Daily Doodle

Using the Pose Tool again I found these two of a dancer. When I’m siting down for these drawings my goal is to capture the figure and gesture. Here I’m focusing on the body and the face is something of an afterthought. Yesterday it was all about portraiture. I’m emphasizing line instead of shading since I’d spend too much time perfecting that and these aren’t meant to be value studies. I wouldn’t exactly call them contour line studies, either, as I’m trying to build up volumes first and then I add the lines. These have been cleaned up somewhat.

For today’s doodle I used PoseSpace’s Pose Tool to find some drawing models to sketch. I found the expressive picture on the left so I started with that and tried to find a similar male picture to pair with it. That one became a bit more of a shading study than I wanted it to but I’m pleased with how things came out over all.

This time I tried using 3 tones to push values a little further. I did lights first, then darks, then went over top with a mid tone. I was debating wether to put the mid tone between them but I ended up putting it on top since I figured I’d painted in too many darks. It filled some areas out but it feels like they’re fighting each other more than working together. Perhaps I should have just done it in the light first and then used the darker shade more sparingly for intense shadows. Honestly these studies are getting more abstracted as I move from strokes to stippling. I think the problem is I’m still not comfortable with the brush as I’m being too precious with each mark trying to get it right the first time. This multi-pass process isn’t going to cut it, either, as I’m getting sick of my work towards the end. I can see laboring a larger piece but studies like this I’ll probably keep to two passes.

Today I took another pass at those studies using a painting brush instead of a pencil. It might be a good idea to use a palette so I can have lights, mid tones, and darks without relying on the pressure of my brush so much. My problem is I like to stick to one brush and one color to see just how much I can do with it. Switching distracts me and I either forget I have options or I rely on extremes too easily. “Oh, this is dark? Lets jump to the darkest color possible right away.” Working digitally is nice because you can use tools to block in, blend, and automate things that would take forever to fiddle with individually. The thing is you still need to spend a lot of care and attention to utilize those tools correctly.

I’ve been wanting to practice backgrounds lately so I pulled out some inspirational shots I found on tumblr. I was going to try painting in color but decided it was best to figure out values before I jump into anything else. I really love value drawing with charcoal but here I’ve yet to feel comfortable with the brush I’m using. The pencil brush I tend to use is good for outlining but rendering like this is a different animal. Thinking I should get comfortable with studies like these and then move on to using them for underpaintings

Today I decided to change up my twitter profile. I thought I’d try drawing our little pin up girl some more. She’s a fun little figure to doodle, especially with Frenden’s Manga Studio brushes.

I wanted to see how scribbly I could make each drawing in an animation while still making it work. The answer is pretty darn scribbly, actually. The real concern comes down to timing and spacing. Placing inbetweens more carefully and in better places would have smoothed a lot of this out. I also probably should have done the moon on a different layer so it wouldn’t be so obvious when I reversed the cycle. Still, this serves as a good example of how loose you can be without totally breaking an animation.

Today I doodled some faces. It’s fun to mix and match shapes that make up features. The first couple were more realistic but then I let myself get cartoony and played around with various brushes. It’s hard sometimes to fight the urge to just see what kinds of marks I can make. Perhaps I need to come to better terms with that urge.

I had some ideas for today’s doodle but none of them were working so I actually just started scribbling to see if I could draw a decent face out of nowhere. I might try this again to see what kinds of variations I can come up with. It’s more important to me to be able to randomly create as many good faces as possible than it is to draw the same one face over and over.