Skull Skills

So I've been meaning to write this post for a few days now, and somehow I keep not managing to do it, but at least this time I'm making a start; only time will tell if I make it to the end in one go.  I've not managed to get all that much practice in over the last two weeks due to having guests, being busy at work and being generally lazy at home.  I did get some done however, and what follows in this post is part of it.  You may recall in the last post I said I was going to practice drawing skulls.  I wasn't kidding.

As you can see, there's quite a few skulls. This is actually all the skulls I've drawn, so the image is a combination of both good and bad renditions. None of them is perfect, but you can see I'm making steady progress. All of the skulls are based on photo reference (and what a grizzly subject that can be to research), but I've concentrated more on the technique than on trying to get the skulls to exactly match the reference images.

I'm quite pleased with the three in the right hand column, and the profile pencil sketch on the left (along with the sketchier one in the top-left corner).  You can also see that I've added some white highlights to two of them, care of my new white charcoal stick; makes scanning them a blasted nightmare, but it does look nice I feel.  The rest are pretty mixed, with the majority being pretty unfortunate and my opinion of one of them is especially coloured ("WTF!?!").

Since I've finished these I've been working on drawing skulls without reference. There's still some way to go, but be assured there are more skulls in my future, and the future of the blog. I also did some figure drawing, but the results were uniformly awful. I shall do some more before I show them, but I either wasn't "in the mood" or I've backslid terribly. Time will tell.

Oh look, I made it to the end.