Multifaceted

Last post I mentioned something about wanting to draw more faces, so I did! On four different days, I drew a face. What was quite surprising was the progression of time taken on each picture. The first one took about three hours to make, with the rest of the pictures steadily taking less and less time to make. The fourth and final face took  roughly half an hour to finish! The first face is actually fully colored (a fact which I blame the unseemly amount of time taken to finish the damn thing on), but I decided on greyscaling it so that it doesn't pop out. For each picture I drew a quick sketch of the face first, then filled in the blanks, so to speak. Structurally I placed the shape or outline of the face, the facial features and the hair on different layers. Drawing each face was surprisingly enjoyable. As a bonus, I threw in a work-in-progress (well, sort of...) of the next scribble I want to work on.

Faces 3

WIP 1

To Infinity, and Beyond!

Here's a piece I began three or four weeks ago. I've worked on it for a total of three or four days, coming to a total of 6-8 hours worth of artistic effort. It's a reminder for me of why I started doing all this drawing in the first place: to be able to draw awesome mechs and other nifty mechanical contraptions! It's supposed to be a Szlamandra Tactical Armored Gear, from the boardgame Infinity. I've never played the game itself, but I happened to browse through the miniature catalog at one time and the Slamandra TAGs were among the coolest things in there. As for the drawing effort itself, I think I concentrated more on the shadows this time around, as opposed to any fine details.

Mech 1

Interlude

Games and work have been actively and very persuasively keeping me from my artistic efforts.The problem is, that getting better at this sort of thing would require much more... How should I put this... Cannon fodder? I think it's a bit like learning math (for some people, like me for example), that one just has to keep crunching numbers together rather than searching for an quicker way out. I'm clearly not doing this. I tried portraying some basic emotions this time around. Nothing fancy, just line-art with some shadows. I want to do more faces! I should start working on clothes as well.

Emotions 1

Heavy Metal

Here's another piece I started about a week ago and never bothered to finish it in time. It took some 4 to 6 hours to finish, with quite a bit of that time going into fiddling about with the line-art and coloring. I need to optimize those tasks somehow. Paint-bucketing uncolored areas wasn't such a hot idea after all, since it roughens the fill area edges rather crudely. One idea would be to quickly duplicate the line-art layer (or a portion of it), bucket it as normal, then merge it back onto the original line-art layer (or another duplicate) thus preserving the nice, gradual stepping that the lines often have. Anyway, this piece is a fictional WW2-era tank I wanted to try drawing. I drew it completely by hand, not using any line- or shape tools in it.

Vehicles 1

All systems 100% and feeling jolly good

Haha! So I'm finally rightfully reunited with my beloved desktop 'puter. It's amazing how faster I can get stuff done. Well, at least surfing the Net seems a lot faster! The lack of downtime updates is explained by my refusal to attempt another drawing with my laptop mouse. That was such an excersize in frustration that I felt it better to do without another such venture. This week's drawing portays my two household 'puters. I don't think I tried anything new with this one, but felt inspired to draw it nonetheless. And yes, my laptop is a bit on the aged and senile side of things.

Life 2

Technical Difficulties

My desktop computer blew up last week. A power-out occured, resulting in an electric surge that most likely fried the power supply along with the motherboard. It's been a week since I took it to the tech shop to have it repaired. Still no clue as to the true extent of the damage. I've been living in processing-power-limbo on my laptop in the mean time. Funny how doing anything with the ol' 'puter suddenly feels so slooow... I did the picture with Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI (dig the name...) and my lil' laptop mousie. I nearly lost my temper until I discovered the pen-tool and how to draw lines with it. Drawing with a low-DPI mouse is suprizingly frustrating. Here's to hoping I can get my beloved CPU back next week, hopefully in working condition.

Life 1

Schedules and such

I think I missed a deadline here... Hopefully no-one will notice since I did two pictures last week to compensate. There's not a whole lot to say about this week's piece. I want to get better at drawing faces, before I can concentrate on drawing other parts of the body. I think I got the basic outline of the face rather well this time. The eyes need more work. The hair appears to jut out from behind the ear. I think I should do a purely grayscale piece one of these days where I'll concentrate more on the face and less on everything else. Anyway, here it is.

Faces 2