This was written February 27, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge
Introduction
Today was a fairly short day. Unfortunately I was both tired and fairly busy. However, I still went to a Cafe, put my head down, and started to draw, albeit for a shorter period than usual. As for writing this article, it was done in a separate session, but on the same day (Which means progress!). Let’s get into it!
Exercises
There isn’t a lot to say about the exercises. While going through the exercises, I was a little more stressed than usual and tried to rush a little, which definitely negatively affected the results. For the line exercise, I once again tried to practice different orientations (Although I almost forgot some of them). I also decided to practice both “overhand” and “underhand” for the horizontal line. You can additionally notice that I started annotating the exercises (Including UH and OH for underhand and overhand respectively).
For the wavy lines exercise, I realized that I don’t approach “peaks” and “valleys” in the same way, which causes undesired asymmetry that gets in the way of the results. Sometimes, one of them doesn’t even form what I would call a curve. For this exercise, I will definitely need to go back to the drawing board (so to speak). I may try to rewatch the video these exercises come from for inspiration. One thing I’ll definitely want to try to do is to take the first wavy line slowly to start it off neatly.
For the circle exercise, I decided to go for a smaller quantity than usual. Also, as noted on the sheet, the clockwise orientation definitely felt unnatural to me. Some of them also look more like “2”s than circles.
Overall, I spent roughly 8 minutes and a half on the exercises.
Drawing
Following the previous day, I figured I might want to practice drawing ears. Thus, I looked through my reference book for the section on ears, and decided to practice it. The process contains five steps, which I’ll illustrate with what I consider my best overall attempt:
- Draw the general shape of the ear
- Draw the ear hole
- Draw the inner contour of the ear (Yes, I redrew the ear hole here)
- Connect the ear hole section to the inner contour
- Loop back the inner contour to connect with the last draw segment
A few things to note:
- I struggle with drawing an ear’s contour and will definitely have to practice this more.
- I have difficulties with the ear hole portion. I find it difficult to gauge the orientation, proportions and the position of this component. This definitely deserves more practice.
Overall, I spent roughly 25 minutes on the ear sketches. Here are all four sketches I drew today. My favorite one is the second one, due to its ear hole’s position seeming more natural than for the other ones, even though some of my lines have confidence, thickness and consistency issues. Ears are definitely something I will need to revisit in the future. One other thing I might want to explore is how to give these lines more of a depth effect, with some segments seeming to be behind others. Right now it seems to lack any depth. I suspect it is based off of thickness of lines and some other tricks, and will require some experimentation.
Conclusion
Overall, the results are not spectacular, but I think it’s still worthwhile to zoom in once in a while to better understand some of the components. And this dive was definitely not sufficient. However, one step at a time for now, which involved getting into the habit of both drawing and writing the blog posts. Speaking of, writing this blog post took me roughly 48 minutes, including reviewing it, which took around 20 minutes. (Overall, I spent a lot more time on this post than on drawing).
Thanks for joining me, and I hope you found this interesting. Have a nice one everyone!
This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 10 (2024/02/28)