Using basic shapes to draw is goddamn hard

Frustrations… fuck ’em. (whine and a bunch of quick sketches mostly)

I’m feeling major lost at the moment, it’s really frustrating for me to not have a clear plan of action, like step-by-step being told what to do. Now it’s really more on gut than anything, I can follow some tutorials here and there, but at some point they will lose me, either they start to get to abstract in their descriptions or they will go purely into theory etc., I need a much firmer frame and I need to be drawing not ‘efing reading.
If anyone out there in “TV-land” knows any good books that take you step-by-step through the basics and with a SHITTON of exercises, then please do give a shout ;)

Now for the drawings – I started on Vilppu’s Manual, to try and grasp the whole quick sketching thing and why on earth I just couldn’t make sense of that whole world AT ALL!

These are max 30 second gesture sketches, meaning the intention are to capture the action/flow or what you might call it. First ones are from number 1 “stickman” and then some middle ones ‘til the last ones, I probably did somewhere on the dangerous side of +400… yeah - I’m a freak >< Anyway at first I couldn’t keep up at all and didn’t knew how the fuck the whole process was supposed to be done, somewhere halfway through I started with just 1 line which wasn’t any outline or contour thing, but more an attempt to create motion.

Then I started with Circles and how you could use circles to make sketches etc. But see this is where most books will fuck me over like this one did, because while he’s blabbering on about circles his examples are quick sketches without a single fucking circle instead it’s all curves, I know it’s nitpicking but for me that shit doesn’t work. I’m zoning out into some circle land where I get REALLY pissed off and annoyed, because I can’t come up with anything and I’m trying to make circles into figures and then give those figures life, all the while the fucktard is using curves, I’m to literal for that shit lol.

Next ones are squares, okay those are a bit more my thing, those shits follow some rules at least. Still it doesn’t really sink in to an extent I can use it for much, so most of these are just straight copies from the book as I recall – If for nothing else I can goddamn copy what the book shows and hope there is some sort of learning still.

And then we got to cylinders. It would be an understatement to say I had a feeling of utter hopelessness at this point, but still fuck it if for nothing else I’ll give it a try, I can always just fucking copy.
To my surprise these cylinders made complete sense, where the circles and squares only confused me, the cylinders was like bacon – Nam-nam-nam – I understand.

Last one is just two attempts at putting that shit into practice. Somewhere I had picked something up, not a feeling of clear understanding AT ALL! But more a little baby step on a long road.

Time to put the foot down! study in drawing feet

Time for those feet studies, didn’t quite make it to 5, kinda lost some time during the last few days… excuses… :P

Anyway, I did these feet sketches, but I’m kinda annoyed with how I work with these studies. I’m attacking it like I would a portrait, so instead of doing something that I suspect should only take a couple of minutes I’m throwing +1 hour at it and I fear it’s overkill, but I can’t help it.
I think it’s a habit that comes with inexperience and not really having the guts/confidence to just throw quick lines down on paper. It’s like forcing yourself to draw bigger, knowing you can and should draw bigger doesn’t necessary mean that your next drawing will be filling out your paper, it’s a slow process of changing and overwriting your subconscious(habits) - in my opinion at least. 

The first 3 are random model stock and the 4’th is my own left foot :P I couldn’t find the angle I was looking for so fuck it why not. Drawing the whole shin and ankle coming down and “merging” with the foot was something I utterly feared, but with my composition I might have cheated a bit by cutting of the back of the leg. I started on another where I was looking down in a slight angle from the knee to the foot and that one turned out just as I suspected, so… stupid as I was I threw that shit away, I need to face the fact that the fails are the ones you learn the most from, and when you fail big time that’s a great fucking opportunity to analyze and learn from that mistake… “You can’t be afraid of failure” as Arnold says - it’s pretty fucking high on the  cliché-o-meter, but it’s still an obvious truth and one I really need to learn to embrace. 

Drawing sure can be frustrating

Back and forth - it’s a bloody rollercoaster. 

I went back to my favorite model and tried another sketch.
 

I had learned some valuable things with the “live” drawing, one thing is that my focus was about 80% on the pose and where the next line would go, so in effect only 20% of my attention would be on the drawing. I don’t know if it’s the stress of the clock or it’s new... but it’s like trying to blind draw, which I can’t do for shit. Now I’m clueless to whether or not it’s the right technique, but on some level at least I felt like I had found some little piece which I can work on. I still can’t get the quick sketches to look right, but well… only currency learning takes is determination and time!

Back to my sketch… one thing I discovered doing this was my obsession with going overboard on certain details which only creates unbalance in the end - in my hobble opinion anyway.

I zoomed in on one of my mistakes here which is the eye, the fucking little shit eye is around 0.5cm and the point on my pencil is around 0.1cm… take in my not super steady hand and lack of knowhow, I’m trying to fucking distinguish one wrinkle and fold with another on the goddamn retard scale, I can only get misery out of trying this. Compare the eye with like the amount of time I tried to put shadows on her face… it’s not even a contest and I’m fairly sure making the shadows work would account for 10x more in terms of getting the picture to come alive. I just can’t seem to get that through my thick skull, but maybe knowing is half the battle…
Anyway, I know the breast is out of… sync, something is very wrong and I think it’s to do with how I placed the nipple which unbalances the whole thing.

Live walking dead drawings... and other things

The promised “live” drawings - live as in on my monitor :P But anyway, they are done on time, I should be listing the time on the sketches.

Godefingdamnit this is how it feels to be knocked back in ludo. It’s like everything I have relied on until now is out the window, I don’t have time to really see the shapes or get proportion/perspective right, or it feel like I don’t have the time at least, so it’s all just “stress attack of the pencil 2.0 – starring a frustrated me!”

I’m sure there are A LOT of things to be learned and very useful things as well in this work, but I also got the annoying feeling like I skipped some part of crucial learning step before you can do these sorta drawings.

Nonetheless it’s all ups and downs, but practice :)

One thing is certain, I’m doing these things way to small – I should be doing one per page and not 4-5… Or maybe it’s just me.

Drawing naked chicks with a pencil is fun

I have been doing a lot of "not so" live drawing - trying to draw someone in a posse within a set time - which got me royally pissed off, since the stress of the clock and suddenly drawing a full body and not just the face, was a bit of an uncharted territory for me. I'll share some of them later, I heard humor is meant to be shared or something...
Anyway, lots of those models were naked and quite interesting to draw, which got me thinking... *yeye hah hah -.- grow up* it got me thinking about attempting to draw something out of my usual comfort zone - if that's something you can claim to have at this level lol.
So I dug out an interesting picture with a posse I thought was "manageable" and got to work... few minutes later I picked up the pen and started drawing - hahahaha, sorry I had to take the shot, cheap or not :P - anywho, godefingdamnit this shit was ALOT harder than I had anticipated. The scaling down of the head really did a number on me and I had to completely rethink my approach, plus the lack of "harder" lines to follow, but instead everything being in curves, was definitely something I found challenging, to say the least.

This is the outline sketch out of all the stuff I had thought to be the hard spots, I had completely overseen her front hand, wauw… talk about having to compromise and do things over and over, I could not translate what I saw to the paper at all, to such an extent I had to “manipulate” or be a bit creative about it you might say "fuck the index finger!!!"

And my end picture, it doesn’t scan super well, but you can make things out at least =)