Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 08 (2024/02/26) – Time Skip

This was written February 26, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Hello everyone and thank you for your patience. I’m finally back with the drawing challenge (with a revenge!). But although today was my first day back and I should have felt energized, I did struggle with motivation due to some other personal issues. Nonetheless, I pushed myself to start and once I got started, things flew reasonably well. I did end “early” because I saw that I was going to spend a lot of extra time on the next phase of drawing, but not because I had exhausted my drive.

A few notes before diving into my drawing session. First, since I had been having some issues with my tablet’s stylus (the tip would quickly degrade and make it harder to draw), I recently purchased a new stylus to use exclusively for drawing, the wacom one pen (I did a small research and this felt like a good compromise between people’s recommendations, and cost). Under my current circumstances, the cost felt steep for a stylus, and I would prefer to avoid such expenses. However, I’m hoping this purchase encourages me to draw through the sunk-cost fallacy.

A few things about the process itself I would like to highlight today:

• In order to limit annoyances with my palm touching the tablet, I attempted to use a light glove. However, the result was too annoying, so I abandoned it quickly and disabled hand motion on the tablet instead. I may have to try using a “drawing glove” such as this one, although this would once again be a purchase.
• While the new stylus has a fairly nice grip, and has a button with an erase functionality, I should have realized I would encounter an issue. The button on the side is placed in such a location that I often hit it with my middle finger while drawing. I’d already encountered this issue a long time ago while playing rhythm games such as “osu!”, and I should have remembered it. Hopefully, I will get accustomed to it. It might also serve as a motive to try different grips, such as suggested in this video. (As an aside, I think exploring other grips could also be useful for drawing Chinese characters)
• I have a few regrets about using a Chinese book while still not fluent in the language, since I’m discouraged from reading everything and fully understanding. While it’s an interesting approach to learning the language, it puts both goals at odds, instead of building synergy between them.

Exercises

As usual, I started with the exercises. Today, they took almost 12 minutes. For some reason, the line exercises were particularly slow, at around 6 minutes and a half on their own. A few small things about the exercises:

• I realized that for diagonal lines in this orientation: “/”, I feel more comfortable starting from the bottom than from the top. This seemed odd at first, but I believe this is actually a consequence of my handwriting. When writing, I tend to prioritize going from left to right. Thus, my forward slash goes from the bottom-left to the top-right. (For this same reason, I have a non-standard way of writing the letter S, also going from the bottom-left to the top-right). I hadn’t quite realized how much of an influence writing had on drawing, though it makes intuitive sense. (Related video about the relationship between writing and drawing: How your handwriting is the key to drawing better )
• As noted in my exercise’s notes, I realized that horizontal lines could be drawn with either your hand above or below the line, using two distinct wrist rotations. This seems to only really apply to horizontal lines, likely because they’re at roughly a 90° angle with your hand’s natural position. It also seems like having my hand under gave me better results.
• I struggled with keeping the diagonal lines aligned horizontally. It seems like their skewed nature made me want to skew their row as well. I will have to pay attention to this in the future.
• At this point, I struggle tremendously with the wavy line exercise. However, one issue with it is that it’s biased towards the earlier lines being drawn properly. Whenever one of them is drawn poorly, it makes the subsequent ones either harder, or pointless as an exercise.
• For the circles exercise, I still struggle with consistency of placement and size. But being more aware of it seems to have helped a bit this time.
• It is clear how unnatural the clockwise circles were to me. I will definitely need to practice those a bit more. In some cases, they didn’t really look like circles.

Here are the pictures of the exercises:

Drawing

Today, I opted for a different kind of drawing, going for a profile shot. I started by drawing guidelines and then used the circle tool to add a guideline for the shape of the head (After multiple failed attempts of drawing it by hand). I then added some guidelines for the jaw, as per the book. Here is what the guidelines looked like at this stage:

Once this was done, I sketched the silhouette. I decided to redraw the head’s circle by hand, following the existing “guideline”. I struggled a bit with the nose portion of it, and also with the mouth portion. Overall, I think it’s not too bad at this stage.

Once this was done, I added a circular guideline for the eye, and started sketching the eye, eyebrows, a smile, an extended jawline, and a rough ear. Here, I actually struggled with the smile, and had to redraw the mouth portion of the silhouette multiple times to get something I was more satisfied with. Unfortunately, I think the eye was poorly placed. They’re a little too low, which means two things: It isn’t aligne with where the eye socket should be (top of the nose bridge), and it makes the top of the head look a little too big.

Once this was done, it was time to add a little bit of detail to the eye and ear. The eye wasn’t too bad in this case, though I’m not sure about the lines placed right in front of it. The ear, however, was extremely challenging for me. First, the book shows the outer portion as becoming a little more block-y. I actually tried to redraw that portion many times, and eventually just decided to go back to the previous form because I thought I wasn’t making any progress. The inner portion is also something I struggled a lot with and made many changed to. I will have to approach it more carefully in the future and focus more on drawing ears to try to improve that skill. Right now, I struggle with properly understanding them and their different elements. It might be worthwhile to look at a real ear’s anatomy to better analyze this. Overall, I spent roughly 20 minutes on the ear, and most of it was undone.

Once this phase was completed, I got ready to draw the hair, but realized it would take me a while, and so opted to call it a day and start writing the blog post.

Here is the final result. Overall, there’s definitely improvements to be made, but I think compared with what I was able to do on the first day, it still feels like I’ve improved, despite not drawing in a month and a half. I was really worried I’d have lost a lot more than I did. And while this drawing has issues, I am aware of what to focus on and try to improve in the future.

Conclusion

Well, the first day back wasn’t too bad, and I managed to also write my blog post on the same day. However, it did take me quite a bit of time to write it (I believe roughly 2 hours), so I’ll probably have to figure out a solution for this. Although, some of that time was spent on generic insights or notes that might not be recurring in the future (e.g.: everything in the introduction, and a lot of notes related to the exercises). Still, I might want to use a stopwatch to time how long I spend on the writing process and evaluate how I could improve it/make it more efficient.

Finally, as a miscellaneous note, I realized how much I rely on looking at the samples for drawing. While this is normal for a day like today, where I’m learning a new type of drawing, I think I will have to learn to move away from this in the future. Thus, I think I’ll want some days where I try to draw without the book, and then evaluate how things turned out, comparing with the book to see what I may have missed or forgotten.

On that note, I hope you all have a lovely day and that you found this post interesting. Stay tuned for the next ones!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 09 (2024/02/27)