Re-building momentum slowly!
September was a bit better than August but not much. So far October (writing this on 12th) hasn’t been great but more in a blog post about that.
Date: 26/9/22, 28/9/22, 29/9/22, and 2/10/22
Comment: The Queen, total time: 177 mins
Easily the longest single drawing I’ve done at nearly 3 hours over 4 sessions. It is probably longer as I actually did bits and bobs in the days in between. I constructed this using pencil/graphite but added some charcoal when I couldnt quite get dark graphites.
I spent over an hour trying to get the proportions righ and the October update contains more details. Generally, this at least looks like the Queen even though it is quite flawed.
Date: 21/9/22
Comment: The Queen, Total time: 16 mins
This is a very good example of why I don’t watch many drawing videos.
This started out as an attempt in charcoal because the reference was a B&W photo and I noticed one video (I forget which) start with the dark tones first and build from that. After pencilling out the main areas – which is wrong – I ended up being lost so I abandoned it. The lesson learnt is to build up dark tones.
Date: 11/9/22, 13/9/22 and 15/9/22
Comment: The Queen, total time for both: 54 mins
I’ll be doing a blog post on drawing the Queen, but both these drawings are of the same reference image, in pencil. Neither look like her at all. The first is proportion hell – everything was off. The second was not any better but I did push a bit more of the shading including using the blender stump. I quite liked the mid-tones you can get from using that tool.
Date: 7/9/22
Comment: Cats, total time 20 mins
This time I tried to find online any sort of guides to cat head shape similar to the guides you get for human heads and there wasn’t much. I do have a book on drawing cats but it is more ‘do as I say’ type approach rather than explaining the basic proportions. I then tried to do exactly that sans aid. It was a really good exercise in understanding detail.
Date: 5/9/22
Comment: Cats, total time 15 mins
Hasn’t photgraphed the best but hey ho. At the beginning of month, I decided to refocus and learn to draw cats but try to aim on simple shapes that build up a cat. This is a step towards illustrating them.
From left to right, the first two are nominally of Freddie and the third is of George. George came out the best.