Posemaniacs: 45 Second gestures using ToonBoom

Just playing around with the drawing tools in Toonboom, the greyscale overlay was done in Photoshop, but check out the linework...looks like my standard Photoshop brush.

 I like you Toonboom...let's get together and animate sometime...

LIFE DRAWING : Sol Art Gallery - Brush Pen

For today's experiment, I did my quick gestures with the brushpen, I then went back to some willow charcoal on longer poses and ending with a color pencil for the final drawing.

1 minute poses:

Longer poses, 5 minutes and upwards:

And 20 minutes for the last one with color pencil:

Warm Ups: 1 minute hand gestures

Using http://www.quickposes.com/pages/timed you can select hands and set the time for warm ups. I'm not really good at drawing hands, so will do this a bit more often.

Digital Gestures 15 sec - 1 min and 2 mins

Since I didn't go life drawing this week, I did a few digital ones.

You can probably tell by me dedicating an entire blog to figure studies that I really love it, so it's never laziness when I don't go life drawing or do digital studies..just need to allocate your time to whatever is important at the time.

I started again with stickfigures, I find it really useful, they don't have the flow or rythm I normally like to focus on, but they do allow you to practice simplifying a pose down to it's core.

Below are 1 min studies, I should really dig out some older gestures I did. I was never able to get so much information down in this amount of time, but I've been doing it now for 2 years or so..

Then finally some 2 min poses, giving me just enough time to flesh out the figures better.

Stickfigures

The power of stickfigures! Honestly, it's not to be underestimated. Stickfigures represent an idea in its' simplest form. I really like doing stickfigures for warm ups (a digital A4 sheet). Definitely going to spend a few hours drawing figures this weekend since I skipped on another life drawing class this week, I've been sick for a few days so need to allocate my time to some other projects.

Anyway, you can see I started simple and as I warmed up I started to get more fancy with the shapes and amount of lines (not resulting in better drawings)...I just can't help myself..it's fun to draw lines and curves.

LIFE DRAWING Sol Art: Willow Charcoal

So this week working with a medium I'm a bit more familiar with, yet everytime I use willow charcoal I find new ways to use it. The cool thing about it is that it is smooth as butter on printpaper, and you can just wipe off the charcoal dust so no need for an eraser. Downside is that your drawing is half smudged by the time you go home to scan your work :P

Really great session, regardless of any results I totally enjoyed every pose the model took and willow charcoal was a joy to work with, I'm going to have to put it into my top 5 medium to use for gestures.

I normally start with posting the short poses, but I really liked some of the longer poses, so here are my favorites:

Alrighty, on to the quick 1 minute poses!

Now some longer poses, these range between 10 - 25 minute poses, but in most cases I finish them early since the medium doesnlt really allow for extreme detail.

 Like the case below I did a slow study and then a quick gestural one:

 Below is he same pose done with willow charcoal and then with a B4 pencil. I think for poses like that you need to almost measure things out to get the proportions right, I just kind of let the pencil flow..it's not horribly out of proportion.

 And below is another gestural drawing from the long pose I posted on top of this post. Great pose, great angle..really hope to see this model more often.

Enviro Sketch + Head Studies

A sketch I did on the streets of Dublin using a rotring marker and Letraset markers.

Also did a few studies of the "How to draw the Marvel way" and a page of some heads from movie stills, but by that time I was half asleep so cut the session short.

Some people sketching