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

Five Dogs Painting

This five dogs painting was a request by my sister.  It took a few days to capture good photos of these dogs, as they don't sit still and were quite an unruly bunch.  So I would wait patiently for each to sit still and look my way, only then would I quickly snap a lot of  continuous shots from my phone. Luckily, out of many useless shots, I managed to find some good shots that showed each of their distinct personalities.

    I started sketching them in my Artrage app and laid them out in a horizontal format.  Since there's five of them and I wanted to finish it before Christmas, I decided to just draw their heads, 

 For the painting, Instead of using Artrage app which is my go to app, I decided to use Clip Studio Paint Ex to familiarize myself  more with that app.    I'm still trying to learn and understand values, so I painted them in greyscale first.   To get the correct values, I  converted their photos to black and white first.  It was so enlightening to see what the real values of their colors really are.   Choco was a surprise to me because her brownish color was very light when seen in greyscale. I thought she would be a bit darker than Snowy, Creamy and Brownie. 

One of the basic painting skills I'm  learning is understanding the correct value structure. I'm no way near understanding that concept yet. But I know getting the correct values would make adding colors easier.   Below is the final version in color.

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.  

Back To Basics -Horse Studies 3

More horse studies  I haven't drawn the horse's skeleton before until now..  This helps me in taking  notes on the proportion and rhythm of it's skeletal structure. The body usually fits inside a square.  I've also animated it's basic walk cycle using Clip Studio Paint Ex, while the rest of the sketches were drawn in Artrage 5. Jack Hamm's, Ken Hultgren's,  Gottfried Bammes', Eliot Goldfinger's, Famous Artists Course books were used as my study reference books.

Back To Basics - Horse Studies 02

More horse studies. I used Jack Hamm's How to Draw Animals, and Gottfried Bammes' The Artist's Guide To Drawing Animals books for reference..  I've collected a number of books over the years but it's only now that I'm looking at them more closely.   

Back To Basics - Horse Studies

After months of  doing my Daily Sketch drawing series, it surely helped gain me back my confidence in drawing animals. Using photographs either from friends or found online as references, I would draw different animals by copying it.  It served a purpose of harnessing my observational drawing skills, a fundamental skill any artist should have.  But now it's time to really learn animal drawing a bit more deeply.

And so,  I'm now taking a slower pace to practice and study some animal anatomy and construction with the goal of eventually being able to draw, and design animals and creatures from imagination.  Thus, I'm starting a new drawing series - Back To  Basics. I plan to go back to learning the fundamentals  of not only animal drawing, but also that of figure drawing, human anatomy, perspective, composition, design, and color.   Listing all of that can seemed really daunting. So  I'll take one small step everyday. No pressure. Just learn it till it sticks.

So for now, here's some Horse Studies.

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.