#layingfoundation

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Laying The Foundation- 004

Today was focused on building upon the ideas of the previous lesson and drawing a landscape picture and a character starting with basic geographical shapes.

I was really happy with how the landscape picture turned out but I’m not so sure about the character. It took a lot of erasing and starting over to get the face to what I believed was an acceptable thing. I’m also not sure why I gave him a look of indifference considering he is about to strike someone down with a sword, but I guess he’s just having a bad day…

I’m going to take some time on the weekend to practice drawing characters and bring myself to a standard I believe is acceptable. Practice makes perfect, after all.

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Laying The Foundation- 017

Its been a while…

I took a week to complete an assignment related to work and after I had finished I wanted to have a small break… which ended up being another week.

I kind of regret it now because when I was drawing today I could feel myself struggling with what I was doing but thats the price you pay I guess, use it or lose it as they say!

Today I focused on learning the basics in still life drawing.

At first I thought to myself that this wouldn’t be a necessary thing for me to learn considering my goal is to go into comic-style drawings, but the instructor made a good point, saying that no matter what or how you draw, you’re going to be basing your art off of real life stuff, so this will become a handy aspect of drawing to learn for the future.

Firstly, I learned how to measure the objects you want to draw to get an approximate understanding of how big your drawing should be, by using measurements with your pencil (I always wondered what artists were doing when holding up their pencils or paintbrushes at arms length haha). By doing this, we can ensure that our drawings aren’t too big or too small.

Then I went over the 3 basic sketch types you can use to create a still life drawing; cross hatching, blending and rendering.

Cross hatching involves using cross contouring lines that cross with each other to create different tones in the drawing. Some artists I follow use this technique and I really enjoy it although I don’t see myself using this technique when I have developed my own style.

Blending is the type of sketching that I have been using throughout and the one I’m most comfortable with, which is when you establish your highlight, midtone and core shadow and layer those values until you create a nice blend between all your values.

I didn’t really connect with the rendering style, in all honesty. Rendering is establishing an overall neutral midtone (notice the grey going across the sphere) and then removing the grey to add in a highlight as well as adding in your dark shadows. The idea is that you don’t have to worry about your midtone with this style, but I felt like this was a bit convoluted and toward the end I just ended up blending anyway to salvage it.

Looking forward to getting further into still lifes and excited to get back into posting and practicing drawing again!

See you tomorrow!

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Laying The Foundation-016

Today was a quick summary of three point perspective and when it can be used. I was busy over the weekend so I didn’t have time to post unfortunately.

Three point perspective is basically the same as two point, with one difference. When drawing vertical lines in three point, we lead back to the the third point that we draw (notice the dot high up on the page). This gives a more exaggerated look to our objects, which is normally used in mediums like comics e.g when drawing a huge skyscraper or creating 3D stylised font.

Given my objective to move into more a comic style of drawing, this will be handy to know going forward for me and I can already visualise where I am going to use this.

Unfortunately I won’t be posting much throughout this week because I have important project involving my work that needs to be given my full attention, but I will be back as soon as I am able to get back to pencil and paper.

More soon!

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Laying The Foundation- 006

Today was a small but important lesson. I went over more advanced techniques of highlight and shadow and how to use these on more advnaced and organic shapes.

The first task was shading a more complex 3D object which I feel I’ve nailed down now. The second task was bit more tricky; taking a 2D organic shape and shading it to give an illusion of 3D. It was hard to know where to shade and for a while I wasn’t seeing the effect but eventually I got it.

Task 3 stepped up the complexity. I was tasked with drawing a rock, which has different angles and faces on it. I had to decide where the top of the rock would be and then shade accordingly, adding other features like holes and cracks and divets. This was helpful as it seems that in real life there is going to be complexities like this in anything I would draw.

Task 4 was using highlight and shadow on a form made out of different shapes (a square, a cylinder and a sphere). I was really happy with how it turned out and found the techniques useful as again, real life objects are going to be more complex than simple geometric shapes.

Tomorrow I’m going to practice these techniques over some more objects, as well as go over some stuff I wasn’t 100% confident on over the week.

Enjoy your weekend!

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Laying The Foundation- 005

Today I grasped the fundamentals of geometric 3D form; taking regular geometric shapes and adding effects to them. I think everybody is capable of this no matter what their drawing ability so I didn’t find it troubling at all. In fact, I learned how to add 3D effects to more curved shapes, which was new to me.

After that I moved onto learning about how light and shadow work on these forms. Getting to grips with core shadow, cast shadows and mid tones was really interesting and added even more of a 3D effect to my shapes. One thing I think I really benefited from learning was the way in which to shade a sphere. I don’t think I’ve fully got to grip with it as I have with the others but honestly I think it might just be a case of getting more comfortable with the way I use the pencil rather than the concepts themselves.

Overall a very productive day of learning.

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Laying The Foundation- 003

Today was focused on the difference between geometric and organic shapes, and how the use of basic geographic shapes can help produce organic ones.

To start with the basic shapes were gone over (square, triangle, circle etc.) and then I was shown how all drawing are made up of these basic geometric shapes by drawing examples (lamp and people/characters)

I was then tasked with finding my own images and then drawing them myself, but only breaking them down into their own geographical shapes. In the first example I continued with a lamp as it seemed a good basic object to start on. I then pushed the boat out a bit and chose a picture of Floyd Mayweather in a boxing pose and broke down the shapes of that.

Aside from the concepts, I am learning that drawing in and of itself is actually quite a meditative process. I find my mind quieter when drawing and I relax a lot more, which I found strange because I thought the opposite would happen.

Excited to learn more!

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Laying The Foundation- 002 continued

I felt like I hadn’t fully gotten to grips with the concepts I learned the other day so I felt the need to get some practice in on a couple objects. I’m pretty happy with how these turned out and I can definitely feel myself getting better with handling the pencil, line weight etc.

I chose a book on my desk to draw initially because it was simple and the different levels of light would give me a good excuse to practice contour lines. I then went to tackle something more cylindrical again to challenge myself and I’m happy with the outcome. i even went to the trouble of writing some details on the shape itself.

My main take away from this is the classic adage of practice makes perfect. During this practice I was feeling way more comfortable using the pencil itself as well as shading and contours.

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Laying The Foundation-036

Took a little break from the blog again but we’re back up and running. Today we looked at establishing the center of gravity and its importance when drawing characters.

Establishing center of gravity is important in character drawing for many reasons. It can help create dynamic poses for our characters as well as establish visual flow. It can also make your character seem more grounded and realistic.

As you can see in the figure drawings, If the center line drawn from the head is anywhere between the two feet or on one of them, then the character will look fine. It doesn’t have to be dead center as it could be a character is placing more weight on one foot, but is still balanced.

If the line drawn from the head is not in between the feet then it will look as if the character is about to fall or will just generally look silly. This could be an intentional choice, say if a character is slipping or has been tripped up.

Good to know this little piece of information as it seems like one of those rules that seem insignificant but actually plays a huge role in creating realistic characters.

I’ve finished the current course I’m on so for now I’m going to post some practice work that I’ve been doing until I come across a more advanced course that will be suitable for me to establish my art style.

Stay tuned!