This was written February 28, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Introduction
Since I got home a little late, and tomorrow I’ll be leaving early to go on a field trip, I opted for a shorter session. This time, I decided to pick things up where I dropped the ball last time, practicing eyes. Thus, I prepared my book and tablet, got a mug of water, and started to play some music.
Exercises
For the line exercise, I ended up realizing that for the “overhand” technique, the hand obscures what’s above (in retrospect, this is obvious), which means it can mess up spacing and flow. Otherwise, an unexpected result is that the “overhand” technique seems to result (for me) in thinner lines. The results of this exercise are soso, but still serve as a good primer.
For the wavy line exercise, I opted to go more slowly for the first line, and it seems to have been a little better. I then opted to go a little more slowly generally, and think I felt a more natural “flow” of the stylus against the tablet, almost as if the stylus were guiding me. Unfortunately, it’s hard to properly explain, but I think it helped a bit. Overall, the results are soso, but I think they’re still superior to previous days.
Finally, for the circles exercise I decided to try to go a little more slowly at first, but I’m not sure how much it helped. I also decided to go for a new type of exercise, where I increased the size of the circle with each new row. I think this could be useful, since it makes me practice different kinds of arcs, making this exercise more versatile.
Overall the exercises took 10 minutes, which ate a significant chunk of the 30 minutes I ended up being able to use.
Drawing
For the drawing, I ended up only using 20 minutes. I would have preferred to use more time, and sketch multiple sets of eyes, but ended up being short on time.
I flipped through the pages until I found the section on eyes. Once found, I decided to follow the steps highlighted there. It went as follows:
- Sketch a rough outline of the eyebrows, eye and iris. In retrospect, I really should have changed my pen mode to a thinner one. The lines I made here were way too thick. I also ended up erasing and redrawing the eye outline multiple times, not so much because I was struggling with drawing “satisfactory” circles (I feel like I definitely improved on that front), but because the symmetry kept being way off. The result I kept is still a little off, mostly unaligned along the vertical axis.
- Once this was done, it was time to add eye lashes and volume in that area.
- The next step was to add some details with the iris and light reflection.
- Next up was removing part of the outline and changing the bottom of the eyes a little bit.
- Afterwards, in a blink and you’ll miss it moment, I added a fold above each eye.
- Finally, I thickened the eyebrows and added shading to the eye. With this portion, I learned that using an e-ink tablet can be very annoying, since what I see can stop reflecting the actual results (E.g.: seeing blank spots when there should be ink, or vice versa), requiring a refresh (This is because the pen can physically pull e-ink in either direction, without it being reflected in software). The other thing I found out was a purpose for different stroke orientations. When it comes to the shading, I find it that the right orientation can help stay within the outline’s borders.
For the final result, I was annoyed with the misalignment of the eyes, so I took a lasso tool and repositioned one of the eyes a bit (Though it’s still not perfectly aligned). I think it helped a bit. Overall, the result is ok. Not amazing, but not awful either. However, I would have liked to do a few more sketches. Here is the result: (Unlike previous days, I chose to crop this one, since otherwise it would just be a lonely set of eyes in the corner of the canvas).
Conclusion
Overall, I’m a little underwhelmed with this day, mostly because I was lacking in time. But at least I did draw today, and wrote this blog post.
One helpful note about drawing, I find that reorienting the canvas (my tablet) can help with some strokes (Although it’s not the first time I realize this). It makes some of them feel a little more natural. p>
As for the time spent, I spent just over 30 minutes on drawing. As for writing the post, the first draft took 40 minutes, and the revision roughly 25 minutes. This means that writing the post took roughly twice as long as drawing. It also took more time than yesterday, though admittedly I was particularly tired throughout the process. I will definitely need to figure how to write posts more quickly. (Though hopefully practice will help)
As stated in the introduction, tomorrow I will be going on a field trip. I know I’m leaving early, and am unsure how late I’ll be get back. I’ll do my best to draw and post about it, but there is no guarantee I’ll manage to after getting back. Though maybe I’ll just manage to do it all while on a bus, with underwhelming results, hahaha. Stay tuned for more updates!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 11 (2024/02/29)