Drawing with firm, strong lines. None of that “amateurish” scribbling. That was my assignment of today.
I grabbed this image from a YouTube video (halted), and colored it afterwards with GIMP.
Even more direct, because I can’t freeze frame it, was drawing one of my cats life.
I’m trying to express myself with more exact lines. I hope I’m slowly getting to a point I can turn that page and start drawing caricatures.
That is all.
In the book about caricature (“Face Off”), the author writes:
Draw anything and everything.
Now that was a good hint for me to start drawing things in my environment. How about my lovely three-colored cat? She is much more friendly to me with age, and is starting to have the nice disposition of the cat I think is her mother. I caught that cat, brought her to my local animal shelter on the first workday of 2008, as my good deed for that year. Apart from the 100 euros I gave (which could be used to spay her, and house her until she found a new owner), I have never been much involved with the animal shelter, before or after.
So there she is, in all her feline splendor. I tried to use strong lines and concentrate on the overall impression. The sketch was made in less than 10 minutes with an HB pencil lead with a chisel point. The chisel point gives me a much more expressive line than the needlepoint most people prefer for their pencils. Or perhaps they aren’t aware that one can give all kinds of alternative shapes to the business part of a pencil.
That is all.
Even more drawing based on a YouTube video.
I’m spending so much time on learning how to code in Objective-C 2.0 (19 hours in the last two days), that I haven’t much time left for drawing. Even so, I will keep trying to draw every day.
That is all.
I have started to use YouTube to get moving people caught on video to “pose” for me. My guess is that if I can capture those people, capturing people in real life is going to be much easier.
The video play was about ninjas. Well, the plot wasn’t very clear to me, but it was more meant as a spoof than anything else, so the plot wasn’t that important.
After the ninjas there were two young boys in the video, which had at least some recognizable features. I tried to concentrate on one of them. The fourth version was pretty close to my novice eyes.
When the video play was over, I went on, trying to imagine additional content. Here’s a wise old man that wasn’t in the video.
And then there was a lot of gasping in the play. As you would expect from an action video. I distilled that into this sketch with a nice even background behind it.
Without my reading glasses I couldn’t have done this. I would have missed the precision. On the other hand, I didn’t use reading glasses in the first sketch. That meant it had to be pretty rough.
That is all.
Learning to see the most essential features of someone isn’t easy. You need to study them while they are moving, and think what jumps out. So I watch a bit of TWiT Live to get inspiration. It didn’t turn out exactly like I wanted, but it’s a start.
I tried to use as few lines as possible. Only one of them sort of resembles Leo Laporte. I’m sure that after a few sessions I’ll get better at it.
And what is so special about Leo? What are his mannerisms? Well, the corners of his mouth curl in a certain way when he’s thinking how to reply to someone talking. Also, his eyes are relatively small, and his mouth equally small, giving him a more youthful look. That has nothing to do with mannerisms, but it is something which you should catch in a drawing as well. Not that I’m anywhere in the neighborhood of that description in my sketches.
I guess I will be watching some online video in the time to come to sharpen my powers of observations.
That is all.
