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.