life drawing

Here's a bunch of gestures and sketches that I have done over the last few months. I wish I could make it out to Life Drawing more often. I usually use pin up girls or fashion magazines when I can't actually go to class. The poses and lighting are a lot better for gestures I find. I sketch mostly women as I find them far more challenging than drawing men.

Tonal Studies

Here are some tonal studies, I wish I could do these everyday, but typically I knock out anywhere from 1-5 a week.

I am hoping to do a personal project in the next year that will involve a more cartoony style. So I thought as practice it would be a good idea to so some drawings of some of my favorite characters from my childhood as chibis. In this case they are the characters from the cartoon MASK.

coffeeeeeeee

I recently switched to decaf, and this week when I ran out of my fancy pants swiss water decaffeinated beans, I started to use an some caffeinated beans until I can go grocery shopping today. I didn't really notice a difference when I switched to decaf, probably because I never really drank a ton of coffee, so I didn't really think that I would notice a difference when I switched back to the good stuff for a couple of days.

I was wrong.bbbbbbzzzzzzzzz.

Here's me trying to work the ol foreshortening.

1KA.

more girlie doodles

Well my brain is slowly turning into mush as I continue to look for work. I think I am ready to stop doodling during my days off and ready to start making some finished pieces. Looking at my website it is in need of a huge overall. Nose to grindstone time.

1KA

I have some time off so I am going to step away from doing poses based on photos and move onto doing some sheets of poses based on whatever I feel drawing. Here's a warm up sheet and some sketches. When it comes to liner art, I am finding it really hard to work "straight vs. round" when drawing women, I have a tendency to get a rather square looking girl when I try to work it, so I sort of abandoned the idea and started trying to work "round vs more round."

more girls.

More gestures

I am going on vacation Friday, so I will not be posting for a week, and I think that when I get back I will switch to posting these gestures in a "best of" format and I might only put them up once a week.

Enjoy,
C.

Gestures.

I didn't do any gestures yesterday because I was at Whistler watching the Mens 10k biathlon. Here's the ones I did this morning.

More pretty ladies

more gestures, this time I numbered the poses and put the times down. I am hoping that I will be able to see some type of progression as I warm up. I am hoping that I will be able to capture more information faster and more accurately as time goes on.

One draw back to working digitally, that is that the wacom pen doesn't really seem to work when you hold with the point up (like you hold a soft pencil while doing life drawing, like holding a remote control or a flashlight.) Holding a pencil, or whatever, allows you to put down a wider variety of marks and therefore you are able to capture more information faster.

These have all been done using sketchbook pro, I love the brushes to death and my shaky hands don't seem to show through like they do when I use photoshop. There may come a time when I will have to switch in order to experiment with brushes and pen tilt to see if I can get something that mimics charcoal or conte.

Gestures

Heyo,

I always lament the fact that I don't get to do enough life drawing, especially gestures, and I decided to do something about it. Because I can't always fit a class into my schedule I have started using a stopwatch and good fashion/girlie pictures from magazines like Maxim and FHM. This was I can do a bunch of quick sketches in the morning as a warm up. This allows me to get in the practice I wanted, but because I can do it at home it also makes it easier work digitally too (I doubt I will ever be able to bring my cintiq into a life drawing class.)

Anywho, it is pretty cool so far, it makes a lot of the things about life drawing that always annoyed me easier. Like you can fit as many drawings as possible on the page, and recompose the page so that each sketch plays off each other. Because you aren't in a class you can redo a pose if the first run through didn't turn out, or decide mid-drawing that you want this to me a 3 minute pose instead of 30 seconds. Lastly, I always felt guilty about going through so much paper in a life drawing class, this way I don't have to bother.

I know the point of gesture drawings is to learn to capture poses with a sense of spontaneity and having all the amenities that working digitally affords me could take away from that, but I find not having to worry about these things let me relax more and work more loosely, so I figure the pros outweigh the cons at least for the time being.

these poses are between 30 seconds and a minute.

Here are some poses that I doodled these week. I am trying to not feel like I have to noodle everything about my work before I post it. So here's some stuff that was inspired by Frank Frazetta, in my books he paints/draws sexier women than anyone around.
Peace,
C.

Mega Man

Well I did this so my good friend Dan Beaulieu could colour it. He in turn did a drawing of Mega Man as well. Though it should be mentioned that Dan not only had his done the week we agree to do the swap, but also did 3 versions. I on the other hand am posting this way late and there's only one.

Peace.

Michaelangelo

Well it feels fantastic to finally get this one out the door. I can't believe that I finally came around and finished the colours on these TMNT drawings. Thanks to Chris Bourassa and Daryl Mandryk for the help. I couldn't have done it without them.

C.

WHAT the WHAT???

Hey, I actually got another one done, who would have thought it possible?!

Colouring the Turtles

Well it is about bloody time that I got around to doing this. I have been trying to get these darn turtles coloured for what seems like forever, and my plan was to get them all done before posting. Well Leo is 3/4 done and Mikey is about 1/2, so if at this rate they should be done sometime in 2053.

Peace,
C.

I can't believe how many things I have been trying to juggle lately, between: work, travel, having a knee injury, trying to rehab said injury, family visits and the unexpected I have had the better part of a month where my life has been seriously overclocked. I doodled this at work while I was waiting for my computer to reboot and liked it so much i decided to colour it. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel though, after next weekend my life should come down to a wonderfully mundane level. Fingers crossed.

L`et's try this again

So I am struggling to get back to sketching for myself. I needed some time off to do something purely for fun.

Hulk sketch

I watched the Hulk tonight, the new one with Ed Norton. It was cool, Tim Roth is a great actor, but didn't seem to fit well in the role of the villain. Here's a sketch.