LS[L]D

Oooooooooooh a life size life drawing!?! Fun! It's 6x3. I was super excited and nervous to start, since I've never worked this large before, but I got really into it.

Stage two... I think it's pretty self-explainatory at this point.

Ta da! I have no complaints on this one. It was a really interesting experience, and I definitely want to do it again sometime... this me took roughly 24 hours to complete.

Self Portrait

So. Self portrait. I had a lot of trepidation about starting this one, since I accidentally gave myself a black eye last Friday night...

At about this stage I realized that it wasn't only my eye that's swollen, oh no, it's the entire right side of my face. Incredibly hard to draw it right: since it doesn't match with the other side but it's not dramatically swollen, it just looks lopsided!! Grrrr.

I gave up at this point. It kind of looked like me, but it was definitely off. A big part of it was definitely the swelling, but I couldn't explain it all away with that excuse. So I put it away and slept on it for a few hours.

Ah, the wonders of fresh eyes! I went back last night and spent about an hour tweaking it; I shortened/narrowed the jaw a lot, which was the main issue, plus some small edits to the eyes and hair. It's much much much better but, um.... it's still not right. I'm done working on it at the moment though...

Portrait

I really like drawings at this early stage. Despite their drawbacks, I feel like they're incredibly interesting.

I was really, really frusterated at this point. It wasn't working out all all. It didn't look like the model, first of all, and I couldn't for the life of me get the eyes to point the same direction!

Finished. I ended up not hating it by the time I was done. It still isn't a perfect likeness of the model, but there's some nice stuff going on in the shadows on the neck and cheek.

Feet

I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out. Feet are incredibly difficult to draw and I always struggle with them (they're right up there with hands and noses for me) but apparently all I need to do is work on them for 6 hours.

Hands

This is the first stage of a drawing. I'm focusing on the hands (the master copy was meant to warm me up for this).

A little further into the drawing. I've blocked in basic shadow forms.

And this is the "finished" piece. As you can see I really didn't spend time on anything but the hands. This pose was really frustrating because the model kept falling asleep. His head and right hand kept slumping and changing positions... very frustrating!

Durer

This is a Durer master copy (a copy of a piece by a "master artist"). It's hands, obviously... I did the majority of it at Starbucks.

Here goes....

OK. After two years of saying it, I'm finally doing it. My art blog starts now.