This was written May 13, 2024 and June 20, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome back! After a long break, I’m happy to welcome you to the start of my third attempt. There have definitely been a few failures, but I’ve also learned from them, so hopefully this time will go better! Note that this have a rocky start for now. I would recommend reading Blog Update – Life Prioritization if you’re looking for more clarifications on the situation.
Before going further, you might have noticed that this is labelled as Day 25, and I have skipped over Day 24, this is because I had a small session where I drew models for Starting to Swim (Part 2). It felt uningenious not to include that session in my count, since I did practice that time. I may eventually release a post about it as a bonus one, but I can’t promise it.
Next, I’ve actually skipped the drawing exercises this session since I wanted to dive straight into drawing. I may eventually revisit the exercises, but for now, I think I may skip them.
It’s also worth mentioning that I dealt with some technical issues that were really annoying. For some reason, my tablet sometimes decided to erase entire strokes right after drawing them. I’m not quite sure what caused this issues, and whether it was the pen, the tablet, or my hand. Under normal circumstances, I would have to investigate this, but I actually was gifted a Samsung S6 lite tablet, which I plan to start using (with a different software) in the future.
Preparation
Before drawing, I considered my first frame and what it contains:
- Closed eyes
- Nose
- Mouth
- Cheeks
Looking at this list, there are a few things that came to mind. First, I’ll need to choose what style and variant I want for the different elements. What kind of eyes, what kind of nose, etc.. Not just in terms of the character’s attributes, but also the art style. Next, I realized that another important aspect, especially with respect to the nose, is shading. This is both a crucial and challenging drawing skill which I will definitely need to learn.
Eventually, I settled on working on noses, and looked at a few models to see what I might my options were. Turns out, there is a lot of variation when it comes to drawing nose. For example, it can be drawn as:
- Simple holes
- A small triangle
- A larger triangle with the whole bridge drawn, along with shadows
- A bigger and more realistic nose with the tip drawn in more detail
I thus opened my guidebook to the secion on noses, and opted to try some models, starting with a more detailed variant.
Drawing Session
During this session, I ended up drawing three noses. Here are my attempts:
First Nose
I also struggled with some small details, such as the nostrils’ size. Here’s an example of one I was unhappy with (on the bottom right of the picture, i.e.: the left nostril). Fortunately, that’s easy to fix.
Beyond that, I struggled a lot with nose shadows and relief, but I will spare you the details. Enough to say that shadows are complicated, and I think I should have a side-quest: studying shadows.
Otherwise, I’m fairly happy with how this nose turned out. My main complaint would be that the top right part (the end of the curve) feels misaligned with the bottom part). A funny note that I wrote, the more I drew the nose and looked at it, the less it looked like a nose. The human brain can be weird sometimes. Here it is once again for reference:
Second Nose
Next, here are a few things I either struggled with or realized:
- As with the previous drawing, connecting different parts of the nose without a connecting line can be challenging.
- When drawing the nose’s tip, it seems easier to start with the line at the tip itself, and then adding extra lines around it.
- The tip of the nose’s relief can be tough to center. Aligning different elements with each other to have a coherent whole has been non-trivial, and I need to make a conscious effort to build this intuition. Luckily, it’s something that can often be fixed through “editing” steps.
With my second nose, I’m happier with the general shape (which came at the cost of a lot of rework), although I’m a little disappointed with the shadows and reliefs.
Third Nose
Finally, for my third nose, I decided to go for a simpler model, but as part of an whole face.
At this point, I was definitely rusty when it comes to sketching faces, and this is an underwhelming attempt. Regardless, it is important to practice once more. Here, I ran into a few issues, not all nose-related:
- I struggled with eyes’ direction (where they look). It seems like it’s based on a combination of the general shape and orientation, the placement of the iris, along with the placement, size and orientation of the reflection. More experimentation might be needed to better understand how those interplay, although for now I might just do it on a case-by-case.
- Aligning the nose with the face wasn’t easy. Once again, it’s a matter of aligning different elements. It needs to properly line up with the “center”, but also the eyes and the eyebrows.
- The shadows remained a struggle. Especially relating it to the topology.
Overall, I’m definitely dissatisfied with this drawing; there are multiple elements I’m unhappy with. While a few of the elements were simple drafts to help understand this conceptually, the mouth is definitely off, which does hinders the nose exercise. Moreover, I’m also unimpressed with the nose. The shadow feels off, and the nostrils aren’t great. Still, it’s work in progress, and the next iterations will hopefully be better, I just have to start practicing again.
Time Statistics
While drawing took me 43mins, and I took 19mins to write a sketch of post and initial sections, I have no idea how long I took to actually complete the article during my second run, so the statistics will be omitted for this session.
Conclusion
So, here are my takeaways:
- There is definitely a tradeoff between detail and work amongst the different kinds of noses, and I will need to choose a specific version, and remain consistent and coherent with it. Also, the detailed nose will definitely be more challenging when it comes to doing different angles.
- Coherence between different elements is extremely important, and something I need to work on. For now, this takes the form of reworks, but hopefully I will gradually build my intuition.
- Aligning different outlines that aren’t continuous is important, and sometimes trickier than it seems.
- I struggle a lot with topology, orientation and shadows. I should thus do a dive into those.
- For my next session, I would like to do some shadow exercises. I’ll look up some simple ones, and what objects work are best to train with. I expect these will involve sketching objects I point a lamp at in the dark. I’ll try to get useful pictures to show how the process goes.
On that note, thank you very much for your patience, I know things have been slow and very delayed, but I’ve been needing to focus on my mental health and to figure out some priorities, as stated in Blog Update – Life Prioritization. I’ll try to get back into this proper, though I also have some important tasks and traveling coming up very soon, so no promises. Take care everyone and until next time!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw Challenge – Day 26 – Shading – 2024/06/21