Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 05 (2024/01/12)

This was initially written February 20, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Exercises

First and foremost, I started with the line confidence exercises. Overall, it took me just over 6 minutes. As noted in the final sheet itself, my hands felt cramped by the end of it.

First in line is the straight line exercise (pun intended). The main things to note here is that I need to improve consistency of spacing and lengths, along with my angles. For example, some of my “vertical lines” are definitely slanted. And my diagonal lines are definitely not parallel all the way through. Moreover, some of my “straight lines” end in a curve or hook. I don’t think it’s that bad of an issue, but it’s still something to note and be mindful of in future exercises.

The wavy lines exercise is definitely the one I struggle with the most. I’ll have to spend more practice on it in the future. One thing to consider might be to focus on the accuracy of the wavy lines before trying to vary the thickness.

Then, there’s the circles exercise. I don’t think it’s that bad, but I need to improve consistency of the size and spacing. And while the circles themselves don’t improve in terms of their shape, I do think the line confidence itself somewhat improved throughout the exercise, and made with a more “continuous” stroke.

Drawing

The first step of the drawing was to sketch the general shape of the head, including the jaw. This time, I didn’t use specific measurements in order to build my intuition a bit, only using guidelines for separation. (I may have used my ruler on the tablet without marking it, but unfortunately cannot recall). I did struggle a bit with some of those strokes, in particular the bottom half of the face and the jaw. We can see some asymmetry present, with the both sides having strokes starting at different points.

Once the general outline was ready, it was time to place elements on the face: the eyes, the nose and the mouth. Unfortunately, I did struggle a bit with my guidelines. We can see here they’re not quite parallel.

I still moved on with the eyes, nose and mouth. I struggled a lot with the eyes placement and getting the general shape I wanted. Especially at such an angle, it doesn’t feel like a super natural shape to draw yet, especially if I have to replicate it symmetrically. But fortunately, there aren’t constraints on the number of times I can redraw components, especially since it’s a digital drawing.

Indeed, it is fortunate that I can just redraw components. After the eyes were in place, the nose and mouth felt off, so I opted to redraw them, along with eyebrows, a neck and shoulders. For now, I do struggle quite a bit with the neck and shoulders, but it’s not the main focus here, so it’s ok, especially at this stage.

Once this was done, I refined the eyes. This meant adding eyelashes and detail within the eye (pupil, iris, reflection, etc), skipping the intermediary stepp I’d previously followed. I feel like I struggled quite a bit with where to place the reflection on both eyes for consistency. I also added some details to the ears, along with redrawing the mouth one more time. Here’s the result, I’m generally happy with the eyes at this stage, though I do see some improvements that could be made. For example, the bottom white part of the eye on the left could be reshaped a bit for consistency.

Once that was done, it was time to move on to the hair, which I dreaded. First in line, was the general hair outline.

Once that was done, I added some detail to the hair. I think this worked out better than on the previous days, though I’m not sure why. I was curious and decided to check how long this step took me. Overall, roughly 12 minutes.

Finally, once this was completed, I decided to fix a few details, such as the jaw and the upper body. Note that I decided to try to “correct” some issues with some lines along the jaw by making them thicker, which is definitely not professional, but helped me with my confidence in this instance, and helped a bit. Overall, I’m fairly happy with the result, especially with this only being my 5th day at it. There are definitely some issues here and there, but I think it’s not too shabby.

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 06 (2024/01/13)