Baltar's NewbieBook

[Baltar]

Hi everyone!

I'm a [very] long time fan and lurker on the forums. I only recently made the account and it has taken me this long to finally start a sketchbook. Now I'd like to add the obligatory, "I've been way too intimidated to post here," and, "crits are always welcome," statement.

With that out of the way, I'm a 25 year old student and I'm not sure what else to say about myself. I hope to become more active in the CA community when I have enough skill to assist others. Right now, asking me for help would probably be like the blind leading the blind.

So, on to the practices...

I got Photoshop 4 Extended in the mail today (hurray for student pricing!) and this apple is the first thing I did (photo ref on the right).



I spent about two hours on it and it's definitely a work in progress. Just looking at it now I can see a ton of errors that I'm too tired to fix tonight.

Mostly, though, working in photoshop has been a nice change, since I've been following Yoitisi's mentoring threads religiously and practicing straight lines, cubes, perspective, ellipses, and cylinders for hours every day...

EDIT: Oh, and the ref apple is from http://www.morguefile.com/archive/?display=57402&

[Baltar]

So for the past week I've been doing cylinders, ellipses, and cubes obsessively in pen and marker, which I've never worked with before. They're pretty unforgiving. When I used to sketch I only did so casually, and in pencil, so this is a big change for me.

So here are the pen/marker cylinders and cubes:








A "self" portrait... pens are rough. Some big mistakes - especially on my "snout".





And, finally, as finished a version of my apple as I'm going to allow myself to get:





I hope these images aren't too big.

[Baltar]

Well, two days ago I spent about 6 hours trying to do a decent self portrait. All were so horrible as to not be worth posting for crits, since I knew what was wrong with them already - everything!

So yesterday I tried to do a portrait study from a photo (as seen in attempt "0" below). I was able to get the general silhouette down okay enough, but just couldn't get the features to work - as seen with all the erasing and eventual abandonment.

Finally, I realized what the problem was - I haven't done any studies of features for many, many years and I'd clearly lost any ability in that area.


So, yea, I was surprised to find that I could barely draw features, if at all, since people were what I was best at (which may be why it took me so long to figure that out)... So it's back to basics. Okay, end of the essay, some eye studies from yesterday (with numbers in the order that I drew them):



I didn't do more because one of my rabbits had a fight with another and had to go to the Bunny ER. She's recovering now, but had to have a minor surgery to have part of her face actually glued back on.

So here's the view from the waiting room:

[Baltar]

I've been crazy lately. Just got a new job.

Here are some eye studies:







My goal was to keep drawing eyes until I could do a passable one without ref. So here is my passable eye:



And moving on to noses...:



I didn't fix the one on the right because it was so off, it was funny.

[Nettle_Mountain]

i like the final apple, now you need to make yourself to do daily studies or fun sketches, the idea is to tran itself drawing every day, now matter how little, how bad you feel, just pick the pencil and make even 30s scribble. It all about getting into habit of drawing.

Posemaniacs would be allright to start, 30-45 second studies 20.60 min then and then. 1 minute for deeper pose studies.

[WickedEdges]

Great apple! I'm jealous! I can't get my apple to look half as good as that!

[Baltar]

EDIT: Wow! Comments. I didn't even think to check before updating.

@Nettle_Mountain: Thanks for the feedback. You're right about practicing every day. One thing I like to do is practice my line quality and control while watching videos if I'm not feeling well, which I haven't been doing - and it shows! --I love posemaniacs! (Though I definitely need to work on anatomy more to get better use out of it.)

@WickedEdges: Thanks! Really, though, I think it was beginners luck (and also working on it obsessively for hours). As you can see, my bun below is a mess!


Photoshop painting is a nice break from pencil and paper...

Here are some process shots of something I'm working on.

Rough sketch (I over-chubbed the cheeks.)



Some fixing and painting...



And again...



This is over my head, really, so I doubt I'll ever "finish" it... just keep fiddling around with it.

One day I will do something good enough to go into the WIP section!

[nancy_kelpie]

I can't see the images in your first 3 posts. It says "attachments pending approvel".

I really like your eye studies !!! Would be cool if you can draw a whole head or even whole body with the same emotion. The rabbit is ok too. I don't work with photoshop though so I can't give you tips how to finish it.

Keep drawing! What are you studying btw? Something creative?

[Baltar]

@nancy_kelpie: I think the images aren't loading because of changes in the attachment manager. I think it's just a temporary issue, but if not I'll just upload the stuff again in a day or so, since I'd have to fish them out of back-up land.

Thanks for the comments on the eye studies! It's funny that you should say that about emotion because I was trying to get that across, but they all looked very flat and empty to me so it's nice to hear that - especially unsolicited.

As far as what I'm studying being creative... I guess it depends on how you define creativity - I'm a Philosophy major.

[Baltar]

More work on my bun. So far, I'm not conveying the true amount of grumpiness she's expressing at being cuddled: