Introduction
The first couple of weeks of October are some of my favorite in the year. The weather cools, the leaves turn beautiful colors, and All Hallow's Eve rounds the corner. Before long, the holiday season rears its head. And although I don't much care to listen to Mariah Carey for the last quarter of the year, peppermint and reindeer more than make up for the auditory assault.
I didn't go into this week with any sort of goal for my art; except maybe to just enjoy drawing, and to try and draw consistently. I started off with a sketch from reference, but I wasn't completely happy with it.
Although I feel like my overall artistic skill has improved, my rough sketches are still extremely rough. I flatter myself by comparing the process to something more like sculpting, where one would block out the forms with crude and unpolished shapes to refine them in further passes. However, I want to remain as true to the physical medium of pencil sketches as I can, and I want to build line confidence and quality.
I feel I've gotten a little better about placing lines, especially when compared to some of my work from just a couple months ago:
Although these feel pretty dramatic and fluid, they don't strike me as the work of a confident artist. The work is messy because it's unsure and imprecise - not in the name of dynamism.
Building confidence with lines
I spent a couple of days continuing my sketching as usual, but this time trying to focus more on accuracy with the fewest number of strokes. Kinda like golf? To that end, I made liberal use of the undo command in Procreate (which has often led me to trying to double tap physical pieces of paper when sketching with real pencil). I think something a lot of digital artists can relate to is repeating the same stroke over and over until it looks just right.
Already, this feels a lot cleaner to me. I have a bad habit of retracing my lines a few more times than is necessary, which often leads to my sketches looking like they've had bad hair days.
This one is messier than I would have liked, but definitely far more controlled than my previous works. My hatchwork is still pretty rudimentary. That's something I'll need to spend some more time practicing. I find it difficult to indicate form with just straight lines, so I tend to throw a lot of curves into the cross-hatching which muddies the readability of the sketch.
Just having fun!
Emphasizing cleaner lines was actually very enjoyable. I started finding references that I thought would be challenging enough to help me grow, but ones that I also found visually appealing. Here's one of a cat, with some embellishments from imagination.
Cleaner lines, cleaner sketch - but this one was a little cheated. I spent some time going back and erasing earlier lines of this cat. Fur still remains an enigma.
I don't have too much to say about the above drawing. I remember being pretty tired that night and just drawing the first couple of references I found. I like how the hat turned out. The man's clothing gave me some trouble.
This one gave me real trouble with proportions. I think that's mostly owing to the puffed sleeve of her shirt. I won't deny I had to resize a couple of areas with the lasso tool, which I'm not particularly proud of. The sketch itself looks good, though. Faces will take a whole lot more studying.
And finally, one of the last pieces I worked on this week. I'm pretty fond of this one. The image I used for reference was a statue someone had sculpted or modeled + printed, but it tickled me and I wanted to give it a shot.
This week's thumbnail shows where I duplicated the sketch layer and started doing some blending. I felt this was necessary as my hatching ended up looking a lot more like body hair. Something to work on for the future!
Gesture work and conclusion
I'll wrap up this week with some gesture work. Once again, it's a quick exercise that flexes a whole bunch of drawing muscles, and I find it fun to do while listening along to music or a podcast.
I threw in a 2-minute-per-gesture session to get more detail out of my figures and to give me a benchmark for progress. I'm pretty happy with it!
I don't have any major takeaways from my work this week! My focus is to keep doing what I'm already doing: finding things I can improve on and improving upon them. I still feel rather afraid or incapable of drawing from imagination, so that may be my next primary focus. I've already been practicing a little bit of construction here and there.
Thanks as always for reading about my artistic journey. I hope you have a stupendous week!
