Yesterday at work I had
Yesterday at work, I had an inspiration to do a quick portrait from a photo reference, so I did. I used a black, fat, chisel marker on a panel of cardboard and it took about 5 minutes. The results weren’t great, but if you looked at the reference I think you could tell what I was going for. I was encouraged by this. I love the idea of being able to do portraits or capture images in the moment and bust out a recreation in a few minutes. So I decided to do some more practicing when I got home that evening.
Why did it go so horribly?
These pictures are my practice and while the one I half-assed at work wasn’t great, these ones are off the chart bad. I don’t know what exactly I need to fix in my approach to even get on the right path, but needed to post my thoughts about the experience. Maybe in hopes that that will be the trigger that helps me get better and leave these scraps behind, even though I don’t know how to improve even if I could be confident that I’d properly assessed my weaknesses. I mean, that’s why I did these sketches, because I thought I knew what areas to focus on, and it took me a huge step backwards.
What irritates me the most, is how none of the sketches even have the aura of their subjects. There’s a hint here or there, but nothing like “yah, the art’s not tight, but that is definitely that person”, and that’s really what I want to accomplish the most.
Here’s my individual notes:
-
I started digital because I really love the idea of having my one device that I take with me everywhere and do everything with. I’ve been pushing myself to prioritize digital art for about 6 years now, even though I was always familiar with digital coloring/touch ups, but the weaknesses really glare here. Accuracy is huge, as it’s next to impossible to get the lines that I want digitally. It’s always sketch, undo, sketch, undo, sketch, undo, and then when I get sick of that it’s sketch sketch sketch, new layer, slow trace, undo, slow trace. A lot of people understand this to be the nature of digital art, and I don’t 100% buy into that, but none the less it’s what I’m contending with. I didn’t really concentrate on going slow, and I think that’s something I really need to consciously aim for, but right here that defeats the purpose of doing fast portraits. I want to feel good and natural when drawing, so I decided to switch back to analogue art.
-
No. Stop. No matter what, I have a ridiculous number of false starts. Just trying to coordinate my brain with the medium I guess. Warm up exercises would probably help, but it also seems like a waste of resources if I happen to get lucky and make something reasonable on my first try.
3. Skew. I always skew. I’m well aware of my inability to do symmetry, and I try really hard to correct this when drawing. I’ve been addressing this for years, and it hasn’t gotten any better. This handicap is laid bare when I can’t start with a rough sketch. I am trying to measure and compare proportions, but they still skew as I go. I guess I really need to get my hand off the page, stop and check my work. But when I don’t have an initial sketch, and that’s the point of this exercise, what am I checking? The lines that don’t exist are in my head, and they don’t end up on the paper in the same spots. I have to work with the mistakes I’ve made no matter what.
4. The features in this one are just so off. I can’t even. I had been marking points where I thought stuff should go, before drawing lines to connect them. Not only is everything still completely inaccurate, but the picture just looks so dead. It’s a corpse of a face that no one’s ever seen before.
5. So I bailed on pre mapping and went the n00b route of starting with individual features. Of course the eyes are where I feel most comfortable. I probably am most happy with this portrait, but it’s such a step back from every tutorial that I’ve been getting help from these days. I wish this was my starting point of my drawing exercise. I might be able to continue from this approach, but I need to get comfortable with a better starting point as this brings the usual issue of not being able to keep my drawing on the page. I know Davinci started with the ear, but that’s a little too around the bend for me. Maybe I can try starting from the cheek to the forehead or something to help me work on features while still having a better overview of my total size… maybe.
6. This one is wrong, but like the last one it doesn’t upset me. It was especially frustrating as I had the hair framing the face, then in full awareness but no ability to stop I watched myself draw the right eye too close to the hair, then the left eye too far away, despite having some pretty easy markers to work with. Speaking of markers, I switched to a traditional sharpie pen for this one. I had been using a dip pen. I think I need to hunt down a chisel tip marker like at work as that seems to be best of both worlds. Especially as my medium at work was pretty large, maybe about the size of legal paper, while everything I worked with at home was no larger than 6 inches.
Hopefully this word vomit cleanses me, or something. Though why would it? I don’t think my art has improved for the last 15 years. I have a couple helpful techniques for digital art, but nothing that applies in this exercise. I can’t even pin point anything I did right in these sketches. Like, nothing that’s says “that’s good, keep doing that.” It’s just, throw it all away and start at square zero again. At least I got some new teases, like, maybe try a chisel marker on a full canvas, find a way to fake a sketch that will let me test proportions before final lines, and looking at the thumbnails of my work is even helping me pick out better shapes in my subjects that I wish I noticed the first time.
sigh, maybe at some decade in my life I’ll be able to do consistent work of an adequate quality, or at least perhaps the false hope will keep me from falling into complete anhedonia. Maybe.
source: https://saturdayxiii.tumblr.com/post/645836584988590080
Post by: saturdayxiii