Hail Discordia!

[Orozc0]

Mutants need love too, right.
You're improving fast. The self portrait with the keyboard is bad(the good kind), the shading has kinetic energy.

Oh yea and kindgirls, great referendum.

[Joce]

ur shading is coming along

[Manuel Baum]

Hi all!

I'm sorry i didnt answer for years . I've started studying and finished my B.Sc. in "Cognitive computer science". That totally sucked me in and thus my drawing began to suck too, because i couldn't do any drawing While i am currently doing my M.Sc. in "Intelligent Systems", I happen to have a little more time for art, or at least i am taking myself that time. I decided to revive my sketchbook and to try to draw and paint on a more or less regular basis.

Ironically another hobby of mine, the game of chess, helped me to get motivated for drawing: I played a lot of chess online at chess.com and one or two months ago my rating there stagnated. I was totally frustrated because of that and didn't really want to play a lot of chess anymore (because of frustration). I found my may out of that circle of frustration by forcing myself to do some tactic-training for half an hour (which is actually fun by itself) and after a week or so i was going through a huge winning-streak. Chess is fun again, although i play actually way fewer games. And now to what this has to do with art: I think that my current lack of motivation is coming from the fact that i am not happy with the level of skill i currently have. That's mainly because i lost some of my skill due to inactivity (see, my last post here was on January 10th, 2007). I will now do serious training to work on my weaknesses. Drawing will be fun again

My goals:
-I want to learn how to paint (the technical side). I began using acrylics and did some research. I only painted on two very small canvasas and the results do not look good, but maybe i will upload them later, so eventually my progress will seem more extreme
-I want to build up a big collection of items i can draw from my mind. I did a drill for 3 days by now: Each day i chose an item and draw it quickly from four different perspectives (from life) with a thin marker. Then i put the item and the previous sketches away and try to draw it from my mind and from a new perspective. When finished i compare my drawing to the item, see what was wrong, correct it quickly and do those sketches from memory several times. With each sketch i feel i know the item better. The days later i try to revisit the items with new sketches from memory (+comparison). I think this works fairly well.
-I want to have a good feeling for composition. I borrow some drill from chess: To build chess intuition, one can rush through many master-games and try to understand fast what is going on, but not on a deep level (only 2 minutes per game (very few time)). If you rush through games that fast, you certainly will not understand everything that happens, but the idea is that your subconscious processes will adapt patterns that occur in tose games, so you intuitively will consider master-like moves first. Sounds crazy but seems to work. This is what this has to do with composition: I will search for artists whose composition i like. Then i will take their artworks and do a rough and fast sketch of every image i like. Hopefully their feel for composition will then slowly devolve to me.

Enough of talking, here's a drawing

[Manuel Baum]

Left side used some ref, right side didnt.

[ForScience]

Embee! Thanks for coming to my sketchbook. You asked about what drills I go through for line work. I actually have a couple things I do that help me train that aspect of my drawing.

1. Contour drawing- which basically means trying to draw your subject without picking up your pencil, I make it a point of trying to define the figure in as few lines as possible and then varying my line weight to add form.

2. 30 second gestures- If you go to pixolovely.com you can do figure drawing at 30 second intervals. Drawing from life is much much better, but that isn't always an option

3. People Drawing- Go to a mall or a bus station or some other place where there are people and then draw people as they move about. It forces you to me much more discriminating about your linework

lovely sketchbook you have here. I hope my advice helps.

[Manuel Baum]

ForScience: Thank you very much! I did spend some time on http://artists.pixelovely.com/ and it really seems to be a good exercise. Also those tips on countour drawing and fast drawing from life make sense. I will sure try those out.

Here are some of the pages that i drew from reference on that side. All are drawn in 30 or 60 seconds. Was a lot of fun. I have a ton more, but i think those are my best ones.

[Manuel Baum]

I've been to India for a month... Man, this was pure inspiration. Lots of great impressions and nice people. Beatiful, yet strange country. Have been drawing a lot, but i think there's not much, which is worth posting, but here's some:


Edit: I used reference on the two indians. These are from two pictures taken by tarik, some nice turkish guy who i met in india. Here's his website: http://www.tarikgok.com/
There is a lot of great reference material i think...

[Manuel Baum]

Whoops, double-post incoming Ignore this post please

[Manuel Baum]

Ok, here's some more:

-A test in painting with acryl. No focus on composition or interesting subjects, just trying to render in a somehow naturalistic way.

-Another small test with acryl. This time also thought a little about composition, but no real planning involved. Apparently looks like a sith, although this was not intended. Maybe i watched to much starwars

-Some quick portrait-sketches of one of my flatmates. All of the same person, but there's not so much likelines. The first one is especially shitty, but the last ones are somehow getting close, maybe. My excuse here is, that i focused on being quick and as correct as possible on the first line. No eraser, only very few construction-lines.

[Manuel Baum]

Ok, so i decided to participate in the community activity 'spartan camp'. Seems like this is great fun and useful. You got to look at Anthis' sketchbook and see the improvement he achieved while sticking to this activity - awesome. So here are my 50+ studies, mostly done with the app from artits.pixelovely.com, some are from head. All are 30 sec or 2 min.

And also theres the ballpoint pen drawing that i used as basis for a watercolor painting i gave my girlfriend as a present.

[Manuel Baum]

So i decided to go for this weeks CHOW (Fantastic Thief), although the deadline is tomorow... we will see if i manage to finish it in time. My idea is a character that trains monkeys to steal for her. I did some research on medieval clothing for this one and did some thumbnails for the illustration. There are other thumnails for composition too, because i participated in the "Skype Improvement Addicts Support Group Activity" for which i had to do some compositional thumbnails. I dont know why, but most of them look shitty...
For the illustration i may go for thumbnail 20, 21 or 22. I dont know yet.

[dierat]

Hello there! I saw your post in Satu's sketchbook and followed it here..

Your graphite portraits are really nice, particularly the ones in post #97. The thumbnails in your last post are also really cool, though you might want to incorporate lighting into your composition sketches as well - different lighting schemes can have a huge effect on the image's mood, focal point, concept, etc. Getting that figured out in the early stages can really save you some trouble later on.

For your shorter figurative sketches, I feel like you're focusing a little too much on the outline of the figures and not enough on their forms. It really helps when it comes to drawing people from imagination if you think of them as a collection of 3-dimensional forms rather than a 2-dimensional shape. (Well not just figures really - if you think of everything in 3-dimensional terms it will really help to place that thing in a made-up space with made-up lighting.) A really good book on the subject is Figure Drawing Design and Invention by Michael Hampton.

I also highly recommend still life studies, particularly for progressing in painting. They don't have to be huge fancy set-ups; single objects or random materials that you have around the house work just great.

[Manuel Baum]

dierat: Thank you! Yeah lighting is definitely a big factor, thanks for the hint, but with those sketches i was just trying to get a somewhat appealing 2d-composition. Im strugling with really basic things, but when i got the basics down i will try to do crazy stuff with lighting Yeah you totally caught me with the figure-studies. I was not going for form but for lines on those. This was on purpose, as i want to improve my linework. I feel that my linework was to rigid and edgy in the past, because i simplified everything into planes, cuboids, etc. So i focsed solely on the organic feel of the lines. I definitely see your point though, especially concerning imagination and construction. Actually i am currently doing some figure-studies where i concentrate one form, due to your comment Thank you
Ah yeah, and thank you for the tip on still lifes in painting. I know the power of still life studies but for some reason didnt think of doing them, lol.

Thank you very much for your comment! Those were helpful informations and generally it feels good to get feedback.

Here are some fashion studies (pairwise one drawing from reference and then a try to redraw it without seeing the original or the first sketch) for building visual library. And then theres a page of brainstorming for a charactercontest on cghub.com.

[dierat]

Nice update! I like the last page, in particular that portrait in the top right. Are those concepts for the voodoo contest by any chance? Just curious!

Since you mentioned linework, my crit is that you could vary your lines a little more to emphasize depth and focus. What I tend to do is keep my pencil sharp and draw as lightly as I can, building up the value as I become confident in their placements. Then at the very end I'll get out a nice soft pencil (like 5B) that's sharp and add some accents to the drawing. You can suggest volume by darkening lines that come closer to us (the viewer/artist) in space and leave lines that are further away (or recede behind other lines) light and airy, and you can push the contrast on focal points (like eyes) to make them stand out a tad more. I know it's not a super important thing to worry about compared to the other stuff you're focusing on, but it can really help your drawings pop and it's a good habit to get into.

Keep up the good work! And thanks for the comment in my SB btw ^^

[Manuel Baum]

dierat: Thank you! Yeah, it's for the voodoo contest Ah, that's a nice crit. I need to do a study for this, as i only thought about lineweight to indicate the angle of the edge that i draw. I wonder what will come out when those two factors get mixed... Thanks for the thought-provoking impulse!

I thought that voodoo-pirate-guy could benefit from a little more voodoo, so some voodoo-style head-ideas. And also some figure-studies in which i had a little more emphasis on form, but maybe not enough. I will try to push it a little more in that direction. Ahh yeah, and some shoe studies for visual library that i almost forgot.

[Manuel Baum]

I tried to do a study for line-weight and wanted to compare two different criterions to decide if a line is heavy or not, but i guess i somehow failed because both have some kind of comic look to them. If someone can point me into the right direction, this would be nice...

In the left one lines should be heavy, if they are near the eye of the camera, in the right one they should be heavy if they are on a deep edge (a point of big difference in depth).

Maybe it looks that shitty because the lines also got thicker when i wanted to make them heavier... Maybe they should only get darker but stay thin. Or maybe i was just being inconsistent. Any thoughts on this?

[Manuel Baum]

Hmmm, i just thought about it. Maybe i should just change my defnitiion of lineweight from "darkness of the line" to "possibly highest contrast on the line". Cant do a study right now, but will definitely return to that thought later.

Ah yeah, and i need to do a study on brightness-histogram / brightness-curves / brightness vs contrast in my shading... Damn you Wesley Burt, damn you!

[dierat]

It's okay if they get thicker as they get darker; that's just part of lineweight variation and tends to come naturally when emphasizing lines. I think the left one looks a lot better than the right one, but it still just doesn't have enough difference in the lineweight to be very noticeable. Perhaps you should choose a subject with more depth for this exercise, like a very foreshortened figure.

Maybe try one of these?

http://tasastock.deviantart.com/art/Pose28-91645665
http://fierystock.deviantart.com/art...or-1-184972334
http://www.deviantart.com/art/Dreaming-51368194
http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/...eam-2-56346477
http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/...ts-26-77925362

[Manuel Baum]

dierat: Yeah, thanks for your help. I think you are right - the left one pops out more. I currently have other problems though and only later will be able to get back to this...

Here are some new sketches:

[Manuel Baum]

Some more figures

[Manuel Baum]

Some random stuff, figures and my entry for the cghub-voodoo-contest

[Manuel Baum]

Some armour-studies, some symbols and a very old concept for a bomber unit (from school (pre 2006))

[Manuel Baum]

I also went to the natural history museeum and studied some dead animals