Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The Best and Worst Sketching of January

I shouldn't be posting today really, I'm off work sick, so by rights I should be lying on the couch with a book and groaning a lot. Unfortunately my Son has a friend over to play and he's terrified of me. I mean really scared, like run screaming from the room whenever I show my face scared.

This is odd as I've never been anything but nice to him, so I'm forced to conclude that his parents have told him that the bogeyman is a 6'4" Welshman with a deep voice and a gut and he's made the connection.
So I'm banished to the office until he goes home.

But enough about me, and more about the sketches...


Figure and Perspective Practice
I've had some issues with my perspective stuff recently. It started out well, as you've probably seen in the last couple of months, but during January my brain decided that it wasn't going to play ball any more, arguing "you couldn't possibly see their feet from that angle" even though you almost certainly could. Hands and feet are still a blind spot of course, but I'm improving slowly (very slowly). In fact I drew quite a few hands on their own in January, but they were neither good enough to post, nor really bad enough to go in the bad. I'll try and do a really good one by next month, or maybe a really bad one...


Free Sketching
Nothing from Reference in January (weeeell sort of, but we'll get to that), so straight to the free sketching. As usual this is predominantly portraiture stuff. That girl to the left and the lass in the lower right almost went into the bad image, but I decided I actually quite liked them at the last second. Things I'm most pleased with here include the chap who looks a lot like Patrick Stewart (in the middle), the chap who looks like Sam from Lord of the Rings (but not like the movie version), the bearded businessman and the girl at the bottom who looks like she's dancing. That upper arm on the Orc isn't too disgraceful either.


Focus Sketching
And here's a new thing. Focus sketching is where I have something in my head, and I try to hone in on what my brain wants me to draw. If you're really astute you can probably even work out what I was going for here, but I'm not going to spell it out in case it actually leads to a finished image one day. I said in the last section that I used no reference this month, but that's not quite true as I used some for the jacket and jeans for the girl on the right - it's not a straight copy though, I was just referencing how the folds might go.


Bad Stuff
Again, these aren't actually the worst sketches of the month, just the most disappointing given the time spent on each and the conditions they were sketched in. Well, I have included the single worse thing I drew in January though (it's the blob in the bottom right with a frowning face by it). The girl on the right was clearly drawn as part of the focus sketching shown above, but is miles away the worst of them; I didn't include all of the relevant sketches you understand, just the best, and this one. The rest aren't horrific I guess, but nowhere near as good as they should have been (and the girl at the bottom has really creepy eyes).

That's it for today. It won't be as long between this post and the next as I have some stuff all lined up and ready to go. I don't have anything after that though, so I should get cracking or next month will be really sparse :)

Oh, and my last post was the first post to ever receive a comment from an identifiable person who I've never had a drink with.  This is amazing, it's like I'm writing a real blog (as my Grandfather would likely say).  Feel free to follow the trend!

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