Workshop participation thread for Big B

Hey all. I'm Bryan and this is my introductory post.

Like many others, I'm a Software Developer by trade. I've also recently been told that I'm the I.T. Manager, Webmaster, and part time cleaning lady (its a small company).

I was an OK artist growing up and in high school, but not good enough to consider a lifetime or art. I took all the drafting and industrial design classes I could in high school, but there wasn't much of a freehand component to those. The most recent artwork I've done has been in Brain Age, so I don't have any previous art to show.

Basically I'd like to draw better (and who wouldn't) and the only way to do that is practice.

Heres my first crack at this. For my two objects I choose my watch and a battery recharger.

Reference



Drawing



Go easy on me.

You clearly didn't draw from the picture, but rather from a slightly higher vantage point. Your drawing isn't bad, though in some places you had your knowledge of the nature of the objects interfere (a very common error).

Try this: take this picture and draw from it, but turn it upside down before you start to draw. Just give it a shot and let's see how that turns out.

Well, I redrew the watch and charger, using the old drawing as the reference. Drawing it upside down was pretty easy since I just drew on the opposite side of the sketch book. I think the lines are a lot cleaner in this one, and I didn't add anything that wasn't in the original sketch.



The faint lines in the background of the charger are from one of my wife's sketches. You can also see where I restarted the watch.

Heres my 50s cover sketch. The source is from a Canadian True Crime Cases magazine. It was the tamest one I could find. It looks like the 50s were much more sexualized than what is typically portrayed about the era. Every other cover seemed to play to the women-getting-clothes-ripped-off fetish.

Source



Sketch



I don't think I'd want to revisit this until we go over faces and shading. Without shading its hard to convey a lot of the detail, and without trying to sound too self-deprecating, I suck at faces.

Quote: Original post by Big B
Heres my 50s cover sketch. The source is from a Canadian True Crime Cases magazine. It was the tamest one I could find. It looks like the 50s were much more sexualized than what is typically portrayed about the era. Every other cover seemed to play to the women-getting-clothes-ripped-off fetish.

Indeed.

Quote: ...without trying to sound too self-deprecating, I suck at faces.

Everyone does, actually. The human face is pretty challenging to draw with a high degree of realism without using a reference, though the more you learn about natural proportions and anatomical shapes the easier it is. Also, I think you might be quite interested when we talk about childhood drawing and our internal symbol systems.

I'm not even sure if faces are harder than most things to draw, or if it's just our brains that seem better trained at noticing nuances on them, and as such variations that wouldn't be noticeable elsewhere are very visible in faces.

In any case, the end result is the same - everyone sucks at faces :)

There are a few curious things about the way our brains process faces. First, we apparently reduce faces to the absolute minimum amount of information necessary (a good sketch artist or caricaturist can evoke a face so precisely with just a few lines). Second, we fill in missing details, which is why we see faces in clouds and in the moon and in wood grain.

Drawing general-purpose faces isn't too hard. Drawing specific faces to a degree of fidelity and consistency, now that's hard.

Your Doctor's face isn't bad at all. Drawing wrinkly old faces is actually alot easier than drawing nubile young women, I think.