You Can't Win E'm All....

Yeah, so a year ago plus I promised to give you the good and the bad. While I like the line thickness in this one, and the use of the marker pen to show the fur of the animal, his face has so many tiny whoopsies that they add up to one big ouch. Ah well... what do we say? Practice practice practice.... :)

Doc

My friend. I call her Doc because, well, she's a Doctor. Go figure. Today was practice on features. While features can look symmetrical...they aren't necessarily so.

Ms. D. and the Cactus.

I have photos from about every place I go. They make for good practice. My practice today was for a mobile face. I hunted through my photos until I came across this one of Ms. D. We were at the cactus celebrating someone's birthday, and I do believe this was before the alcohol started flowing...there was a T.V. screen up above and she was animatedly and AVIDLY watching what's going on. Challenge: The turned, upturned, elongated face and curly hair.

Me. Again. Apologies.

Goofing around in the mirror several years ago. I didn't have a specific reason for sketching this one... no lessons to be learned. Just practice to be had. :-)

Sleepy

My pen brush is starting to lose its point. Fun, but I like my point... :-)

Two to post...

 04-24-2012. Unfortunately, yesterday my internet (the whole area, actually) was down. Doesn't mean I didn't sketch... this is Annalivia pre-green tongue. :)

04-25-2012. Abby. This one was mostly cut off, so sketching out the general head shape was almost impossible. The good thing about practice, though, is that it helped me place the features in pretty much the right place.... :)

Annalivia and her green tongue

This is Annalivia. Annalivia is one of my beautiful nieces. (I have several, mind you, both girl AND boy). Annalivia was showing my her green tongue that she'd gotten from a particularly yummy sucker. So this is one of those faces. A bit skewed, jaw dropped open, tongue out. Good practice. And fun lines on this one. Well, fun to draw. I used her, too, to practice those heavy shadows. I think I may be starting to get it. Until a monkeywrench gets thrown in. But hey, that's what this exercise is for, right? And balancing out the weight some... like balancing the weight of the shadow on the tongue with the thicker lines in the hair up top... :-)

At the Meeting

I borrowed this gent from my friend Webby... this gent was at a church meeting, and I liked the angles in his face. He sort of reminded me of Ichabod Crane. :-)

Say AAAAAAHHH!

I've been reading Hogarth. I really do like him, but I'm having a problem. What he's talking about sketching is face front or profile, while most of the people I see and sketch are not. Of course, I haven't gotten very far into the book, so I'm sure this will be covered later, but for now... I thought I'd mix it up some. I still want to add in more torso, but I also want to work on learning the face more intimately. I figure a good way of doing this is to see it moving. twisting, turning, opening, closing, squinting, sticking out, pinching in... get the bone structure/muscle structure/skin moving and shifting. So I asked my friends if they wouldn't mind sharing some silly photos, and got a couple of bites. Thanks to Amber, I found this great guy in her albums. It LOOKS like he tossed something up in the air and is in the process of waiting for it to come down so he could catch it. :-D

Dan

Nope, nothing deep about Dan. I just straight up wanted to practice sketching. His glasses were a challenge, I'll admit I used my pencil and resketched their peculiar shape several times trying to get it right before I sketched with ink. I never DID get it exact, but I have to remember that it's all about the LINES, and not the perfect exactness of the shape. I cut back to more face and less upper body, but I'm thinking after sketching this I'm going to continue trying to get more upper torso at least. Hey, it was fun. :)

Sssteph...again

One thing I've noticed is that when you sketch someone it's a lot...well, the word easier is incorrect, but it's the closest that I can come to in meaning... so I'll use it... It's a lot easier to sketch someone that seems to have a very stable character. Meaning, they don't have a lot of animation in their faces. They may smile, or frown, but they're generally low key so their features are pretty stable. It's a lot HARDER to sketch someone who is more animated, who shows more emotion, because their faces seem so elastic that when you capture them mid look or gesture (even while being photographed) you think "That doesn't look like them!" even though it does. Because instead of one smile, they may have twenty different types of smiles.

Back to Sssteph. Sssteph is one of those animated people. I've tried several times to catch her personality on the paper and never was satisfied. I think I've finally gotten one where I think I'm satisfied. It feels like her at that moment (this photo was taken of her and used by her in a madonna-like piece of art. It feels like I captured that mother-of-Jesus-icon-as-a-modern-day-woman-sketched-like-a-cartoon. :-)

Eric...again...

Poor Eric. Many moons ago, he was nice enough to tell me "yes" when I asked if I could borrow him to sketch. I've sketched him probably..oh...what, three times? Four? (unlike others who I've sketched several times back to back) With several months in between. So he's become my gauge of sorts to see how I'm doing. I compare how I did this time with how I did before and see the progress, what I like, what I think I still need to work on, etcetera.

This time it was a bit harder, since I was working from a more dramatic angle than I was used to. The nose threw me a bit, and the size relations to each other shifted from the normal head-on version. I actually had to use a pencil and draw the basic shape three times before I could get it where I wanted. (This makes me glad that I listened to my friend T. when he suggested getting some drawing books by Burne Hogarth. I'm not too far into them, but I have a feeling this is going to help big time.) In the end, though, I believe I am satisfied with  him.

I'd also chosen him because I'd started thinking about adding more body into my sketches... to start working on physical proportions and the skeleto-muscular structure to get a sense of movement. I think this will be the natural progression of things... BUT as I found out with earlier sketches and again with this one... I'm going to need larger sketch pads. I made his head smaller, but was unable to make it small enough to add in more of his upper body. It all goes back to that loving to sketch the face and the details. If I had to make it smaller and get rid of the details, it follows that I'd have to make the torso smaller and I'd have to leave out the details there, too. And that's not where I want to be. At least not at this time. Maybe later. :-)

As an aside, Eric is really a very nice person. Don't let the sketch fool you. ;-)

Terryl

This is my friend Terryl. He was so gracious when I stuck my camera in his face and asked him if I could add him to my album. I'm not sure if he knew that meant sketching him, or just photographing. Everything I photograph is fair game for practice...so... :-D  One of my better ones, I think...

Robyn

This is supposed to be my sister in law. It's the first time I've tried to sketch her. I'm a bit off somewhere along the line. This goes to show (not that you know what she looks like, but...) that it's not necessarily one big thing that can throw you off, but a small chain of events that pulls things off just a tiny bit, then a tiny bit more... I'm thinking that generally her head is a bit too elongated. Right between the eyes and upper lip. Yes, it may be a whole year, but it's ONLY a year. There will never be an end to the lessons... :-)

Train dude

Thin lines, simplified, 3/4 view from the back... fun. :)

coffee lady

Yep, there are all sorts of whoopsies on this drawing. Not necessarily the specific features... but she kept moving...tiny moves...and suddenly I'm looking at a face drawn with about ten different angled features on it. :-D

Fur

A bit of a stylized kitteh today. :)

Sleeper

I met Sleeper about a gazillion years ago, when I hung out with a friend at the bowling alley once in a while. They were on the same bowling team. I found him articulate, amusing, and intelligent. And a good bowler. We've kept in touch off an on, and the other day I asked him if I could sketch him. He graciously agreed. He has a wonderful face to sketch. Usually when people say "character" it's taken as a detrimental comment. But his face DOES have character. Lots of lovely smile dimples. The lesson that I took away from this one? Well, it was practice... practice on drawing a face that isn't all there, since it's partially covered. You'd think that it wouldn't be all that hard, but when I sketch, I sketch from the bones out... so I need to sketch the whole head as a shape to locate the facial features and get them in the correct spot without having them askew.

Ken

I'd asked my friends a while ago to borrow their faces. You've seen them popping through here a lot. Usually I get the coolest, largest, clearest face that I can so can see the details. I've avoided sketching poor Ken... not because I don't like the fella...but because his photos were a bit on the smaller side and a bit fuzzy because of the sizing. It has had to do in the past with a lack of comfort in knowing the mechanics of the face...the underlying skeleton, muscles, then the overlapping skin and all the folds and movement that you can get from them. If I tried it before, I'd purposefully shade in or blur out the part that I couldn't define. After the practice that I've had over the past year with the many different faces, features, angles, I finally felt comfortable enough to give it a shot, extrapolating from my knowledge database in my brain and filling in the fuzzy gaps and I think that I didn't do too bad of a job... :-)

Ray Ray's face

Okay, besides the fact that I love LOVE when people make faces and mug for the camera (It makes them look SO much more interesting and dynamic as opposed to standing there looking like your soul has been sucked out of your body) this one was a good practice at 1. sketching normal features askew, and 2. blocking the facial hair into simplified shapes. :-)

Kate's Eyes

Sometimes even the odd partial photos marked for deletion are good to hang onto. For instance, Kate's eyes were good to practice on. Losing more lines, breaking them down.

In the Coffee Shop...

This unknown gent was sitting across the way, focused in on his laptop screen ignoring his coffee date rather completely. Of course, she was ignoring him too. He was so focused, in fact, that it felt very safe to start sketching him since it seemed he'd be in that pose forever. And he was. Until I started sketching him. And then the usual... my electric personality and piercing gaze made him aware that there was someone in the room watching him and suddenly he's moving every two minutes. :-P

I'd still have to say that despite the constant movement if I go back and look at the beginning of this experiment I can certainly see a difference between coffeeshop people.
:-D

Hand...

Today didn't feel like a sketch a person day... so it turned into sketch a hand day.... :-D

Wayne

I have many memories (I'd HAVE to have with four decades under my belt...) and some of my fondest (yet sparse) memories are from my Aunt Vera, Uncle Bill, and their twin sons, Willie and Wayne on their visits from the south. I loved/love their accent and their all around fun demeanor. I wish I was able to remember more, but like I said... they were great. This is one of the twins, my cousin, Wayne. It's a more recent photo of him than I remembered him looking like, but it's fascinating how he looks like my Aunt's brother in this photo. It's with sadness and regret that I say that I'll not be able to have more memories of Wayne, as he was taken from us way too soon. I'd say rest in peace, but frankly that's not in our gene pool. Give 'em hell, Wayne... wherever you are out there in the universe.

Django and his shadow

This is my friend Django, an excellent guitar player, who graciously allowed me to practice on him. For a while now I've been running away from deep shadows. But if we never try, we can never figure it out, right? So now I'm trying. Here's the question I played /will be playing around with: How solid should the deep shadow be? If it becomes too deep does it render the person flat? How much shadow is too much? But if it's shadowed like I did on Django's face and neck, does it appear too "raggedy" for lack of a better word? OR if I did it solid, as in one solid line denoting the edge, would THAT make it appear weird? This begs further exploration. :-)

Ellyn

This is Ellyn. Ellyn is my coworker. Ellyn has a doppleganger that is an actress and I've seen her in something but I'll be darned if I can remember where or what... :-/ Hmmm....

Moustache...mustache....? ummm....

Either way it was pretty cool. :-)

Mads Cartoon-ized

My niece Madison. A very beautiful young lady. I minimized shadows and lines, concentrating on thickness... and she got cartoon-ized. :-)

Some Charcoal, Some White Pastel, and Ego.

Not MY ego. This is Ego, one of my artist friends who lives WAAAY over across the ocean. Today I decided to play with my vine charcoal and some white pastel. Not too bad for the first go. The smoke was fun.  :-)