Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 11 (2024/02/29)

This was written February 29, 2024 as part of the 2024 Learning to Draw People Challenge

Introduction

Happy end of the month everyone, with the elusive February the 29th. Today, as stated in yesterday’s post, was a long day since I went on a field trip. Thus, I started drawing fairly late, while also exhausted. But I still went through with it, and am also writing this post!

Before getting into it, a silly note. While on the bus, I decided to try to read/translate a few lines from the (Chinese) drawing book I’m using as a reference…and there’s definitely a lot of value I’m losing by following visually and not reading. I will need to spend some time reading it.

Exercises

For the exercises, there isn’t much to say. Mainly two realizations:

  • When drawing multiple strokes in a row, I tend to leave my hand in place, only changing my wrist’s position slightly. This means I often end up in a very cramped position. After realizing this, I decided to try to move my arm after most strokes, and I think this was a little better. My hand wasn’t feeling as cramped as usual after the exercises.
  • While handling the wavy lines, I also realized I could move my whole arm, instead of just my wrist and my forearm. This means I raised my hand and arm, and let the stylus glide over the tablet. I suspect that might be what I did yesterday which led to that motion that felt so fluent. I also opted to use that technique for some of the larger circles, and tried it with a few strokes in the actual drawing. I think this has potential, though I might also need to explore it with different grips.
Beyond that, I still think these exercises are a great warm up, and I think there are a few areas in which I’m improving. It might be worth eventually looking back and comparing the progress here. Overall, it took me roughly 10 minutes to complete the exercises. Here are the results:
Day 11 – Lines exercise
Day 11 – Wavy lines exercise – Horizontal
Day 11 – Wavy lines exercise – Vertical
Day 11 – Circles exercise

Drawing

Today, I opted to revisit the profile angle. I started with some guidelines, as usual:

Day 11 – Drawing Guidelines

Once this was done, I continued with the front of the profile (nose, mouth and jaw). I also added a neck and redrew the “cranium”, following the guideline. It has a few flaws, but I think it’s not so bad. Plus, it’s just a temporary fixture. There two components I struggled with the most. First, the bridge of the nose (roughly where the eye sockets should be), often making it too deep. Then there’s also the chin, which I often draw too blocky. You can see the result so far with and without guidelines:

Day 11 – Outline (With Guidelines)
Day 11 – Outline (No Guidelines)

Next up, I added some guidelines for the eye. I drew a line from the neck to roughly where the eye should be, and added a circle for the eye. (No, it is not a monocle)

Day 11 – Eye Guideline
Once the guidelines were ready, I drew the eye’s outline, making sure to align it with the top of the nose this time. I also added an eyebrow and a smile. Being unhappy with the chin, I redrew it along with the jaw before adding the ear’s outline (since I wanted them to align properly). Here it is with and without the guidelines.
Day 11 – Face Components (With Guidelines)
Day 11 – Face Components (No Guidelines)

The next step was to add in the inner outline for the ear, and some details for the eye. I once again struggled with the ear.

Day 11 – First details added

Finally, the last details for the face were added: some highlights around the eye, a thicker eyebrow, and a more detailed ear. Also some plastic surgery, redrawing the jawline and the nose. I’m fairly happy with the image at this point, I also think it might be my best ear so far.

Day 11 – Final face details
If we compare this to the drawing I had on Monday (Day 08), I think it’s much better:
Day 08 – Final Drawing

Next, there were a few steps to handle for the hair, which I opted to draw this time. First, a general outline:

Day 11 – Hair Outline

Once that was done, I tried to add details for the hair, with different strands here and there. Though I once again struggled with the hair conceptually: what should be drawn where and in which orientation?

Day 11 – Adding details to hair

I then removed the cranium line and started trying to modify the hair a little. I noticed that the book, for some reason, removed some hair at this stage. I definitely struggled to better understand that. Here’s an intermediate stage I had, before refining it some more. Note that the back of the head was changed a bit, since I wasn’t convinced with its shape. The shape definitely appears smoother.

Day 11 – Intermediate Hair Stage

Ultimately, I learned a few things about drawing hair today:

  • Less is more. Having less detail and focusing on specific areas lends itself to better results.
  • Working on hair orientation is definitely important. Trying to make it flow “naturally” goes a long way, although I haven’t mastered this yet.
  • Having smooth strokes seems especially important for hair.
The drawing is not perfect by any means, but I think it’s my best so far, and I’m really happy with my progress. Here it is:
Day 11 – Final Drawing (With Guidelines)
Day 11 – Final Drawing

Conclusion

Overall, I think I’ve definitely made observable progress, and I’m ecstatic about it! I’m also glad that I’ve managed for the past two days to both draw and write my posts, despite being tired and exhausted. I think that’s the extremely valuable if I want to make this a long-term habit. As for the time spent on this, I spent around 90 minutes on drawing (10 minutes of exercises and one hour of drawing). Writing this post took me roughly 50 minutes, and reviewing it took about 25 minutes (a 2:1 ratio, definitely better than yesterday in terms of proportions). Overall, this is a huge time commitment at a total of 2h45mins (And that’s just drawing and writing, it doesn’t include transferring files, publishing the post and relevant updates, etc…). I’ll need to find a way to shorten it a bit by the time classes resume next week. But one step at a time.

I hope you enjoyed today’s post. Thank you for joining me and following my progress. Stay tuned to see how far I can get, and what other things I learn along the way!

This post is followed by Learning to Draw People Challenge – Day 12 (2024/03/01)

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