Today’s study is of yoga arm stands. The human body can move in some interesting ways and I try to collect reference pictures of it. Drawing poses like this and keeping proportions realistic is a nice way to flex the artistic muscles. Drawing exercise for exercise, or something like that.

More pose tool studies, this time with some athletic stretching and flexing.

I think it’s important when sketching to practice both male and female models. I also like to get variety is body type, age, ethnicity, basically give me lots of different stuff to draw. Sometimes I’m not sure what’s going on in terms of placement of torso or limbs when I start but that’s what the sketching stage is for – figuring things out. It’s really nice working digitally when you’re drawing a leg too long and can scale the whole body down or move it over. Also, I have no qualms about drawing nipples or genitalia, I’m just ignoring them because they’re not relevant to what I’m trying to get out of these studies. Maybe if they’re longer drawings with shading, I don’t know. The whole NSFW issue is never relevant to me when browsing but I imagine people viewing my site care about it. Not that I’m drawing anything particularly explicit but some people are up tight about even artistic nudity.

Using the Pose Tool again I found these two of a dancer. When I’m siting down for these drawings my goal is to capture the figure and gesture. Here I’m focusing on the body and the face is something of an afterthought. Yesterday it was all about portraiture. I’m emphasizing line instead of shading since I’d spend too much time perfecting that and these aren’t meant to be value studies. I wouldn’t exactly call them contour line studies, either, as I’m trying to build up volumes first and then I add the lines. These have been cleaned up somewhat.

For today’s doodle I used PoseSpace’s Pose Tool to find some drawing models to sketch. I found the expressive picture on the left so I started with that and tried to find a similar male picture to pair with it. That one became a bit more of a shading study than I wanted it to but I’m pleased with how things came out over all.

This time I tried using 3 tones to push values a little further. I did lights first, then darks, then went over top with a mid tone. I was debating wether to put the mid tone between them but I ended up putting it on top since I figured I’d painted in too many darks. It filled some areas out but it feels like they’re fighting each other more than working together. Perhaps I should have just done it in the light first and then used the darker shade more sparingly for intense shadows. Honestly these studies are getting more abstracted as I move from strokes to stippling. I think the problem is I’m still not comfortable with the brush as I’m being too precious with each mark trying to get it right the first time. This multi-pass process isn’t going to cut it, either, as I’m getting sick of my work towards the end. I can see laboring a larger piece but studies like this I’ll probably keep to two passes.

Today I took another pass at those studies using a painting brush instead of a pencil. It might be a good idea to use a palette so I can have lights, mid tones, and darks without relying on the pressure of my brush so much. My problem is I like to stick to one brush and one color to see just how much I can do with it. Switching distracts me and I either forget I have options or I rely on extremes too easily. “Oh, this is dark? Lets jump to the darkest color possible right away.” Working digitally is nice because you can use tools to block in, blend, and automate things that would take forever to fiddle with individually. The thing is you still need to spend a lot of care and attention to utilize those tools correctly.

I’ve been wanting to practice backgrounds lately so I pulled out some inspirational shots I found on tumblr. I was going to try painting in color but decided it was best to figure out values before I jump into anything else. I really love value drawing with charcoal but here I’ve yet to feel comfortable with the brush I’m using. The pencil brush I tend to use is good for outlining but rendering like this is a different animal. Thinking I should get comfortable with studies like these and then move on to using them for underpaintings

Today I decided to change up my twitter profile. I thought I’d try drawing our little pin up girl some more. She’s a fun little figure to doodle, especially with Frenden’s Manga Studio brushes.

I wanted to see how scribbly I could make each drawing in an animation while still making it work. The answer is pretty darn scribbly, actually. The real concern comes down to timing and spacing. Placing inbetweens more carefully and in better places would have smoothed a lot of this out. I also probably should have done the moon on a different layer so it wouldn’t be so obvious when I reversed the cycle. Still, this serves as a good example of how loose you can be without totally breaking an animation.