Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 06 (2024/01/13)

This was initially written February 21, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Exercises

As with other days, I decided to start with the line confidence exercises. Overall, it took me roughly 10 mins. I also came to two realizations:

• I could practice drawing my lines and circles in both orientations, not just the one that feels most natural.
• I might as well use this time to fulfill other goals. Since I’m currently learning Chinese, I started counting my lines/circles in Chinese. (Combining different goals and synergizing them seems like it could be useful generally)

On this day, I think my straight lines aren’t that great: their lengths vary too much, there’s a lot of them that aren’t parallel to the others, and quite a few of them hook at the end.

The wavy lines exercise was ok. At least the overall direction remains similar from one to the next, though I still think I should start by focus on the line shape before trying to vary line thickness (pen pressure).

The circles exercise was not so great. Some of the circles are not that round, and they’re also all over the place. I wasn’t that consistent with spacing and size.

Drawing

On this day, I decided I wanted to move on to a different exercise and try something else. I opted for a view from an angle. Do note that on this day, I couldn’t find my ruler, so everything was done by hand. I started by drawing the head’s outline with some guidelines (In this case, all on the same layer).

Once that was done, I tried to add a neck, but struggled quite a bit. I eventually ended up updating the head’s outline a bit to account for the jaw, before adding a neck and a plane for where the neck intersects with the head. Finally, I updated some of my guidelines according to the new information on the drawing. Since this is a new type of drawing from a new angle with new techniques, I definitely struggled quite a bit here, and had to erase and redraw lines quite a few times. I still have to build my intuition for this kind of perspective, which will require practice.

Once this was done, I added some thickness to the top guidelines as per the book (As of yet, I do not know its purpose, but it’ll come as I continue to learn). I also added some face elements.

Finally, I refined the jawline, and added some eyes and eyebrows to the drawing before calling it a day.

Overall, it makes for an interesting exercise and I’ll definitely need to work on different angles and perspectives. The result is not mind blowing, but for a first attempt, it seems reasonable. Obviously, I didn’t add in any details, so this lack of refinement is definitely noticeable, but that’s not the point of a sketch at this level. I must say, one of the most challenging things for me about this kind of exercise is the lack of the usual symmetry. For example, the eyes are at different “distances” from the canvas, and thus they’re not the same size, nor are they the same distance from their “midpoint” on the guideline. I’ve also been struggling with placement of the guidelines, including the neck. This will definitely require more training (and investigation).

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 07 (2024/01/14)