This week wasn't the most productive for me, at least in regards to the visual arts. That's okay! Not every week has to push one to the absolute limit of creative potential. There were other facets of my life that demanded some attention, and I believe my best art is only fostered in an environment that promotes holistic well-being.
I spent some hours catching up on guitar practice, meal prepping, running, cleaning, and winding down with some video games. All of which - in my opinion - are artistic expressions of the self, if one can frame these activities in that mindset. But enough rambling! I still have some work from the week that I'm quite proud of, so let's dive in.
As I may have previously noted, one of my favorite ways to practice observing the world is through the human figure. Figure study can build a sense of proportion, form, shape, perspective, and value. We are hard-wired to recognize the human body, which makes it exceedingly easy to notice inaccuracies in anatomy. One thing I've always found difficult is pinpointing where exactly my work differs from the reference. Drawing figures makes it a teensy bit easier to identify which lines are out of place, which in turn allows me to correct and improve my initial reading of the figure.
Even the sketch above has some real anatomical inaccuracies that are more obvious to me now in the writing of this article (like the torso being too short and the hands and head being sized wrong). The important part is to do some retrospection and understand what I can improve upon.
One of my favorite sources for figure references is Pinterest. Unfortunately, in today's generative world, it can be pretty difficult to filter out references that are artifically produced. Even with the AI filters enabled, untagged generated pictures can still leak through, potentially poisoning the reference pool. I haven't found many alternatives to Pinterest in terms of sheer volume, but my go-to sites for purely human reference photos include Line of Action and Quickposes.
These sites offer timed practice sessions that force you to sketch out a figure in intervals of 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, etc. I highly recommend sitting down and doing a session for at least 10-15 minutes. After a couple of sketches, the practice becomes meditative. I stop looking for things like arms and legs, instead looking for basic shapes and forms that let me recreate what I'm looking at more accurately.
Obviously, I'm still struggling to get a full figure penned in a minute. I feel relatively new to gesture, and the time pressure is (in theory) forcing me to be less precious with my line and anatomy accuracy and focus on the flow and feeling of the pose.
It's also good to take some time and work on a figure for a longer session, as it will allow you to notice things that might be overlooked when trying to get the essence of a pose. Don't critique my attempt at Bruce Lee too harshly - achieving true likeness is much harder than you might expect!
However, I definitely think my anatomy and proportion could use improvement, and I will make it a point to focus on that more heavily this week.
An acquaintance of mine sent me a lovely lighting reference in response to my exploration of value last week.
I thought this would be a really fun exploration of light and shadow, so I tried my hand at a few of the variations. Originally, I wanted to tackle these with only 2 values. I was not really happy with how the first one turned out, so I caved and started smuding the solid dark colors to create softer shadows.
I tried to do each of these from scratch and I was pleasantly surprised by how similar the structures of all three turned out. Obviously there are some discrepancies, but my focus was more on the lighting than the facial anatomy.
(There's a noticeable lack of the bottom left lighting setup - and I have no good reason for its omission. I got a little lazy. Oops!)
It was a good week. I'm glad I'm finally comfortable enough to embrace living in art, and I hope the weekly recaps give readers an inspirational push towards pursuing their own creative goals.
Art is therapeutic. It is the purest look into one's mind and soul, and every one of us is a student of art in some form or other.
Learning to draw is learning to really observe the world around you, and I'm always surprised by how much my art exploration influences the way I approach other aspects of my life.
Have a wonderful week!
