Figure Drawing Practice 002

Here's another figure drawing focusing on the back muscles.   Learning artistic anatomy has been an ongoing effort and it really helps in recognizing all those muscle shapes and bumps that can be quite confusing especially in the shoulder blade area.  The challenge with this drawing was deciding how much muscle anatomy should I show and still maintain the feminine quality of the model.   There's not really any way of  learning how to judge this except to just keep practicing and let my artistic taste evolve to what's pleasing to the eye. 

Figure Drawing Practice

     One of the fundamental skills I should have learned by now, considering I was once a traditional animator, is figure drawing. But due to various reasons, I haven't done much of it.  As a former traditional animator, the emphasis of  our figure drawing exercises had been in capturing the gesture quickly, and pushing the pose for a quick read.  And so most of my figure sketches were sketchy, loose and unfinished.

      And so, for this year, I decided to focus on figure drawing and learn  how to finish it.   For this effort, I signed up and just recently completed  a figure drawing crash course and will further my learning in another course for a long pose figure drawing  The method is very similar to the previous head drawing course I've taken, by learning how to do the basic figure construction using shapes.

      And so, while waiting for that course to start, I did this figure drawing  and will compare this later to what I'll be learning in that upcoming course.  So here's my first post for 2019.

      Using a photo reference from Croquis Cafe, I drew this in Clip Studio Paint, using a Wacom Cintiq 13HD pen display tablet

Thumper Sketch

      Just a quick sketch of one of my fave Disney character -- Thumper, the inspiration behind the design of my animated blue bunny icon.  I had fun animating this character for Bambi 2, way back when I was working at Disney Australia. It's been awhile since I drew this character, but because someone actually requested me for this sketch recently, and so I took the chance to revisit this character and did this sketch. 

 

Head Drawing - Marlon Brando

     Today's head drawing is the young Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. He was not only very gorgeous in this film but his acting style was revolutionary at that time.  Drawing his likeness took me some time and was a bit tricky, because it can easily looked like a generic handsome face.   But it was fun just the same. 

Head Drawing - Al Pacino

   Today's head drawing is the young Al Pacino in his role as Michael Corleone, from the film classic The Godfather. 

Head Drawing - Michelle Pfeiffer

     Continuing with the head drawing practice using some drawing methods I've learned from the just concluded class, here's a drawing of Michelle Pfeiffer as Madame de Tourvel from the film Dangerous Liaisons. 

Head Drawing - Jeff Bridges

        This is my week 5 and final head drawing assignment. Rendering was the topic. It was about design and edges. I still have a long way to go in terms of polishing my rendering, but in the span of 5 weeks, I think I made quite a progress.  I enjoyed doing theses assignments that I will be continuing doing these head drawings for days to come. Till the next one....

Head Drawing - Stan Lee (28Dec1922 - 12Nov.2018) R.I.P.

       Today, I learned of Stan Lee's passing at the ripe old age of 95 years.     I wasn't a Marvel comic reader. I was more of a Dennis the Menace, Snoopy, Garfield comics reader. Even if I'm not much of a comic book reader these days, nevertheless, some of the best movies and series I've enjoyed for the past decade or so, had been the Marvel superheroes like the Iron Man, Captain America, Spiderman, and the Daredevil. They were all based on comicbook characters created by Stan Lee.

       When I was still starting out to become an animator many years ago, I was terrible with drawing humans.  In fact, I was terrible in drawing from imagination, a crucial skill an animator needs to be able to animate different characters effectively.  One of the books that helped me draw people from imagination was the book, How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema.  Even if the book was tailored for comicbook artists, the fundamental lessons were very much applicable to a budding animator like me at that time. 

         And so, in a small way, I'd like to pay tribute to Stan Lee, with this drawing.  May he rest in peace.

 

Head Drawing - Alan Rickman (Updated)

      It's really important to have a good solid construction and correct proportion as the foundation, but that doesn't mean there won't be no changes along the way. This happened with this drawing. Shadow shapes were further refined and adjusted. The neck and shoulder proportions were also broadened.  But once the basic structure and the general shapes were laid-in, adding the details of eyes and mouth were like icing on the cake. 

Head Drawing - Bruce Willis (Updated)

     This week is the final week and the focus is rendering. Since I've done so many heads in the past 4 weeks, and most of  them are in different stages of completion, I decided to go back and finalized some of them. 

     Here's the updated version of my drawing of Bruce Willis, finally with eyes and mouth.

Head Drawing - Emily Blunt

    This drawing was also part of the week 4 assignment I submitted for the Head Drawing Class I'm taking.  Just like in my Hugh Jackman drawing, I'm showing here the drawing stages that I've learned from the class so far.

  

      It starts with the lay-in of the generic head from week 1. Then the Reilly method rhythm lines from this week's lesson were drawn on top of it. Those lines also served as planar and anatomical guides as well.  After that, the features and shadow shapes were added.  Followed by the adding of  dark tones on the shadow shapes. This stage was where most of my time was spent. Likeness was recognizable already at this point. After this stage, adding some light gradations was easier to figure out. The rest of the rendering was finished in a short time after that.

    

   

Next week would be the final week of the class and it would be about facial features and rendering. Watch out for my assignment postings of those here.

Head Drawing - Hugh Jackman

        So for the past few weeks, I had been taking a class that gradually introduced me to the Reilly Head method.  Having drawn a few head assignments where I learned to separate the shadow shapes from the light shapes, it's now much easier for me to grasp  the concept of the Reilly Head .  Those multiple lines, which can be confusing, represents the head planes, anatomical structure and rhythm lines.  Those lines really help in rendering the form.

    After learning the Reilly Head, those rhythm lines seem very obvious  whenever I look at faces now.

Head Drawing - Alan Rickman

        *** There's an updated version of this, see here.***

         After Bruce Willis, it's Alan Rickman in his  memorable role as Hans Gruber from the film Die Hard.  He's got a nice shadow shapes in this photo, that drawing his likeness became easier to capture. Although I wasn't quite sure when I first started with the basic head construction.  I skipped the outlining of some of the features and just went straight to sculpting with tones. It took me awhile but eventually I did manage to get his likeness.   I kept the values limited to three, with some hint of whites in some of the hotspots. Plus a light grey background to frame him nicely. Cool, huh?

Head Drawing - Bruce Willis

 ***There's an updated version of this, see here.***

    This was one of the head drawings for my week 3 assignment in the Head Drawing class I'm taking, rendered with 3 to 5 values only.  Still not concerned with the eyes and mouth, it's amazing how effective this method is in drawing the likeness based on the dark patterns of the head.

      I used the basic generic head construction I learned from week 1, and then  modified it according to Bruce Willis' head shape and proportion. Followed by the mapping of the dark shadow shapes, avoiding the eyes and mouth for now, using only three values, the paper's value for the light, mid-tone grey and the darkest dark.   To add some polish, some whites are added for the hotspots, and black background to frame the whole head.

Head Drawing No. 5 - Can You Tell Who This Is?

This is now my 5th head sketch, where I draw the likeness through shapes. Even without the eyes and nose, this face is easily recognizable.  This head drawing method made my previous portrait drawing using the grid system seem obsolete.   This method is all freehand, a more enjoyable method for me.

Head Drawing No. 4 - Can You Tell Who This Is?

        While the previous three head sketches (see here, here and here), had been a struggle and took each a day for me to finish, in this sketch I was able to do a quicker lay-in almost effortlessly.  This took less time that I was able to do two more head sketches after this,

       Could be that this head had a easily recognizable shapes, or  I'm getting used to this drawing method.  Either way, I delightfully realized that this method of constructing the head is effectively training me to focus on the general overall shapes first, ignoring the eyes and mouth for the meantime, while some likeness must be evident at this stage first, before proceeding to add the facial features and  final rendering.

          I'm liking my progress in this class thus far...
      

Head Drawing No. 3 - Can You Tell Who This Is?

     This week 2 assignment required  me to do twenty-five of these heads.  As with the previous two sketches, getting the right shapes took time. I was already doubting myself if I'll be able to do more than five at the rate I was going. I was only managing one head a day at that point.

     My first  and second head  sketches conformed to the generic head construction easily than this third one. Miscalculating the angle too much while laying-in the generic head was my problem. The top of the hair confused me with the perspective of it.   So I had to carefully observe the slight angle tilt of the head and try not to overdo it.

     Getting the right shapes also took a lot of time. A wrong shape easily destroy the likeness. In the end, I'm still not sure if  I achieved the likeness. What do you think?

Head Drawing No. 2 - Can You Tell Who This Is?

    Another one of my no-eyes-no-mouth head sketch.  As I mentioned in my previous post, this is the lay-in stage where I decide that if  I can't get the likeness at this point, going further won't help either.

   The more handsome the face is, the harder it is to get the likeness, It was suggested that getting an "uglier" face would be easier and lessen the pressure of trying to get it perfectly. I should have listen to that suggestion. Because this was such a struggle.  After  multiple starts and stops, erasing and revising, this is the closest to the likeness I was able to manage. 

   What do you think?

First Post for 2018 - Ianna's Portrait

 

 First up for the new year, it's human portraiture!  I have been shying away from drawing human portraits  for years because I find it harder to capture the likeness.  Those who know the person in the drawing would quickly tell me if  I succeeded or not.  Unlike animals, no one would complain. Haha...

Here's the portrait of my niece, Ianna. A gift for her 18th birthday.  Painting straight in color still intimidates me, so as a safety method and as always, I started painting in greyscale.   Making sure the value structure was right,   All the hard work was done at  this stage. Once I was satisfied with it, I then glazed-in the color on a top layer set in the color blend mode.  I used Clip Studio Paint Ex this time, which is very similar to Photoshop. 

So for this year, I'm thinking of expanding my artistic horizon and include humans in my drawings and paintings.  Might do some  of my fave celebrities.  Watch out for it!

Furry Goat

It's been awhile since I last posted a sketch. . I had been receiving some photo references from drawthis.com, for some time now, and  haven't sketched any of them until today.  It's a furry goat.