- Meli's Sketchbook - Not Quite so Frequently Updated, yet Lemony Fresh!

[Meli Hitchcock]

Ok, my scanner is tired. I gave it a run for it's money and am surprised I didn't break it. Most scanning the poor thing has in a long while.

Anyway, going to break this up in a few posts since it's a lot of images and I'm reading the thumbnail thing isn't working right. Hope these all show okay.

First two: My job causes me to travel a couple times a year, so in the airport, I do gesture work and try to draw the figures as fast as I can. A lot of the full body gestures of standing people are peppered throughout the book in my sea of crap.

Everything beyond that is just head studies. I suck at drawing people, specially heads in angle views. So this was just a bunch of head studies.

EDIT: Redid the first post to have a snazzier thumbnail.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Doodles = images I saw in clouds. I was on a road trip to and from Albuquerque, which equals super boredom. Thankfully the clouds were very drawable in what I saw in them.

Last image is a nice fresh lemon. Done for the Photoshop painting thread.

[vitaliyvladimirov]

i like these. you pay close attention to details, and your anatomy is good. Try drawing larger though. force yourself to take up the whole page. That often changes a lot and forces you to work on what you may not be good at. But deff good stuff.

[character]

good stuff man. diggin the head studies. i'm in the same boat as you, i have a hard time drawing heads angles other than looking at the camera. just keep at it

[Kitiker]

Hi Meli, the head studies are great, especially the angled perspectives. Who doesn't have a hard time with those? I'd love to see you post this regularly, you'll improve at an incredible speed, and you'll also inspire me to get my sketches up!
vitali's advice is good too. I always shy away from larger sketches, they exploit imperfections and force you to work on area's you normally wouldn't.

Nice website too (except for the lack of ca.org in your links, heh)

[Meli Hitchcock]

Not a whole lot of updates, last week was hell. Too much running around and not enough time to sit down and paint. I manage to get this speed painting done, but I hate it. It looks too smudged now that I look at it, even though I didn't use the smudge tool at all. PS 1.5 hours ( I think... I was super angry when I painted it and didn't really look too close at the time).


vitaliyvladimirov
Will do. Most of my sketchbooks are rather small for portability reasons, but a few days ago I bought a much larger one. So no excuses for small drawings from here on out.

Kitiker
Been changed. It's been a while since I updated. I didn't even have my most recent stuff up there. =p

[darkwolfb87]

Hey, excellent work going on here. The lemon study is juicy Though I have a suspicion that, if you are able to observe it again there may be a faint yellow reflected into the cast shadow from the lemon. I'm not sure, the surface probably needs to be more reflective than cloth heh.

Your last speedy would benefit from having flatter cast shadows to completely separate the light from the shadow. In fact they could even be slightly darker to emphasize this. Leaving out the reflected light on the shadow side would help too

[Kitiker]

Good tip on the shadows darkwolf. I like the painting Meli, looking really good.
Otherwise, good to see the site updated

[Meli Hitchcock]

darkwolfb87
Thanks for the tip! The photo I used for the speed paint is found here, looking nothing like the model of course but right now that's not really the point. I just need to get more painting done on people. One of my other problems that I need to fix is translating things I see so literally and learning to adjust lighting or shadows or highlights to help give the work a bit more punch.

Sometimes though after I get these done, I still feel like a person foundering in the dark looking for direction.

Here are two more Speed Paintings I've done though, about two to three weeks old. Practicing skin tones and seeing how quick I can get myself to work. First one done in about 4 hours, second one done in about 2.5 hours.

By the way, shouldn't my thumbnail supposed to be updating when I use the attachment feature?

[Meli Hitchcock]

All work and no play make Melissa a dull girl...

Actually, I have little to no work to do today, so I worked on these over lunch and a bit beyond. More to come when I get home.

[Meli Hitchcock]

And more crap.

Side note: Found an old sketchbook with my college sketches and noticed that my sketch work has gotten more sloppy as time went on. Too tight in the lines and not enough confidence in my strokes. Plus a lot of my shading was more comic like.

Noticed also: Action poses are a bane to draw. I never know what to do with limbs, they kind of flail or have no real dynamic appearance and look flat. Need to practice more of that.

Moving on... stuff done at work again. Cept the skull study, that was at the house. =p

[Kitiker]

Great to see those studies Meli. The coloured painting is a far more accurate render of the model. Are you overpainting the image or painting from scratch?
Either way, it's lovely. Very nice mood to the piece. I'd keep giving attention darkwolfs comments on shadow though. And on my monitor anyway I can't see any detail in her hair, just a big black void.

Nice to see the updates! Keep em coming. Here and in the PS Painting thread

[morningbloom915]

You have awesome attention to detail. That skull study is really very well done. The hands that you spent longer on (at least by appearances) are really solid. Keep it up.

Only crit I have: Sometimes your eyes dont seem to line up with each other. They seem just a tad bit off angle wise on occasion. Moreso in your older stuff than your most recent paintings, but I can still see a hint of it.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Kitiker
I typically paint from scratch. I think overpaints wouldn't really help me learn anything, I've got to actually start things from the ground up. Plus that's more fun and interesting for me to do. Maybe I'm not understanding though on that shadow bit. My monitor that I work off of, renders my darks fairly dark, but even still that first color speedpaint I did of the woman I put some lighter accents in her hair to break up the black. Granted it's not everywhere in the hair, just the top and near her face.

morningbloom915
Thanks! I noticed that too looking back on those sketches. Yet another thing to try and be careful of. hehe

[max xiantu]

banana guns of doom!
awesome.
nice paintings. and i like the stick figure gestures whole bunches :.

[Marty666]

Nice studies. Very good hands aswell. I can see the highlights in the hair, but if you look at some refs you'll see that hair has quite bright speculars, while in your case it are barely visible lines

[Meli Hitchcock]

Master's sketches from over at CGTAlk's Head study deal. Just for practice. I'm working on the second one as a color study too and correcting the errors I made originally.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Should have posted these as I went... Took a life drawing course over the past two months. =p It was an Atelier course for Beginner artists, but even though I've done figure classes before, it was a great refresher course for me. Once April hits, I plan on signing up for the Intermediate class.

The photo quality sucks though. Sorry that they are so dark.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Some of the week 2 work done.

[Meli Hitchcock]

And more....

Week 3 work.

Next time around I'll make sure to do this as I go along rather than all at once. >.>;

This class we also looked at figures from Andrew Loomis's book Figure Drawing for all it's Worth and drew some of his figure work.

[Meli Hitchcock]

More figure work...

[Meli Hitchcock]

And more...

Damn I've got issues with legs getting scrunched up. So disproportioned from the main body.

2 min, 5 min, 10 min, and 20 min

Wish I could remember which one is which. Next time I'm remembering to jot that stuff down. O.o

[Meli Hitchcock]

*dies*

And more...

[Meli Hitchcock]

Last class our model never showed up, so the instructor decided to do critiques instead. With the time left over we did some masters studies.

And thus concludes my figure drawing class. What I learned:

*Don't use graphite pencils on news print. It sucks.
*My figures get either Shrunken head syndrome or squished legs syndrome
*Pelvis and leg areas need to be studied more. Trouble spots for me.
*I obviously need more figure drawing practice.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Lighting study. Same drawing, different lighting placement obviously. Was trying to practice how lighting effects mood and can change on focal point on an image.

[Meli Hitchcock]

More figure work. This time these were from Bridgeman's figurative drawing book, plus trying to help make my lines more steady and secure when I make them. Good practice on helping me to slow down and really look at proportions and gauging things before I make a stroke on paper.

[Meli Hitchcock]

/casts necro spell to summon the dead

Come forth dead thread, and serve as my lair of evil!

Going to try and at least up date a few times a week. I'm horrible. I killed my own sketchbook and now I have to become a necromancer to revive it. :<

Helmet was done yesterday, camera done today.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Tried doing an environment and it was one hellofa dismal failure, so here's another small still life sketch. O.o

[wisdom_of_trees]

I like the larger sizes for your still life "sketches" more here than the resized ones on dA. I really wouldn't call these finished studies sketches though, each one reflects a lot of personal time and attention. I love the subtle differences in textures that are reflected in each one. Technically these are all pretty spectacular, if I had to crit anything it would be the perspective on the wine bottle...the bottom of the bottle looks a little bit like it's not quite resting on the table. My favorite part though is the transition between the glass and the foil bottle topper, as an avid vino fan it's something I like about wine bottles.
Also the label doesn't quite look like it's following the curvature of the bottle. My other favorite part is the texture on the cord that attaches to the camera, it's subtle but makes a big difference in the life of the picture. (Is that the camera you used to take pictures of flowers with in the conservatory?)
I plan on faving this over at dA, but I thought I would do the crit over here.

[Meli Hitchcock]

Two more. Last one is a bit sloppy for my tastes but my wrist is killing me right now and I can't really paint anymore without making the pain worse. It's totally uneven on the one side.

wisdom_of_trees
Everyone keeps saying they look like they aren't resting on the surface, but I don't understand why that is. Maybe I'm just not seeing it. Is it due to the darker shadow directly underneath the object? Because the way I have the light set up there generally is a sharper shadow. And yeah, that's the same camera that I had with me that day.