Lunch Sketches @ Foodhall

Some quick heads using a brown color pencil..had to push the contrast quite a bit for the lines to pick up on the scans.

30 sec and 2 min gestures

I don't like the 2 min gestures below, it was at the very end of the evening and I was just doing them to be able to say I did some studies...never do that! I think for studies to be successful you need to have a fresh mind, at least be in the moment to get something out of it. Otherwise you might as well just draw some circles or better yet read a book.

Sketchbook Long Studies

Started the day with a couple of 30 second gestures using posemaniacs (done in Photoshop)

I then moved on to my sketchbook for some longer un-timed drawings from Photo Reference. It's actually from a book called Virtual Pose 3 (Got it on sale in Chapters). It's really cool because you can turn the model around to find an angle you like.

As you can see I started shading differently on the legs, which I find much clearer for study purposes.

On a side note I start with a quick 1 minute gesture with blue pencil, before I go in with a mechanical Pencil (0.5).

You can really see the importance of that initial sketch in the drawing below. I really screwed up the gesture but was too lazy to fix it ....building on top of a bad foundation is always a bad idea...but the main idea behind these studies is not gesture, it's really about investigating anatomy..especially interested in that midsection at the moment.

Life Drawing: Sol Art Gallery Long Pose

Below on the left a couple of heads I sketches during lunch at the Foodhall in Dublin. And on the right the first couple of 1 min poses from the warm up before the long pose. Those couple of sketches are pretty important to get the eye/hand coordination going :P

Here a couple of 1 mins I liked for different reasons.

Since I've been sculpting out that mid section a lot in slower studies, I managed to get it down very quickly here in the image below. Proof that doing the same thing over and over eventually becomes second nature.

In the one below I especially like simple curved stroke for the leg coming in on top, also like the curve of the shoulder.

Legs in the next one aren't very successful, but I like the upper body and curve in the lower arm.

So next up is one pose, broken up in 3 sessions of 30 minutes. I changed sides for each of the time slots. For each of the drawings I started with a gestural sketch in cheap crayon pencils and then went in with my new friend, a 0.5 mechanical pencil.

In the one below I really don't like the way the head connects to the body, I also made the mistake of drawing a hair going down from the ear...it looks like the edge of the jaw, but it isn't.

Some nice things in the drawing below. Especially like the hair and the hand.

For the last one I really liked the initial pencil sketch, I tried to keep the drawing lively but I still feel that initial sketch was a lot more pleasing to look at it..unfortunately nobody will ever know :D

Would've liked another 15 minutes on this one, but unfortunately time ran out.

Some Loomis Wise words

I actually starting "reading" the text accompanying the drawings I had been copying from Loomis. Gotta say it's well worth your time, plenty of additional insight and lots of encouraging words actually!

SKILL IS THE ABILITY TO OVERCOME OBSTACLES! - Loomis

I think we keep forgetting how hard it is to learn anything new. You can't put a gold medal sprint athlete on a soccer field and expect him to score goals for your team. He'd have to learn how to handle the ball, get a feeling for where the goal is, etc (I'm hardly an expert :P).

Point is that when you want to learn something new, it's going to take practice and you'll need to cover the basics regardless of how good you might be at drawing. You also need to prepare to fail. This is also the purpose of this blog, to share what I study, where I fail and what I do to get better I guess.

Anyway enough blabber, here are some images from the last 2 days:


Some horrible Loomis heads, re drawing them to try and memorise and also understand his structure and proportions. I might actually try and draw these slower and bigger, because as you can see it goes a bit all over the place. Part of that is when I get sleepy, I also get incredibly lazy with my marks and accuracy. But I'm kinda happy I still fill up at least a page every day.

Below some head structure based on images, trying to understand the perspective and how I could draw Loomis' structure as a base for let's say a longer render.

And today again covering sleepy time with some Loomis head studies:

Followed by 2 slow figures. I don't measure out the body...instead I draw a "gesture" in blue and then draw a more refined version of the figure on top of the blue. As a result proportions are off, but I also think it prevents the study from looking too stiff.

Sunday Slouching

Some more Dr No sketches..this does not look like Sean Connery...but unless I take out my ruler and spend an hour on each drawing I don't think I'll be able to capture his likeness. My observation is not that developed yet.

Some Loomis head drawings...note to self: after drawing a page like this, draw it from memory..because I don't think these are sticking in my head yet.

Selection of some 1 minute drawings with a brown crayola pencil.

2 untimed poses"

Another..even slower drawing, digging into my memory of how Loomis uses lines to describe form...doesn't look like a Loomis drawing, but I do like it.

I then tried to draw the pose from another angle ..using the power of my tiny brain! I like some of the markmaking I did here. I think it's a great exercise that I'll be doing more often from now on.

Dr No Movie Sketches

Sketching from Dr. No (the James Bond flick). God..people in the 60s were so freakin' stylish! Gotta throw in some loomis studies since it would be a nice way to approach drawing a couple of Bond stills.

EDIT: As I said, I went ahead and did some quick studies of Loomis before doing another little session of Dr No drawings. Gotta say,I never get the likeness of the actors. But that's also not really my focus. My focus is drawing heads using the loomis structure thingie, and also getting better at using a pencil again. I've been way to accustomed to drawing digitally (and my wrist hurts because of it). So trying to level the playfield a bit :D

Loomis drawings below:

Back to Dr. No: