An Artist's Journey

More pencil art

2008-08-12T13:19:00.009-04:00

...which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on how you look at it I guess. I need to also focus on painting and coloring in my art. I've only got like...what, one colored picture on here? And that was using sharpies.

But anyways, sorry that I've been out of the loop again. I had a few weeks where I just didn't feel like drawing at all but eventually I got into the jist again.

This first one is a drawing of my character from one of the RPGs I'm in. She's actually sorta elven-ish, but that's not so apparent in this picture because she has some human blood in her too. She covers her ears with a knit hat.

If I did this drawing again, I think I would have done more detail on the hair and maybe the facial features. I also wish I could have made her look younger, but in the reference I was using she looked to be about her late twenties. My character is supposed to be 18 so it was pretty hard. But the main focus here was just to make it look realistic instead of cartoonish. I wanted to so badly change into my anime style because she didn't look young enough. But I love the knit hat.

The rest of these are going to be pretty sketchy because they're from the Life Drawing panel I went to at Otakon this year. I think I got a lot out of it. We sketched for two hours: 30 second sketching, 1 minute sketching, 5 minute sketching, 10 minute sketching, 15 minute sketching, and then one 30 minute sketching. It was real difficult.

Forgive me for the quality btw. I'm bad with scanning.

This is the 30 second drawing I did. or well, drawings. We did a lot of 30 second ones. They were frustrating but the curves and lines I got on some of these are actually pretty awesome, in my own opinion. I think I got a lot out of these. I'm so lucky they had this panel; the demonstrators were awesome.

These are the one minute drawings. I like the middle one and the one on the center right, although it kinda got overlapped by the other one. Oh well. These were fun to do. I wrote some notes for myself near the bottom left. There was a webcomic artist there that gave us advice on how to draw the figure.

These are all the 5 minute drawings that I did. One of them's cut off though (obviously). It was hard for me to learn to draw boxes and shapes for the head and chest and such instead of drawing the outline curves which I'm so drawn to as a beginning artist, I guess. In my later drawings here I hope it's noticeable that I started drawing shapes beforehand and worked on the curves later.

These are my fifteen minute sketches. I remember the feet being a pain for me to do on the first one. I couldn't see close enough I think. On the second one, the head is where I had the most problems with. Ugh, these scanned came out really bad, I'm sorry. D:

This piece I'm really happy with. Yeah the faces suck, but those were hard figures to draw. I used shapes in the beginning, like triangles, squares, uhh, polygons...to get a feel for where I wanted them, and then I worked on the curves afterwards, and this is how it came out.

Now to use those art books, get some supplies to finish the chapters in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and start painting and coloring my penciled work.

I might be getting better.

2008-07-02T22:14:00.005-04:00

Bit by bit, time after time. I have been drawing and uploading my results, but I have not posted them here. Why? Because I'm lazy. But now I'm going to attempt to not be lazy. Here we go:

This first drawing was the second attempt at drawing Picasso's Portrait of Igor Stravinsky. The first time I attempted it I was in high school, and unfortunately I don't think I have the drawing sitting around anywhere. But I think this one turned out nicer anyways:

The face is definitely something I struggled with. It was hard to not be conscious about whether or not the skull was the right shape or size. Also, the darker spots in the picture (the ring and edge of chair) or actually in pen, and are things I realized I had forgotten after I had drawn it.

I don't know why, but while drawing I tend to pay too much attention to some things and very little attention, if not full ignorance, towards others things. Also, I went too narrow on the tie, and the neck too small. Maybe I didn't go out far enough on the outside edges.

After that, I felt inspired to draw something on the side. Other people I knew were drawing "mindscapes" so to speak, so I made one of my own:

This is actually a side view of the drawing, and also a very FAINT picture. That's because I first used a 4H pencil before coloring the drawing with marker.

This is the complete drawing. It was my intention to make vibrant colors in this piece. The colors for everything were a bit unplanned but I think it worked out nicely. This whole drawing is basically symbols for what represent my positive and negative attributes. I would go into detail of what each thing represented but that would be boring.

The hand was fun to draw, although now that I look at it again I feel I could have done better. The rainbow-yin yang symbol was something I made out of the blue. I can see that being a tattoo for me, or something...Most of this was done in sharpie markers, by the way. The blue birds are supposed to be doves, but they don't look it. The thing that the hand is coming out of is a whirlpool sort of thing...everything else is self-explanatory, I think. I didn't get too many crits on this one.

This next one was basically a long overdue drawing that was requested by a friend. It's one of his characters from an online RPG that he's in right now:

Think a muscular, middle-aged Mexican and you have what I've attempted to portray here. Few crits I got of this were that the eyes were too far apart and it needed more details on the nose and lips. (Before it was even at this point, I had the head a bit smaller than I needed to as well, hence why some of the head is covering the letters.) So, I revised it a bit and came up with this:

The one thing that I think I had showed some improvement on was creating a realistic image by shadowing. Again I'm not too happy about the face because it still looks cartoonish. I worked hours and hours on the jacket though, although I think the lighting on the right side is a bit off, still. And I cannot draw realistic clothes wrinkles for crap, seriously. The ears are a bit wack as well, and to tell you the truth I didn't try to reference the ears that much. But yeah, the shadowing = epic.

Actually, as I look at this now, the first drawing of the face looks more realistic than the second, to me...ah, crap, I don't know.

As far as the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain goes, I'm working steadily through the lessons, and after drawing Piccasso's piece upside down, I drew the knight & horse upside down (which turned out crappily, but I do want to put it up sometime). I also tried blind contour drawing which I also failed miserably at. Oh well, I'll get it.

I also got a few drawing books from my mom's boyfriend that I have yet to put into use. I've also received a few tips from another artist (computer drawing artist, but nonetheless an artist) that's really good and I'm trying desperately to put into use too. This is the link.

And, that's all from me right now.

No, I'm not dead. Yet.

2008-05-18T15:14:00.005-04:00

I really need to stop slacking and at least update once a week if I can. I think I've got some progress down despite not updating here.

This is a couple notes I made out of a drawing book I got at the library. I don't have the book with me anymore but I did grab a couple things from it. I might check out the book again another time. But as you can see here, I worked on shading as well as shapes. The drawings over to the right with the dotted lines was when I was practicing ellipses, and the drawings on the left side and bottom are of cones and cylinders...although the cylinder over to the right looks like it's curved a bit or something...and yeah that's a waffle cone.

This is a drawing I did of geometric shapes and shading--a cone, ball, cylinder and cube. It was pretty hard but at the same time, I was copying from the book so it wasn't too hard. Apparently the shading was really good, but the shapes not so much, according to some observers.

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Right now I'm focusing on a book I bought at Borders called Drawing on The Right Side of the Brain. and so far it's a very thorough lesson book from what I've seen thus far. There's lots of reading but there's plenty of exercises that the author leads you through.

This is the first lesson I completed.

#1: Your "Self-Portrait" Sit at arm's length (about 2 to 2.5 feet) from a mirror. Lean your board up against the wall, resting the bottom of the board on your lap. Look at the reflection of your head and face in the mirror and draw your "Self-Portrait."

This one took me the longest. I like the way I did the nose and lips at least...but everything else seems to be a bit off in my book. And I'm wearing a hoodie.

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#2: A person, drawn from memory
Call up in your mind's eye an image of a person--perhaps someone from the past or a person you know now. Or you may recall a drawing you did in the past or a photograph of a person well known to you. To the best of your ability, make a drawing of that person. You may draw just the head, a half-figure, or the whole figure.

Alex looks way too emo in this drawing. And lips are not that dark...

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#3: Your hand
Pretty self explanatory, I drew my left wrist and hand in this case since I'm right-handed.

In this one the watch is not positioned right...I had it positioned right before but then changed it after second guessing. Oops. And that's supposed to be a ring on my finger, but I got lazy. I think I had the most fun with this one.

More drawings coming soon!

I am slow as a turtle.

2008-04-25T19:17:00.004-04:00

So I haven't actually made much progress, I don't think. But at the same time I oughta' be kidding myself if I actually think I'll make a drastic progression in only two months.

In other words...at least I'm trying.

I'm going to do something a little bit different this time. Instead of just posting artwork, if other stuff comes to mind, I'm going to write on what I'm improving on and what I need to improve on. Putting this note here because...well, I know my entires need more depth.

So with that aside, I present you my newest picture:

It's my character from a roleplaying game I signed up for on a forum. Her name is obviously Maydson Ross. That bag she's carrying is supposed to be a camera bag.

Some pros I received from some of my friends:

Eyes are very expressive
Nose is realistic
Shading on the face is good
Hair is realistic

Some cons I received:

Arms look like they're broken/disfigured
Pants look sketchy
Face is a little more to the right then needs be (either that or, her left eye [right eye from our perception] is a little too high compared to the rest of the face, but I'm not certain)

Some additional crits from me:

I wish I had done more shading/wrinkles on the clothing, as well as made the shading from her neck to her left (our right) shoulder more apparent. To be honest, I didn't like the face because I still felt it was too cartoonish. Her arms, as well as her legs, wrists, and hands, don't look realistic enough.

If I was to maybe pose in the mirror for the pose I was trying to portray in the character, it might have worked out a little better, as suggested from one of my friends.

I need to learn how to not smear so much, geez. Or maybe I should stop being lazy and start using something other than a 0.07 mm mechanical pencil.

At least I made a pretty good attempt at plaid shirts. I'm not too sure about her vest, though. The idea actually came from here.

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OK, so here are some things I should probably work on:

human bone structure
human muscle
lips
hair
facial expressions
OUTLINES and "THE BASICS", as suggested from a friend
shading, as suggested from a friend

Stuff I may be getting better at:

facial expressions
eyes
clothing appearance
my determination as well as
MY PROCRASTINATING

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Also, this is more of a note to myself, but another thing I needed to do was read more books. One of the books I'm searching for is this one.

So there you go, guys. Comments are appreciated!

Just one drawing

2008-04-06T16:55:00.009-04:00

So this is an idea I've had in my head for awhile that I wanted to put down on paper--a friend (who's a baldie) with long, curly hair...and some comedy on the side. I had to look up a ton of picture references for this piece, and I've probably spent like...five to eight hours on this, so I am happy with how it turned out, even though it isn't perfect. I used a mechanical pencil and eraser for this one, which is how I've been drawing all my pieces up to this point. And yeah, he has some chest hair.

Sorry for the lack of update this time. Work, stress, and college work has unmotivated me to draw some.

-Rinn

Some drawings

2008-03-28T18:19:00.001-04:00

Since I'm a little late in posting, I decided this will be an even bigger blog than my first post.

I drew some things this past week to try and get into the habit of drawing a lot...also, to see on where I need to improve. (And keep in mind that these images will look a lot better when you click on them for full-view.)

This is the first drawing I drew this week. I didn't really look at any references this time and I didn't have the library books around at the time, either. This was mainly done for my friend, Alex, who I wanted to draw something for since he's cool like that. The little critter in the background is his cat, Lillie.

This drawing was just sort of random. I really wanted to draw something but I couldn't think of what, and Alex said to draw an albatross. I didn't even know what an albatross was so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and took a picture reference from there. This was a result after two days of off-and-on work. (And oh, god, I just realized I put '07 instead of '08...and it's already March...)

This one was a request from another friend. Again, I couldn't think of anything to draw at the time so I asked if anyone wanted me to draw anything for them. This one took awhile...one night and a couple hours today. There's a lot of errors in it but I thought I would share, anyway. It gives me some insight on what I can improve on when it comes to realism.

I almost forgot about this one! I definitely need to put this one up because it's the worst out of all my drawings, hahaha. It was actually more of a draft/sketch, just trying to figure out if I could put facial expressions down on paper. As you can see it really didn't turn out too well. I didn't use many picture references for this one--for the realistic eye I did, but everything else was pretty much on my own. The Frankenstein guy was actually a person I was trying to draw that I saw on a random college book. The picture was too small I couldn't get any of the tiny details right, and he looked really weird so I named him Frankenstein.

I've gotten a lot out of the books I've read, too. Just little bits of everything, really. But I think my best bet is to keep going at it with drawing and try to see whatever's wrong in my pictures, so that I can correct it in my next drawing; and at the same time, put the suggestions and advice that I get from books and friends into good use.

Speaking of which, if there's any artists out there who actually know what's wrong with my drawings, I encourage you to comment and tell me. I need all the advice I can get.

-Rinn

The Beginning

2008-03-24T22:09:00.002-04:00

I never thought I'd be doing this. I mean, actually getting all serious about improving on my drawing skill. It was and always will be a hobby, which was why I didn't see much of a point in improving. Plus, it wasn't like I was getting a degree in art or anything like that.

But this year I have been drawing quite a lot for some reason. The creative spark in me just set in, I guess. And lately, I've been complaining so much about how badly I draw this and that. So a friend of mine, who is on a journey of his own, suggested that I try out my own journey. At first I hesitated and told myself that I would not commit anyway, so there was no point, but, I figured that I should at least give it a shot and see if I go somewhere. Plus, the whole idea seemed too exciting not to pass up.

So to get started, I went to the library today and checked out some drawing books. "DRAWING: The Complete Course" by Stan Smith, which had a good section on learning the fundamentals; "Drawing for Pleasure" by Start Walter, and the title can speak for itself; and "Drawing Trees" by Colin Hayes, which seems to be in the same series as "Drawing For Pleasure". Eh, I had a hard time drawing trees, anyway. But yeah, when I was looking through these books I felt really inspired and psyched about this out-of-the-blue idea.

Now, to draw, and actually stick with it. Hopefully learn a few things, too. :)