Wintertime sketching

From last October. Some of these were made at Piazza Santa Croce (Florence), some while sitting on grass at the nearest park.

I tried to combine the fat tip of a Tombo marker and my usual Staedler fineliner, hunting for a different result. So:

• It's a super fast combo - I can get shadows down quickly without actually drawing the outer lines, and the fineliner's thin tip fixes the general look. Very helpful if I need to practice on solid shading and strong contrast

• Well, I suck at sketching buildings! :D 
• So much sketching... and I can't seem to reduce the amount of linework yet

Experience gained: 3 points!

- I need to be more effective with less detail. I guess I'll pick up my notes from Louis Gonzales' workshop on gesture drawing - it was a gold mine
- I should train my eye with buildings and perspective - it's so intimidating to me, but this must be the right way to break the ice
- Blocking in shadows with a fat marker is a process I enjoy and will probably help me improve on many levels. It's fast, rough and unforgiving

Ski season

Why do I crave snow so much?
Speed painting from reference of Ovindoli, a mountain place I miss very much.

All together now:

- one brush

- no color picking

- no lineart

• This took very little - between 10 and 15 minutes
• Contrast looks a little better-managed than usual 

• Those clouds suck, no matter how stylized they ended up looking
• I'm not happy with the general feel of the textures. Time to make some good brushes

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I feel I need a "multiple strokes" brush. Scribbling with a single tip is fun and all, but I feel it doesn't simulate the effect I'm after well enough. I also need brushes that are better suited to painting environments - more texture, less control
- I realized I have little to no experience with rendering clouds. Practice needed!

More naked people

Beach and post office - what to do when you're bored as heck. 

Summer was coming to an end :( 

This batch of sketches was done during the same day as this one, so I guess there's nothing special to report in addition to what I wrote there.
What? No I'm not lazy c:

Cutout

I found the reference for this on Pinterest by typing "prostitute". Whut.

Limitations: just one brush, no color picker (not so daunting when you have a greyscale ref :P), no preliminary skecth.

Let see here - at some point I used the cutout filter on the refence: it simplifies the image by reducing the number of colors and making more or less complex adjacent patches out of them. You have control on edge fidelty and color complexity. I looked for something that could help me envision the values in definite areas.

• I used the filter midway during the exercise and my patches of grey were quite close to what happened to the reference picture after the cutout. I wasn't expecting that!
• I don't mind a rectangular, minimal background like that - I feel I'm getting a little more used to this kind of thing

• I don't like the face. There's something wrong with the values and the patches of grey don't really deliver a good sense of  volume

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I need to practice more on painting faces and getting the volumes down in a few strokes. Speedpainting of faces from reference pics with a time limit should work - perhaps I could make 6 per day, 5 minutes each?
- The cutout filter is a valuable tool. I'll definitely use it again to get a better grasp on synthesis

Hello watercolors

Why hello - here's a watercolor sketch I made roughly two years ago. Finally introducing some colored traditional stuff! Now for the sad part: I haven't touched watercolors since this flamingo.

Let's see here:

• My beloved fineliner seems to cooperate with watercolors too. I'd like to try different media and/or ink colors for the line drawing part
• It doesn't look too dull for a watercolor sketch

• The face part looks confusing - too many details when a few wide blothes of color would have worked fine
• Colors need to look more lively. I want to see more contrast (duh) and clash 
• I probably worked with dirty water and slightly murky colors

Experience gained: 4 points!

- I want to practice more with mixing various media and watercolor. I like the outcome! I'll experiment with different ink colors, too
- I need to work with wide areas of base color before jumping into details (its face D: )
- Some consistent speedpainting from reference should help me manage tones and values better
- Be clean, Dev. No murky water! You want your watercolor paintings to be bright

Overused

Tigers are an easy choice when it comes to animal portraits but what can I say - they are such scenographic subjects.

Same as last times: one brush, no color picker, no outlines. Analyzer mode: ON!

• It seems that I'm moving towards more decorative solutions - the rough parallel scribbling in the background was spontaneous and doesn't look bad; those almost rectangular patches of fur seem to work nice; I think I'm improving with framing and cuts too - negative space foliage and fur look good, I'm gonna try that again with other subjects

• Still struggling with contrast
• I feel it's too soon to start tweaking colors - no trippy interpretations for now
• I wanted it to look fine with bigger blotches of color and less detail

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I need to improve on synthesis. I should try shrinking and blurring the original reference picture, so as to be unable to go into details and forced to stick to the general impression
- I'd love to get better at managing negative space and making it a part of my style

I miss the beach

I decided to slow down and post three times per week. With the current post format posting WILL become more time-consuming, and with academy and all I guess I should focus on good in-depth posts instead of quantity :B

So! here's a sketchbook page full of beach people from last summer. Some of them are amusing.

• I'm glad I could use all the available space in the sheet. The year before I couldn't squeeze in as many sketches
• Poses and shading seem to work fine - the bodies are less stiff than last time

• The linework is often insecure and messy - NOT the good kind of messy
• Anatomy and proportions, as always. I seem to struggle most with legs and sitting poses

Experience gained: 3 points!

- I don't mind a cluttered page. I lovelovelove saving space and drawing tiny helps me cope with fast-moving bad people
- I definitely need to work on legs and hips structure
- The lines are more complex and messy than last year. I can't tell if it's a good thing quite yet D:

Standing on nothing

Another speedpainting I did back in July. 

Oh deer, you don't seem to be standing on very solid ground!

Limitations:
- no color picking
- only use one hard brush
- no lineart, sketching and such; apply color directly

• Messy erasing on the edges looks interesting
• The background is very rough and painterly but does look like forest. A bit
• I managed to keep myself from touching up the background
• I actually didn't use the picker at all this time around!
• I can see I'd do much better now - this was from last July

• I couldn't keep myself from touching up the damn deer
• Speaking of which, it looks stiff and the neck is especially off
• The deer looks really bad exactly where I went back with a smaller brush to "fix it"...
• ...and it doesn't seem to be stading on the ground. The problem was that bunch of branches/stray that cover its feet: in the picture it's actually a lot closer to the viewer and out of focus, so the deer's shadow wasn't visible and I couldn't really deliver a sense of distance
•  The colors aren't fresh and bright as they're supposed to

Experience gained: X points!

- Work work work on freshness and brightness of colors, perhaps even pushing values and saturation a bit

- Do NOT zoom in and go small brush on speedpainting like these - I need to work with large solid blotches of color and get better at being expressive with few strokes 

- Do NOT go for details if the base stucture is wrong 

I definitely need a hand

Part two of my brief but intense hands session.

Some improvement here, I think.

• Anatomical accuracy and technique improved since the last batch 
• Midtones look better 
• The inking style is a little on the decorative side - I'd like to keep like those "patches" of parallel lines

• Those hands would look overdetailed on a full illustration in this style - the illustration itself would look stupidly overdetailed in this style
• I'm still far from a decent decorative solution 

Experience gained: 2 points!

- I'm going to try with some better thought-out hatching. I'd like the strokes' direction to be actually based on the surface of the object and how its "facets" tilt
- I realized I need some background color to make the "lineless-with-shadows" idea work - or, as "background", what should be part of a full illustration besides hands :v

Need a hand?

 Hands are evil and since my last exam I realized more than ever I lack some real knowledge of their structure. So in July I gathered some reference pics and produced some quick practice sketches.

Staedtler fineliner and Copic markers - I was coming from a week or more without grabbing a pencil (or pen tablet) and my strokes were ugly and unconfident and hairy ugh.

I used my trusty fineliner and the fat brush tip of a black Tombo marker on this one.
Let's see:

• Fat black marker and fineliner are great for quick sketching
• I improved a lot by making more and more of these - the next batch looks a lot better!

• Fingers often look off
• Not drawing for a while is bad. It shows
•  This first batch of marker & fineliner sketches look horrible. The black areas are unrefined and uneffective
• Those parallel fine lines as midtones look awful  

 

Experience gained: 4 points!

- I've been having issues on this. I need to draw hands more often and study muscles and bones properly

- Tombo and fineliner are great mediums I'll definitely use again to get more confident on large shadow areas

- I'd like my inked stuff to look good without those outlines that are exposed to light. In other words, I'd like to find a solution to make subjects look believable by just inking shadows and a little hint of midtones, without the need for outlines

- I need a solution for midtones. I can't figure out how to reproduce them properly when using inks yet

Brush test

Back in August I started working on some more personal custom Brushes. I was looking for something with texture, shape dynamics and a "dry brush strokes" feel. Or something chalky.

Here's a random furry creature I made while testing the brush. I named it Beebo. The brush, not the beast.
Analysis:

•  This Beebo brush looks okay. Not too texturized, still reliable for sketching and blocking out flat colors, with a hint of silky texture. I'm using it a lot
• Beebo feels especially good for scribbling and hair tufts
• The values are decent
• I like the result of cutting out parts of the creature in a nonconventional way

• Beebo needs some more work
• As this was not character design practice, the creaure turned out random and uninspired... but unlike other times where I just draw without planning, I haven't created any particularly interesting body parts/markings 
• Anatomy and perspective fail here and there

Experience gained: 3 points!

- Painting something as a custom brush test instead of just scribbling around is a good opportunity to produce and practice more

- Sketches emerging from a brush test SHOULD be checked and fixed if anatomy and perspective suck, no matter how little planning there was behind :D

- I'll experiment more on weird cuts and framing