Year of Drawings - 13th December 2018

It's been a while since my last drawing, buuuut, I have been drawing every day. I've just been taking some time to do drawings with traditional mediums more than digital. And I feel like it's paying off. What I do need to do is start taking photos and uploading these to my list of posts. I might actually do a backtrack if I feel like it. Anyways, here's a list of things I have been consciously practicing:

  • Drawing lines! - Drawing lines is arguably the most fundamental of fundamentals that needs to be trained. It's also proof that you can learn how to draw. The key? Drawing from the shoulder. Other artists have explained it so much better than I ever could so I won't go into it here. But the outcome of it is to draw confident looking lines instead of terrified wobbles.
  • Putting lines together to draw rectangles - In digital medium, I suck at this. That was what made me decide to go back to traditional mediums. It was far too demoralizing to draw on digital mediums and realize I couldn't draw a damn square. Turns out I'm decent at it in traditional. All hope is not lost. I now have pages and pages of rectangles drawn in various perspectives
  • Drawing circles and ellipses - This one is tough as nails! And it's even harder to draw in perspective. I'm training hard at this.
  • Drawing boxes - Not just any boxes. Boxes in 3d space. Not just boxes in 3d space. Boxes turned at extreme angles which triggers 3 point perspective. Not just boxes triggering 3 point perspective. But boxes in the same drawing that each have their own perspective and vanishing points! Suffice to say I've got a long way to go before doing this successfully. I'm progressing and the point of this exercise is to train your brain to start seeing things in 3d space when drawing on flat paper.
  • I've also been learning portrait drawing. Putting a lot of the above lessons together, I'm learning the basic shapes and forms of the face in 3 dimensions. Did you know the nose can be reduced to an elongated box? I started to realise that once I understand the basic forms, I can play around with it as I wish. Want to a big nose? Sure. Just adjust the "box" to give that shape. Of course, to do that we have to understand how to do boxes in various perspectives which is where all the above lessons come in handy.

With all that being done, I decided to put some of those lessons into practice today.

The ultimate goal of all my training is to illustrate all the stories that I have come up with for my child. Hopefully share it with the world too. Today I tried to put a face to one of the characters, "Wizard Mopson"

Putting down the basic shape for the wizard. I wanted his nose to be a little larger. And his ears. The face to be more boxy with a square jaw.

I then carefully tried to lay down linework over the rough sketch

The lines on their own. I'm very proud of this step honestly. It show progress since I first started.

Added in values to show lighting. I was starting to run out of time here so I rushed the hat and beard. The hat looks terrible.

Values on their own to see if they represent any 3d shape. Unhappy with the progression of face to beard. The beard looks like it was tacked on. But that's understandable given that I don't know how to work with longer facial hair (or even hair) just yet.

A final attempt at colorization. Not too shabby. I will improve on this.

Posted on December 13 2018 by Adnan Issadeen