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• I started drawing again

  Monday, Feb 11, 2008 3:57PM / Standard Entry / Members only
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  Lately, Chieze, Jed, Christine, and I have been getting together on Sunday afternoons for informal drawing sessions. We crowd around the dining room table, break out our sketchpads & pencils, and draw for 2-4 hours. Drawing in a group is pretty productive. We critique each other’s work, share tips and techniques, and pool our art supplies. So far we’ve had two sessions. I’ve just been copying existing artwork, but hopefully I’ll graduate to drawing original artwork at some point.

  For Week One’s drawing session, I decided to do an anime-style drawing in ink. I picked this picture, by an artist named Haccan.

  

  I was feeling lazy, so I was pretty sloppy about copying the original picture. I left out the little kid, skipped the background, changed her clothing slightly, and messed up the proportions of the arm. I also learned that my Copic Multiliner SP pens suck. At $6/pen, I figured they must be really great pens, but it turns out that the nibs are really fragile. If you press too hard, the nibs get bent out of shape and the ink stops flowing. It was really frustrating trying to ink this drawing.

  

  Next I scanned the drawing and started coloring it in PhotoShop, following this tutorial. I picked my color palette with the help of Kuler, a neat site that Chieze introduced me to. However, I ran out of time and only got as far as the flats, so there’s no shading yet. Here’s the work in progress.

  

  For Week Two’s drawing sessions, I decided to make up for the previous week’s laziness by doing something more challenging — a photorealistic pencil drawing. I flipped through Allure magazine and found this beauty editorial.

  

  Here’s the final drawing. I did a better job of staying true to the original than the previous drawing, but there are still a lot of problems. Her eyes are looking in different directions, her nose is too long, and I got really lazy with the earrings. But if you didn’t see the original drawing, I think it looks alright. I used Derwent graphite pencils 6B, 5B, 3B, 2B, F, and 2H.

  

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