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

Back To Basics - Izzy's Three Simple Rules of Light

 Unlike drawing, where lines are used to delineate shapes and forms, painting uses light and shadows to describe an object or surface.  Very basic idea it seems. But the challenge is to be able to visualize how light is affecting a surface correctly. It's a fundamental skill an artist needs to master, if being able to paint without copying from reference is the goal.   One amazing concept artist/illustrator who explained the concept of light and shadow really well is Izzy Medrano in his YouTube videos, which are found here & here.

My 3 Rules Of Light painting exercises toggled with Izzy's paint-over critques,  plus his red number indicators for his notes as enumerated below.

  He breaks down those fundamental principles in three simple rules, that seemed deceptively easy. This is how he  breaks it down: (Watch his full explanations from here and here)
1. Objects most perpendicular to the light gets the most light.
2  Light's power gets weaker on more distant objects.
3. If something solid is between your object and your light source, the object gets NO light.
  - Every object that is lit by the light source, itself becomes another light source.
  - The light being bounced cannot be as bright as the original light source.

  To completely understand Izzy's 3 simple rules, I did some painting studies, using black and white photo references. Then I analyzed the photo reference's lighting, by transferring the lighting info unto a light sphere, showing the direction of the light source.  Then apply those lighting information onto a completely new surface forms.   To determine if I did a good job, I submitted this study to Izzy in his Patreon page for his critique.

   
   He did some paint-overs and gave me a few notes, which  were very helpful.   Here are his notes: (Please refer to the images with numbers as indicated in red.)

1. Your light sphere is almost  directly overhead. The specular and hot spots on the cheeks and nose tell us that the light source is closer to us on this side of the picture plane.
2. There is no reflected light in your origin image.
3. The cat is half-lit according to the rules of the image with the same lighting as the image though the object shouldn't catch light the same way.  Reference would help you figure out your planes, so that you can tell which surfaces are more likely to face up to the light source. A cat doesn't have the same planes as a human does. So a cats nose can't cast a shadow like a persons, and that's why you have a big black streak on the second image's face.
4. These eyes look flat. The overall face needs more reference in the same way 3 does.

  With this exercise, it is humbling to say that my main difficulty was in visualizing correctly the many subtle planar shifts of the surface form, and how light would affect them correctly. Also, good references for my studies should have been used, to correctly understand and render the different subtle form and plane changes.  With these new insights, I need to do more of these and have them reviewed and critiqued again, which would help solidify those three simple rules of light into my brain, and then hopefully, would serve as a good foundation as I develop my skills to become an artist who is not a reference slave. 

  If any artist is interested in learning and understanding the logic of light and color, I highly recommend Izzy Medrano's tutorials that can be found in his Gumroad page.  And perhaps be a patron of his and get critiques of your work.  You can check him out in  his Patreon page.

  So, if you've watched and did the Izzy's 3 Simple Rules assignment practice also, how did you find the exercise? How did your study turned out?  Love to hear and see what you've done.

 

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.  

Daily Sketch 121 - Tiger Head

 

Time for big cats. It's a head study of a tiger. .  It won't be enough for me to just sketch this in greyscale. like in my previous cat heads.  It is such a bright-colored animal.  So I glazed some bright orangey color that tigers usually have.  As for the stripes, inking it with the pen tool seemed appropriate, and then scraped  it with the palette knife tool to achieve some fur texture and then blended it to soften it after.

Daily Sketch 120 - Cat Laugh.

More feline cuteness.... cats that seem to be laughing.   These are copied from cat photo references,
and it's amazing how cartoon-like their expression looks.

Daily Sketch 119 - Cat Faces

The many faces of a cat -- the innocent look, the diva look, the sleeping-baby look, and the vampire look.  One moment it can look so sweet  and cuddly, then  another moment it  can look cold and scary.  Just a black and white pencil sketch for today. 

Daily Sketch 118 - Drama Cat

It's easy to anthropomorphize this cat.  With those lazy pose and blank stare, I only had to add a dark background and some lighting, then this lounging cat suddenly evokes a feeling of drama as if  it's acting.  So I entitled this sketch as Drama Cat.  

Daily Sketch 117 - Cat Blue

After getting used to drawing dogs for weeks, this sketch almost didn't happen. Because I was sketching another dog instead of a cat like I said I would. Silly me. After realizing it, I quickly shifted to drawing this cat, whose looking blue. So here's Daily Sketch 117 - Cat Blue.  

Daily Sketch 116 - Cat Basking

 

In the previous post, I said that I'll be focusing on learning the art and techniques of digital painting, specifically using Photoshop.  This plan would definitely affect my daily sketching routine.

So today, I was originally planning to just do a quick sketch of a cat, and be done with it so I can focus on my main study of Photoshop.  I used Artrage which is still my favorite drawing app. However. I was having fun, so I  decided to just continue and finish it. 

So here's the final sketch.

 

Daily Sketch 115 - Prince

Photo reference by Jene Espiritu

The challenge of this subject , aside from drawing the likeness of the dog, was in figuring out the form underneath the shaggy fur and to render it convincingly, without overdoing the details of it all. 

I have been sketching dogs for months now, and yet I had a hard time with this dog, a shaggy maltese named Prince.  I originally plan to use Clip Studio Paint for this sketch, but since I was having such a hard time drawing and painting this that to use a program I'm still unfamiliar with would be another difficulty I wouldn't want to take on right now. So I reverted back to using Artrage.

After this sketch, I plan to focus in learning the technical aspect of digital painting. So no more sketching dogs for a while.  There's so much I need to study and learn.   Now that I'm in the right frame of mind, it's  a good time for me to do just that.  

Daily Sketch 114 - Sace

Learning a new software for digital painting can be intimidating and overwhelming. I would usually watch a lot of video tutorials on how to use it.  It can be so tedious and boring. And so I decided to just start using it in creating an artwork, and learn the tools and presets as I go. This means that my workflow wouldn't be as smooth-sailing yet, because of the frequent stopping to research the solution to whatever problem I would encounter in using  the program.

This is why I've been using Artrage for as my main drawing and painting application for the past 4 months now because of it's simplicity and user-friendliness that allows me to just focus on the drawing and painting aspect of digital art, without much  technical complications.

However, I also wanted to learn and be proficient in the other digital art softwares like Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint. And so, for this sketch, I started the drawing the initial blocking and painting in Artrage 5, then continued to finalize the painting in  Clip Studio Paint. So far, I managed to replicate my Artrage work process to Clip Studio Paint successfully.  I know I'm just skimming the surface of the program, and there's a lot more to explore and learn.  But for a simple one-character painting, I think I adapted to it very well.

So here's my Daily Sketch for the day - Sace, an adorable Shih Tzu pet of my former work colleague, whose other dog, Pringles,  I've also painted before, 

Daily Sketch 113 - Older Creamy

This sketch took longer than usual. I was sick for a few days and it's only now that I finally able to finish it.  It's hard to draw with a runny nose.

In those sick days where I can't really draw,  I had been doing some painting art book reading and learned a few bits here and there from different tutorial videos online. I tried incorporating some of those bits here.  One of the things I'm learning is about observational skills - how to accurately draw and paint your subject's form and color.  I had been doing some visual measuring loosely before and the tips I learned from those tutorials helped reinforced it and also provided me with some focus.

So far, I'm satisfied with what I've done. I'd like to try doing some human portraits too as my next challenge, which I've  been avoiding.   But not for long now.

Daily Sketch 112 - Boomer & Fluffy Portrait

 

I wasn't feeling well when I started this sketch. A rough sketch was all I could manage yesterday. Today, I'm having a terrible cold. But this sketch needs to be finished. So slowly but surely, I worked on it till it's done. 

After finishing the rough sketch yesterday, I proceeded to clean it up by using a pen tool in Artrage, to create an inked drawing look.  I haven't really done much inked drawings before, so I take this as a good small step. I know it's not the same as using real pen and ink on real paper, but using a digital medium frees me from worrying about wasting art materials as I learn and inevitably will make mistakes.  I'm happy with what I've done.

I could have just left it at that, but I decided to add color to see how it would look. So with the inked drawings on the top layer, I added the whites underneath, and then glazed in some color  in blend mode for the tongue, inner ear skin, and eyes. 

Then for the background, I added some gradient color for the final version.

Daily Sketch 111 - Queenie Smiles

Here's Queenie in her extreme, cuddly cuteness.  A fluffy white body with a face that looked like she's wearing a mask, don't know what type of dog she was. I don't even remember who gave her to me. She wasn't my first dog. She could be one of my last. I'd like to have a new dog someday, but not just yet. I'm quite content with just drawing and painting dogs for now.

Daily Sketch 110 - Queenie

 

 

 

So it's my turn to sketch my own dog today. This is Queenie during her puppy days. She's small and fragile-looking, yet she's not afraid to fight with my other dog triple her size. She's in dog heaven now.

Daily Sketch 109 - Happy Huskies

 

My sketch for the day is these two adorable huskies,  Fluffy and Boomer, together.   If they're not annoying each other, they're quite content hanging out with teach other, or so I'm told.  For this sketch, and as with my previous sketches of them, I draw them in grey scale first, and the color added  later. Once everything's final, I add a noise filter to the whole image to give it some texture.

 

Daily Sketch 108 - Boomer Sits

 

 

Another Boomer drawing for today. He seemed well-behaved here. I reckon he got scolded here. Just look at that grumpy-looking face. Hehe.

Daily Sketch 107 - Boomer's Hula Hoop

 Boomer, my sister's other pet husky, seemed to want to play the hula hoop.  Or it could be that he thought it's a big chew toy. Whichever it was, this is just too cute that I just have to draw this as one of my daily sketches.  This is the second time I painted this dog. The first time was done in Photoshop, while this was painted using ArtRage 5.

Daily Sketch 106 - Fluffy Looking Silly

Another Fluffy drawing, a cute one.  She got caught and scolded for doing something naughty, and looked like this with a silly smile with ears folded back.
This sketch was done using Artrage 5 - my favorite drawing and painting application for my Daily Sketches.