had to be finished by noon on her birthday in order for him to get it printed and framed (yes, this is another digital piece - I'll get around to real paint again eventually), and it needed to be poster sized. So, a tight time limit (12 Days) and a hefty resolution (The biggest I've done). No problem! How hard can it be?

The next day I had these rough sketches and a contract. Signed and paid (up front, no pressure then), "something like the second one" selected and a handful of reference photos handed over I went home and got started.

Firstly I had a small problem. The photos were generally of a good quality, with lots of shots of the three zombies I was to paint, but none of them were from terribly useful angles, and every one had different lighting to the others. I don't think there was a clear shot of their feet either. Tricky... Need a solution. I could draw the figures, but that's a little hit or miss for something that needed to be complete in 11 days, so I turned to a package called "Daz 3D" that allows you to pose figures in 3D. It's designed to do all sorts of fancy things, but for the purposes of this exercise we can think of it as a high-tech version of those wooden artist dummies (which always seem to be crap, by the way).

Here's the resulting render; Originally I was planning on lighting it like this, but gave up on that idea fairly quickly. You'll note I've also mocked up a basic graveyard, but for time reasons I ended up only completing the front two gravestones. The poses are based on the actual poses of the Yard Haunt zombies so as to be as authentic as possible. The heads would eventually be based directly on the photographs I had with the lighting tweaked to better fit the scene.

I kept each major element on it's own layer to save time, although that actually didn't work out as well as I'd hoped since the image was so big my PC choked on it and slowed down a lot. Still, it did allow for easier tweaks as I went along. Here you can see the development of the layout and the color scheme as well as the first pass on the the zombies. I had no idea what I wanted in the background at this point, other than "Trees", so that's a bit rough. These four images show the first bit of digital "trickery" as well - I resized the female zombie after first painting her so she didn't seem to loom over the one in front (the second time was resizing the lead zombies head later on, though I regret that in retrospect).

It was around the time of the first of these four images that my PC caught a virus and I managed to lose two hours of actual work as a result, plus about 8 hours of painting time while I cleared it off my system. Nasty business, and the lost time was primary in my deciding to simplify the image by losing the background graves and not including the comic title as I'd originally planned.

My compromise was to make the mist a lot thicker than originally intended, and to have the trees and clouds form a skull in the background. This latter was inspired by the Mondo Return of the Jedi Poster, which is extremely cool. I didn't look up their poster until I'd completed this, but I had a recollection of it from the first time I saw it last year.

The sky and the fog posed a minor problem, and I cheated a bit by painting them half size for speed's sake and then bringing them into the final picture and painting over the top for the final result. The gravestones are based on actual ones they use in their yard display, which I thought was a nice touch, though you can barely see the one on the right of the image.

Finally, here's a more detailed look at the painting of the female zombie (they name them, but I forget the names). I can probably do better than this, but not while rushing at the same time as capturing a 50's horror comic vibe. I was concerned that my compromises would not meet with Moby's approval, but I figure that based on the time I spent on it he'd probably got his money's worth regardless. I just hoped that the birthday girl would like it.

She did, thankfully. Liked it enough that I got invited to her birthday dinner where she and her family enthused about it at length. That was nice, and appreciated, although being a humble soul I found the whole thing a little awkward (I don't do that well with compliments, don't quite know how to take them, though they're always nice to have).

So yeah, I've not seen the final print as yet, but I'm told it looks pretty great and is really big and cast a shadow over all her other presents that day, so that's great. For myself I'm not completely happy - if I were to do it again I would change the composition slightly, moving the female zombie to the front (I think her light shade draws the eye more than the guy in brown), but given the time constraints and the reception I guess I should be quite pleased with myself. I know one thing, it was certainly an interesting experience ;)

The Best and Worst Sketching of March and April

So this post took longer than planned, but it's taken me two weeks to work through all the sketches I did in the previous two months. As usual I had vastly underestimated the number of sketches I'd managed to do in that time.
April had very few sketches of course, which you could have guessed since I was away for a good chunk of it, and what I did while I was away was covered in the previous post, but March had far more than I expected. I could have posted something else I suppose, but in all honesty I had nothing else of interest. I have some stuff in the works, but I wasn't (and I'm still not) in a position to write them up yet, and while it was the blog's 2nd birthday the other day I was too busy to do anything for it - maybe the next post will be a belated birthday post.
But for now, to the sketches...

Figure and Perspective Practice
Not a lot to say about this - I really need to work on my anatomy still (I keep putting it off, and then learn a tiny bit before putting it off for a while again and then coming back to it - not the most conducive way to learn). There are a couple here I'm really pleased with, but in the main it's all a little meh. I am getting happier with the proportions though, but I think my heads still tend toward being a little small.

Free Sketching
While the figure sketching was all a little dull, there are some free sketches I'm really quite pleased with. As usual they're predominantly heads, because I like drawing heads and I'm still a long way from getting them right, but here I think I got a few good ones. Oh, by the way, there are two images there, you need to enlarge them separately, if you have a mind to.
So, in the upper image I quite like the profile picture of the girl in the lower right, as well as the rather angry looking woman above her (or is she in pain... I think she looks ticked off either way). There are a handful of caricatures (The large girl, who was more a study in shadow than anything, the chubby chap to Miss Angry's right and the girl in the trucker cap), and the triangle of guys in the top left are pretty natural looking - I'm particularly pleased with the lowest of them.
In the second image things aren't quite as good (in my opinion), but I do like the elven girl in top right (Elf ears are cute, alright?), and the girl next to her - the others are all varying amounts of OK, but not really worth dwelling on.

Works from Reference
Not a lot to say beyond what I referred to, except that there are more misses here than hits, particularly with the eyes of the two guys - neither is dreadful, but the eyes are wrong so they don't look like who they're supposed to. Working clockwise from top left the pictures are:

• Bore by Ictoa
• Figure 5 from Katlovestock
• A poor sketch of a model I found on a pic site (where they never give credits unfortunately)
• Dean from Supernatural
• Jeans Stock 47 - Contemplating from Akissi
• Dirty Harry (with bad eyes and no gun)
• My Mother in Law (she was watching children's TV with my son at the time)
• Another sketch of the model I mentioned above, but this time more stylized (I prefer this one, though it's less accurate)  

The chances of Akissi turning up again are fairly high because she has a wonderfully expressive face, and lots of cool stock. katlovestock will probably pop up again too, because she does really phenomenal poses with good lighting and, well, she's appeared before.

Oh Dear 
Really, words fail me - these were actually the worst, as well as the most disappointing. I think the most irritating thing about them is how close each of them comes to being not terrible in some ways. Really though, Stretch Armstrong Waist, a Hermaphrodite and a man with eyeliner... if I ever actually need to draw any of those things I now know where to look for reference. Yuk.

OK, until the next time... I'll try to do that late birthday post, and I have a couple of other things I might be able to do - but the next fully finished piece of work is probably a few weeks off at least. Sorry.