Goddamn imagination needs to L2Draw!

"Are we there Yeti?".... "No we are not!"

I can’t do shit when I can’t use some visual reference, still I try and force myself into new things, instead of treading water with the light/shadow painting style.

I spend waaay to long trying to solve the perspective issues and problems creating a hanging cage in a top view perspective. It’s not all bad since its good practice I suspect, anyway I had to solve quite a few problems drawing this in photoshop and coming up with a solution to placing the bars correct without drawing a million lines, finding all the right angles and shit… omg the nightmares.
Figured out I would just draw two squares, free transform them and add some quick “walls” using the one vanishing point the two squares would make and voila - I tried all kinda weird shit before that though – so next time I don’t have to reinvent the fucking wheel “weee” :)

The bars I made by making a line fence, duplicating that into four and "distort" them into place, thought that part would be impossible, but turned out that was super serial simple... yay learning shortcuts! :P
SOooo before I could continue the cage kinda needed some “content”, I wanted to throw in a dead skeleton jester/jack-in-the-box character, but that was opening up a whole can of “OH FUCK” drawing a imagination character like what would be close to impossible for me, but throw in some very weird perspective and complicated foreshortening  and it’s a mental K.O. – solution: buy a pizza and soda, put on some UFC and tell yourself that it’s just because the angle is stupid and it has nothing to do with ability…
Still it’s immensely frustrating to know you have a plan and a vision of things, but you simply can’t put it down in practice.

So you try again… fucking imagination needs to get with the program!
I got a thing for zombies okay! So thought I would create a big fat ass zombie with a baby… seemed logical and smart enough, what could possibly go wrong? Apparently a lot of things, two problems I assumed I could free draw a zombie with pulled open guts… I couldn’t… then I also assumed I could draw a baby attached to the mother by the umbilical cord… I couldn’t… hahaha so yeah fuck that shit, I went and got some chips instead – by the time I know wtf I’m doing I will have gained 20kg! 

Still I wanna upload these major road blocks, because drawing is so much more than these portraits I’ve been doing. They have turned into some comfort zone for me and while it’s good to have something you can go back to and tank up some positive experiences it doesn’t move you all that much in the long run. If you only see one side of the story you could have the impression I learned something, and come on, that’s just highly unlikely we all know that! :)

I also started on a new figure drawing using a reference photo, initially I thought I picked a pretty simple photo… yeah… as if.
The body was pretty straight forward and fairly simple light/shadow tones… but, wait… uhm jeans?
Holy smokes, two big problems, you have to sell a texture illusion and you have to do it while building up the butt underneath… that’s like valuing out a shape in a minefield of details. I could have done better, but I had boxed myself in with details and tbh I didn’t want to redo the whole thing.
I’m fairly sure I know what I should have done, I should have thrown away every single detail on those pants and just shape in the butt with light and shadows using a good texture brush and THEN do the fucking details on top of that. That way I wouldn’t have to juggle ten spinning plates at the same time.
But I ended up just blending in the body quickly and throw in some hair shizzle – DONE! “Live to fight another day” right?

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