#204

#203

i was looking through my computer for some face reference and I found this reaction photo which i always liked. i think i sorta flattened her nose which was a mistake and i broadened her jaw in a way that reminds me of one of those squat little kids from akira. i actually like it as a drawing, it feels like a different character but i think i used the reference quite well.

#201

#197

#196

#195

referenced from here

#194

referenced from here

#190

This blog was feeling lonely so i thought i'd post this here rather than on the tumblr. for the last couple of evenings i've been drawing girls. some with more reference, some less so. people seemed to really like the last drawing i posted on tumblr and this is kind of different which is basically the reason im holding off posting all of this over there.

i've never been good at drawing girls so i've practiced drawing them a lot in the last year or so. I feel like anatomically I'm getting there although obviously my whole approach to art is a bit bad so i dont know if i can really say that. inspiration-wise these are fuelled by Dave Cooper and Chris Sanders' work - both pretty cheesecakey artists but they sorta celebrate some elements of female body types that i think are underrepresented. I think my favourite here is the girl on the left considering didn't really reference the pose as a whole, although I also really like the running girl. Trying to use weird hairstyles to see how far i can push it before they just look like dudes. also i like weird/short hairstyles. keen for feedback on whether these are weird/shit.

#186

sketch of Bogart that I did that I sort of like. referenced from here (I put a coupla years on him, sorry Humph)

i don’t know if it’s to do with the limitation to monochrome or just the styles of the time but actors of this era had some really awesome faces. John K always goes on about kirk douglas (amazingly sent up by dave stoten with audio from frank gorshin here), and I’ve also seen it mentioned Kurosawa had a real knack for picking superb mugs.

trying to think of the great countenances of today… Willem Dafoe’s pretty good. i might draw him tomorrow.

#68

#64

boooooooooorrrrrrrringgggggggg

trying out a low opacity thing

#63

lot of faffing about on this one. mostly because I'm terrible at this.

#60

referenced from here.

#58

more girls. this time, petulant. can't find the source photo, sorry!

#29

These are all from a manga called Bakuman I've been reading on and off for a while now, my little brother has a bunch of the books at home so I ended up reading a big chunk in a row over the christmas break. This got my appetite going and I've since read about 3/4 of the series online.

I'd really recommend reading it, it's about two guys in high school trying to be mangakas which might sound like it's going to be mediocre but it's actually amazingly well observed in terms of character. People go through various complex and (mostly) believable traumatic experiences and learn from them. It's also deliciously meta for obvious reasons.

It's written by the guys who wrote Death Note, so the art's pretty good too, although I much prefer his silly faces to his bland attractive faces. This manga is a good example of how caricature can be used to uniquely punctuate certain moments. The one in the top left took me a bunch of inking/computer fiddling to get it anywhere near right. Original's here. Shame I didn't draw more of the body, that guy is hilarious.

tomorrow - dungeons & drawings!

#17

tolja I'd get back to faces.

#11

Again with hands I have trouble with gestures that don't have a lot of recognisable shapes and arcs. 2 and 4 were probably the hardest ones here, I was kinda giving myself an easy time with the other ones. I find splayed fingers really hard for some reason - I think it's because it's easy to abstract the hand into "blocks" of fingers, thumb, palm, and when the fingers spread out it's just a way more compicated shape. Also angles like number 4 still blow my mind, hands can look really strange and can bend in all sorts of weird ways. I think I'll go back to women tomorrow, maybe try some faces.

#10

04 and 05 I can live with (04 had amazing musculature and 05 had a pose with lots of recognisable shapes and curves). 06 exemplifies this problem I have with boring straight-up poses (just like number 01 yesterday). I guess part of the problem lies with the pose rather than my rendering of it but it feels like I should be able to make even uninteresting poses look nice. Also, she had some amazing muscles across her torso which proved really hard to get without trying to shade them (trying to describe all the shapes with just lines). Also she has her left hand on her hip in this manner that I ALWAYS struggle with. I might do some sketches just of that fucking hand.

Also, haha faces. Once I'm settled a bit more with the bodies I'll get to that.

#9

real quickie tonight, these felt good though so I'm gonna do some more later tonight/tomorrow.

#8

I actually like the way the gesture drawing turned out, although it feels very much like a luck thing, I need to do a bunch more like that. The inking took so long! I am so slow! and, although I think I got a pretty good read on her body (besides meaking her arms a little too thick-set), her face doesn't look anything like that. I was a bit stuck on whether to caricature it and ended up just doing something placeholder. She actually has super asiatic eyes, which are partially obscured by the hair but I think I was on the way to getting that right.

Other than that she looks a little butch, but definitely not like a guy! A mild success. Tomorrow - less talk, more gesture drawings.

I'm not posting the reference photo for this one, because I'm embarrassed about how different her face looks.