This was written March 15, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Credits: 0
Introduction
Hello and welcome back everyone, I hope you’re all doing well. First of all, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that my credits dropped down to 0. Indeed, I made sure to hold onto that one credit because I knew yesterday was going to be very busy. Also having to pay off a sleep debt, I figured I should rest. But now I’m back at it!
This session started around 6:15pm, and I evaluated my tiredness at 6/10, better than the rest of the week. However, I must add that I’ve also been feeling very nervous and stressed, which should probably also be taken into consideration.
Exercises
Let’s start with the exercises. As of late, I’ve definitely been letting myself go with the lines exercise, using it mostly as a warm up. Today’s was rather sloppy, and I might have to make a conscious effort to improve these. Although it’s definitely not a priority at this point.
In contrast, I believe the wavy lines exercise went particularly well today, and it might be my best results yet. I’m happy with them, and feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it. In particular, I think the horizontal ones turned out pretty well.
Meanwhile, the circles were soso. I think I should definitely look up tips to draw better circles. Overall, the exercises took me about 5mins, which is incredibly short.
Drawing
As I’ve mentioned last time, I decided to wait until I’ve translated the related pages before going back to the angled profile. Yet, I needed something short and a little simple today, especially with a time limit of about 40 minutes before the Cafe I was in closed. For this reason, I chose a frontal face in a new style, akin to chibi.
The first thing I drew were initial guidelines with rough measurements, making small ticks here and there to guide the head’s outline.
Next up, I drew the outline in the guideline layer. Of note, I struggled with line confidence today, with my lines being on the shaky side. This is generally especially true for longer lines (e.g.: outlines), but today felt particularly bad.
I also added extra guidelines for the eyes (unfortunately not quite parallel). The previous horizontal one should align with the “middle”,while the others with the top and bottom. Note that these eyes are particularly “bottom-heavy”.
With these guidelines ready, it was time to add a new layer and start drawing proper. In this style, the head’s outline wraps inwards toward the eyes, so I estimated where that would converge and marked a spot on each side. I then drew my curves. I once again struggled with this. Head outlines seem to be one of my biggest struggles, which luckily can be mitigated with later additions like hair (for non-bald characters). Thankfully, this is something I get to practice on most drawings. Though I may want to look up tips on consistency (both consistent results, and consistency between different elements). This is definitely a stage during which erasing and retrying is common practice for me.
With an outline sketched, I moved on to the eyes. I noticed that the eyes looked to be oval, with more “weight” towards the center of the face. Consequently, I made some rough ticks for the ovals’ axes, and tried to sketch them. This took multiple attempts, and adjustments to the aforementioned ticks.
With their outline ready, I moved my attention to outlining the iris. I eventually realized this should be taller than wide, while not touching the top of the existing oval, but merging with the bottom (top and bottom relative to the drawing). I then added eyebrows, ears, a smile, an upper body and clothes. In the future, I may want to check rough measurements for the mouth’s position. Also, the upper-body is just meant to be decorative, yet this is something I’ll need to practice through full-body sketches.
Next up, small shading for the eyes, along with reflection. I actually struggled with the shading, since it’s only a few lines, and I’m not fully understanding the theory behind them. But it seems like the orientation of those lines is of primordial importance. The reflection is also something I struggle a bit with: drawing the circle with the right width, and positioning it correctly.
The eye’s outline was itself also detailed. Do note that I erased the previous outline (which I commonly do during step). I also added some additional details such as a blush, and a line in the ears.
I was then distracted with trying to fix a few elements, such as the eye’s shading and reflection, and the jaw’s outline.
Finally, I moved on to the final details for the eyes, adding the iris, and darkening the rest of the eye (making the previous shading pointless). Once done, it was time to end the session, at roughly 39mins, 34mins of which were dedicated to the drawing. Here’s the final result:
Conclusion
Looking at this drawing, here are a few of my thought:
- I really need to work more on my face outlines, in particular making them “smoother” and with better line confidence.
- In the future, I will need to work on some spacial positioning. The mouth seems a little off, and the eyes might be slightly too far apart. Yet, I think I’ve still improved a lot. While I’m unhappy with it here, this is still much better than some of my early work.
- Below the neck is an area I really struggle with in general.
As for the stats, 39mins were spent on drawing, and 38mins on writing the post. Reviewing took me about 41mins, but good portions of it were either with adding the pictures (since I’m now doing this in a single batch) and fighting against WordPress (I generally hate tools that try to be smart and just change everything without your consent, but I’ll spare you a bigger rant). This means the article took roughly 79mins, and the session itself was a total of 118mins. Finally, drawing represented about a third of the session, and reviewing took just a little longer than writing the article.
On that note, have a lovely weekend everyone, come back next week for more!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 23 (2024/03/16) – Dawn of a new Break