I want to draw - I have to draw!

This little blog should – in a perfect world - function as a peek into my personal little trip down the road of drawing. I can guarantee there will be plenty of road rage, steep learning curves, crying and thumb sucking involved.
If you scroll down you will see some of my begging steps (hahahaha I'll let that stand - Freudic slip - but I mean *beginning*). Since I never really did any drawing prior, I don’t have any old drawings lying around to share either - unfortunately.
My starting level was nothing, stickmen and general straight line challenged, with an newly added circle handicap – good fucking game.
But I’m determined I will learn this, whatever the cost.
- Tue

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Some random updates and ranting


I haven’t been drawing much lately… I can sit down and work one day, but I can’t seem to follow through the next day, really frustrating tbh.
But I’ve been managing some work at least, so fingers crossed! 3 projects are better than none.

I started out with some imagination stuff which is my biggest weakness by far; I’m so fucking visual it’s stupid. Anyway, started out wanting to draw some fairy thing on a leaf, can’t remember why… Did the first draft with pen and paper and then worked on it in PS trying to use a bit of color – I’m banging on all cylinders now!
Goddamn efing damnit that shit is hard when you don’t have any visual reference at all to lean on at all, at some point the leafs kinda turned into a plant I got here, guess that was the only mental reference I had in my memory bank -.- Still found it a bit funny I draw those leafs without noticing it or looking at it :) which raises the question: WHO THE FUCK IS DRAWING HERE!? IS IT ME OR MY SUBCONCIOUS???
Anywho, it’s obviously unfinished but I don’t know how to proceed yet, I wanna fix some sorta glow, but I don’t know how, doing it as I tried now isn’t what I want… so yeah good game, one more thing to come back to when I learn more I suppose.
Oh one more thing, HOLY Biggus Dickus trying to draw a body from imagination is hard “now where was it those breasts go…?” and “shoulders… hmm how the f do they connect to the body??” etc.



I tried to do some gesture drawings, but that shit just pissed me off, it’s like I’ve forgotten everything in my break and I have to relearn it all… well fuck that shit hahaha :P So just started drawing a portrait instead, I’ve been hooked on The Dresden Files series and I wanted to draw someone who I could see as Harry Dresden, I found David Duchovny to fit that bill – for me at least – I dug up a reference from Californication where he plays Hank Moody. I found it oddly simple to work with for some reason and everything sorta just felt natural. I valued in the basic shapes and just kept doing that, basically just one big process of slowly working towards details without ever really drawing them if that makes sense…
I didn’t like the beard I did on my Jens Pulver portrait so I knew I had to change something with that, luckily I stumbled over some youtube stuff about making your own pencils… and well - that works!!  I can download 10 fucking packs of all kinda pencils and none of them really fits me, but when I make them myself and do my own adjustments, then it’s something else (I only got the 3 basic brushes from ctrlpaint.com and 2 made myself – If I had more they will only confuse me I’m sure). Back on track, I made a small scatter brush with some opacity variation and used that to make the five o'clock shadow, made another dual brush for the hair, it wasn’t perfect, but felt a lot better than my previous hair failings.
I cut his hair a bit shorter and stuff, but unknowingly I sorta just changed Hank Moody (Harry Dresden) into Fox Mulder, but only saw that afterwards >< oopsie.
I could/should have spent some more time with the cloth, neck and hair, not to mention his lower lip, but I guess you’re never really done…



I started on a portrait of this Tron chick (name…?), but I made some mistakes somewhere in the start which just turned the whole thing into a brick wall. One mistake I’m sure of is that I started out with a too light a tone/value for the foundation (if that’s the correct word?). In my world I suspect it’s easier to value in from dark to light and not the other way around, which I suppose makes sense… for me at least.

But after the David Duchovny portrait which just fucking flowed and was done with pure gut feeling, I found myself in sheer frustration trying to go back and measure proportions aligning features correct, basically doing all the detail work before the whole value step was done properly… I’m sure that’s a working approach as well of course, but for me it doesn’t work to start out with one plan in mind and then suddenly shift gear. It’s like looking at the whole and working out from that, to putting down a puzzle one piece of the time only having narrow focus on one thing and then trying to juggle everything in place afterwards.
Or maybe it’s because it’s a girl, or the contrast and shadows are just too complicated… grrr fucking excuses. One thing is sure, I don’t like how I had tried to solve it like some fucking math equation in the end, so I’m gonna let it rest awhile and pick up something else…


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Usual process gifs, been thinking about doing a video process, but even with 10x speed the size would be astronomical and I got 100GB left on my HD, not sure that equation would be solvable. Still it would be better than a gif and it shows my mistakes a lot clearer, if you look at youtube there are thousands of speed paintings by fucking masters, but I don’t see many by people who don’t know wtf they are doing like me, so… maybe.






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