Illustration Friday – Suspense. Police/Detective character from a game that can be rather suspenseful at times.

A drawing for Illustration Friday. A self-portrait of sorts; the joke being that when we go walking in the park, we tend to go through the wettest, muddiest trails.

Practice Sketch

In order to force improvement upon myself – kicking and screaming if necessary – I try to make a point to do a daily practice sketch. What I do is this:

1) Find a nice figure drawing. I like The Satorialist for this, and DeviantArt has some awesome stock art photographers for this purpose. I make the image big on my monitor, clear away  my keyboard, get out some printer paper, and then try to do a loose but accurate figure sketch.

2) When the sketch is complete as I’m going to get it, I’ll scan that thing and bring it up in Photoshop, then open a copy of the original photo. I drag the sketch over the image, resize it, then adjust opacity so that I can see the photo behind the sketch.

3) From there I can see where I’ve failed spectacularly at the figure.  I especially need to look at the following:

- Face Proportions.

- Posture.  Contrapposto gives me fits. I have found that if I draw a line from the head right down to the ground area, it helps. Then the angles of the hips and shoulders.

- Shoulders. I never draw shoulders quite broad enough, even on women, so this technique has helped massively in that regards.

- Leg length/Calves. I chronically draw legs too long/calves too big. This practice has helped me scale those down.

- Fabric/Clothes. Realistic representation of how clothes fit on a figure is rough – drawing a figure with clothes actually helps!

4) I take the tablet, and in blue lines, I sketch over my lines and the figure, ‘fixing’ what I messed up on before, overlayed across the image.

5) If I have time, I’ll start over again from scratch, getting a new sheet of paper and resketching the figure after having observed it in detail.

I realize in doing this that I could do the same to multiple figures and how they interact, as well as scenes and backgrounds. Knowing how the figure works and interacts with other figures and the background in life creates a much more realistic view when you are drawing something from scratch or an imaginary scene.

It’s a process of continual improvement, and my hope that doing this exercise every day will push that improvement along at a steady pace.

As ongoing process this year, I plan to try to correct my diet a bit, get back into the swing of things with workouts, and continue with some of the improvement projects I’ve been working on for the better part of the year.

The most important personal project for me is to push myself more than ever to make something of myself, and my art. It’s finally really solidified for me that as tough as things are right now everywhere, and especially here in Flint Michigan, that the only way out of this hole is to drag myself up on out of it.

And keeping that solidly in mind, I intend to take a much more proactive stance with my own situation. Getting this site and the gallery up is one stage in this. You can expect to see more and better art in the gallery in the coming weeks, more posts here, and possibly some tutorials when I find some good things to teach others.

Active, that’s key. I don’t want to live a passive life, so it’s time to get moving.