It has been a very busy week, and I’ve been trying to find time to relax somewhere in all the hubbub. I’ve not been fully successful in it all, but I’ve been trying to do a bit of drawing practice where I can as part of the relaxation, but then sometimes I get carried away with my experimentation and turn a simple sketch into a more elaborate thing. It is good practice for The Project, but is it relaxing? I am not sure. It sure is more productive than watching a random TV show, I suppose…
I dropped in at a studio to do a bit of drawing of a model some nights back after a long time away. These “drop in and draw” sessions are good ways of helping me do a hard self-reset on certain aspects of technique, and wake up certain types of seeing, as I’ve mentioned here before. They are an excellent complement to the drawings I do on the bus, subway, in cafes, and so forth, that you’ve also seen here. (And then there’s home studio work which is a whole other thing altogether.)
I was pretty terrible on several aspects, as expected from time away, doing rather clunky renditions of the model in various poses. I felt bad, as she was doing some really interesting work (using the light and shade well and so forth) but I was not really doing it justice. But it was good to do.
In the last ten minutes I did one last drawing and got something half-decent. I ended up doing some inking experiments on it a night or two ago – some rather stern cross-hatching for half-tone was featured, as you can see. I sort of like it. I was mostly enjoying dipping this nice new pen nib I got recently into the ink and drawing the lines… Then today I decided to splash some digital paint on to it. The figure evolved a bit from the original drawing, somewhat toward the cartoon side of things, because of the style of inking I used, I think. Interesting. (Compare to the recent experiment here, or something very different here.) I like the girl who emerged in the end. Perhaps she might be a useful basis for a character in The Project at some point…
-cvj
