Life drawings of androids

[scottmcd]

More experimentation with segmentation. Pencil, then brush and ink, then Photoshop.

[darthmarsh]

Hey buddy,

Thanks for the crit on my CHOW you sir are quite right! Some really good stuff you've got here, the Flower and glass still life I think stands out most for me and the line still lifes, simple and elegant. Keep it up

Cheers

Tim

[scottmcd]

darthmarsh: Thanks for the comments. I wish I had more time to spend in chow and critique center, because it helps my own drawing if I have to slow down and verbalize what I do and don't like about other pieces.

Here is my most recent figure drawing practice. It's my fourth time (or so) going with pastel pencils. I purposefully avoided detail work (no fingers, for example) and went with a light, medium, and dark tone.

[scottmcd]

Here are some of the final illustrations for my friend's book. He was aiming for a sketchy feel, so I didn't finish them as much as I could have. Mostly they're pencils with values done in Photoshop.

[scottmcd]

A couple of recent ones. One is a recent CHoW (Lesser Demon), and the other is a piece I did to test out a new Photoshop brush that I made.

[scottmcd]

Did this as a study with ink and colored pencil.

[scottmcd]

My wife wanted to go to Costume Con this weekend, and I took a number of potential reference pictures. Not as many as I'd thought, though. In the meantime, I did these drawings. Two are for a drawing I'm doing of a Sylph, and the last is based on my daughter. All of them will form the basis of Photoshop illustrations. (The colored ones are pastel pencils.)

[scottmcd]

WIP for the current CHoW - Absinthe (The Green Fairy).

[hungryan]

Because you were nice, I give you some advice. I don't want to look very clever or anything.

I think your best pieces are the ones made with ink, or generally black lines (the webcomic and those nudes). Your lines are nice, just try to relax when you make the shading with ink or pencils, and follow the forms with your lines, not just doing it fuzzy, because then they will start to work like strange forms. Do it like Rembrandt and Dürer did, I will give a link:

http://blog.eddadietrich.de/wp-conte...8/09/beten.gif

I hope you see what I mean. There's a post of a ballpoint pen drawing of a woman somwhere 2 or 3 pages back, there you can see this problem really much.
Also, don't really use smudging (in pencils and digipainting), because in my and lots of other's opinion, it produces ugly surfaces if not used properly. With pencils/grayscale it can get particularly something which looks like messy paper.

Also you might want to really loosen up, and start freely digitally painting some photos like I do, with a hard edge brush, opacity set to pressure, first looking at the big color blobs, and then refining the forms. It helps if you switch between these techniques a lot, and you can also learn a lot about colors eyeballing them this way.

And draw a lot, I know I should too.

[scottmcd]

hungryan: Thanks for the comments. I do need to do better about having the shading hatchwork better follow the form it describes. I'm still very much experimenting with pencil work, smudging, shading, etc. and I'll see how that goes.

Speaking of ink work, here is a landscape that will be a comic panel in a comic I'm working on. The ref picture is from a park right next to where I work. I haven't done a lot of trees and landscape, but I pulled out several things to look at: mainly Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise), Osamu Tezuka (Buddha), and Savage Sword of Conan. I should also have looked at Jeff Smith's Bone and still will.

[scottmcd]

These are my notes from a meeting today. I drew out a quick sketch in pencil and then cross hatched it with a blotchy pen. I tried to keep the lines going in one of three directions with only the occasional contour line to help out. All while everyone else was talking about bibliographies, eRA, who had access to which data, and lots of other nonsense.

[scottmcd]

I don't get to doodle much with the tablet, so here we go.

[scottmcd]

Been drawing but not posting here as much. For our anniversary my wife got me some watercolor pencils. I saw Charles Vess use them in a demo for the CBLDF at Comic Con in San Diego, and I've wanted to give them a go. Here's the first quick try-out. Drawn with the pencils first, and then washed with brush and water. It almost looks like my wife, too.

[scottmcd]

Character design for an upcoming comic. I also used the chance to practice with the recently acquired watercolor pencils, this time on bristol board. Never mind those coins in the background.

[scottmcd]

Pencils, inks, and then watercolor pencils. The final step will be to do the wash on the watercolor pencils.

[kev ferrara]

A lot of nice ideas and designs. And good image sense. I would suggest getting the Bridgman anatomy books and copying them into your notebooks a little each day. I think your stuff is lacking a bit of a sense of solidity... that sculptural feeling of light and shade and interlocking forms that all Bridgman student's seek out in their work.

Good luck
kev

[scottmcd]

Kev: Thanks for the look and the advice. I've done some Bridgman copying, but not nearly enough.

Here are a couple more of the watercolor pencil drawings, plus a sketch of a dog I did with ballpoint pen. The dog will end up as the basis for one in a larger painting.

[scottmcd]

Same model and pose, but opposite sides. Brush and ballpoint, about 45 minutes each or so.

[scottmcd]

This is today's 45 minute watercolor pencil drawing/painting from the session today, followed by a study I did of an obol - the coin people would be buried with to pay Charon for the trip across Styx. Ballpoint pen for that one.

[scottmcd]

It's the carnival/mask self-portrait. Not to the "self" part yet. No reference for this.

[scottmcd]

Don't know if I'll finish this one still, but I've fixed some proportions, added clothes, etc. About another hour or so, I guess.

[scottmcd]

Update

[scottmcd]

Here's today's. Graphite and white pencil. I made her look older in the face than she is - something to work on.

[scottmcd]

I first did this one back in March of 2007, here.

This time I spent a little longer on it. The head is wrong, and there are other problems, but it's neat to compare it to the earlier one.

Pencil first, then ballpoint pen.

[p sage]

Ah, Mr. Smiley Nice.

I like the contour-y feel of the last piece.

I do think proportion is in need for the last several pieces; it seems the torso area is fairly elongated in your figures... by almost an entire head.

I would echo what Kev Ferrara said earlier in your thread about Bridgman; I've learned quite a bit in a fairly short time just from trying to understand what Bridgman's lines were "saying", and then copying his stuff.

Without that attempt to understand it, though, it would just be useless busy-work. It would not be a study, in that case.

Good work here. Keep it flowing.

[scottmcd]

This is an illustration I'm working on for the same friend whose book I illustrated a while ago. This would be for the next book if it ever sees the light of day. In the meantime, I'm aiming for a portfolio piece with this one, though there are still miles to go.

[scottmcd]

Results of today's life drawing session. This was about 2 hours. First lightly penciled, then inked in an Art Nouveau style, then colored with pastel pencil. I'm pretty happy with it overall, except for the hand. I think the doctor's will be able to reconstruct it for her, though.

[scottmcd]

A long time ago I did an ink drawing of a guy with an eyeball in his mouth. I figured I could do better now, so I gave it a go as a PS painting. This is probably 4 hours or so.

[scottmcd]

Here is some lunchtime practice for the day. About an hour total. Ink and watercolor pencil. Based on a picture of my great-great-grandfather.

[scottmcd]

Yes, it is.