22 Jul 2017 - Art Update

I have not drawn much in the last two weeks. Some of it is laziness, and some of it is running around and some of it is using the time to do things like clean models and earn the Summer seasonal ship in Star Trek Online while cranking out my reputation. That said, I took pictures of my board today as it had been two weeks since I cleared it off. Here is some of the last two weeks.

I really should use reference until I have a better handle on anatomy. This was more about getting the concept, but good anatomy would have been nice too.

View from the waiting room of the Neurologist

Drawing Up a Storm. Picture of a statue used as reference.

Another Week

This week I had been playing with the charcoal pencils that came in last week. It is a new medium for me. There have been some graphite drawing as well, but not much. I took pictures of the charcoal drawings as I pulled the newsprint off my board today. Here are a couple of those sheets.

New Pencils

I drew every day since posting except for Wednesday. I ordered some pencils and newsprint over the weekend as I could see myself running out of materials. I can archive things on the computer before I toss them out. The pencils and paper arrived today. I had barely started on a warmup page so I decided to turn it into a pencil test page. The paper was a cheap 50lb pad I bought years ago. I tried not to smudge the pencils for this. Tones were attempted primarily via pressure.

Freehand Circles

I do not know how much art I will be sharing. If the blog in general is any indication then not much. I found my circles were really weak when warming up today so I did a page of circles in addition to the other pages. All but one circle are freehand and done with a bik pen so I could not erase. That one circle was me trying to spin the paper which shifted during spinning so looks as off as my freehand ones.

I need to work on photographing drawings. Ballpoint seemed a good medium for testing so the extra circle page from today is what you get. I did not use the clipboard when drawing, but needed something to hold the paper for the camera. I found that when laying the paper on a table or other flat surface I can not see the view window since I can not get over the camera to look down. The lighting was better with the table view though. I had to adjust this in Gimp using a gradient map to lighten the left side of the page some.

In related news, I used up the printer paper I originally pulled to practice on when I decided to attempt drawing again. Tomorrow I have to decide if I will continue using printer paper or move to the 50lb paper I have. I made a small sketchbook using that 50lb paper and drew my first Reilly head in it so it would not continue its existence completely blank. I am trying to decide if I want to order some newsprint and graphite, or wait and see how much my practicing will move to a Wacom tablet when I buy one of the enthusiast pads soon. If I can figure out the lighting and camera then I might focus more on the traditional. Either way I will be doing a mix of both, but how much of each will determine if I need to order supplies sooner rather than later and in what amounts.

I Suck

...and the only person that cares is me.

I have been wanting to try my hand at scultping for a while now. I've sculpted bits, but never a whole model. Like every wargamer, I have ideas for what might make for a cool miniature or alternate sculpt. The desire was great enough to where I picked up a pencil to bang out some concepts. It was then I realized the pencil is not my friend any more.