sketches & stats: august 2015

Hello lovely people!
Today I have some of my drawings from the last month to share! To explain why I'm doing this-I was recently introduced to Jake Parker, the artist who started Inktober by my uncle he is an artist and was kind enough to talk to me about my art-more on that later). In addition to being a very talented and inspiring artist, Jake Parker also makes awesome videos on his youtube channel over here about all kinds of art-related topics. Something he says in those videos multiple times is that you should fill at least one sketchbook per month. And something you should know about me: I really like to have concrete, measurable goals. It's the engineer genes; I can't help it! That of course sparked the idea to keep a folder of everything I draw each month and to tally up how many pages I create (counting the front and back of a page separately). I draw all the time-at school, when I'm playing games with my family, when I have a couple minutes of free time-and I am notoriously bad at keeping a formal sketchbook, so that's why I'm measuring by pages instead of by sketchbook. I usually draw on whatever I can find.

I'm not sure how many pages = 1 sketchbook, so for now I'm going for 100 pages/month. I know I didn't get that far this month, but it should be interesting to see how many pages I actually put out over time. I'll also be tracking finished pieces, as that's another important part of being an artist where I want to improve.

Unfortunately, the thing about having a lot of loose pages kicking around rather than a nice bound sketchbook makes tracking my output difficult. Papers get thrown away/lost/used for something else after I'm done . . . So here's my plan: 1.) Keep all the pages in a folder each month 2.) Share some of the better-quality stuff here 3.) Record at the end of each post of this type how many pages I've done. Who knows, maybe I'll graph it or something after a while.

Another idea I'm playing around with is tracking the number of hours I spend drawing per month and posting that too, but I don't know if that's a crazy impossible idea or not-especially because during school I draw during class to keep my hands busy or as a way to remember concepts in a lecture, and timing the drawing I do then isn't really a viable option. I'll see how that goes!

Another thing I should mention when I was talking to my uncle an exercise he suggested to improve my figure drawing is CYLINDERS. You get some pipe from a hardware store, or use a pencil or a cup or whatever other cylinder shaped object you can find, and practice drawing it in different ways so you can confidently draw cylinders from all sorts of different angles and perspectives. Because cylinders are such a basic shape in constructing the human form (and lots of other things too!), I need to able to draw them very well. So yep. . . lots and lots of cylinders! I'm not going to show you these studies, as they're mainly for me and not too exciting to look at, but I did want to keep you updated on what I'm doing. I can already tell that this exercise is helping me defeat a bad habit I've formed over the years of getting too excited about details and zeroing in on those before defining large shapes and really nailing down my proportions, perspective, etc. I have to save the detail love for later in the process. . . So working on my basics with this kind of exercise has been great for me.

I've also been using a method he showed me of drawing the face where you use a rectangle as a construction shape for the face instead of a circle or oval. This seems simple but it's made a world of difference to the way I approach drawing faces from various angles and in playing around with proportions.

And now-a peek into the craziness that is my sketchbook. For some reason there ended up being a lot of girls in this batch! And I apologize for the picture quality. These are pretty small sketches (another area in which I need to improve! yikes!) and the camera didn't appreciate that.

Twenties hair girl!

I've been working on drawing expression and communicating emotion. As the great Ollie Johnston said, "Don't animate drawings, animate feelings!" He was talking about animation (another area of interest for me, although my animation is so basic that I probably won't be sharing it here for a while) but the principle is the same for all art forms. Don't think about drawing arms and noses and hair; think about the emotion being expressed.

Yes, this is a lizard. Fascinating creatures. And yes, those are multiplication problems on the other side of the paper. We don't like to waste paper in our family (the good ol' engineering Type A personality genes at work again) so almost all of this is on scratch paper, the front side already having been used for something such as one of my little brothers' math worksheets.

Enjolras :D Scribbly and rough, but I liked the rhythm and the way the flag came out. Sorry about all that mess in the background! I draw things too close together. A lot. Oops.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I love reading every single one of your comments and it means so much to me that you show up to read my blog!

August stats
sketchbook pages: ~33 (that I can find-since I only decided to start keeping track in the last week of the month it's likely there are more
sketchbooks completed (100 pages = 1 book. . . at least that's my benchmark now): 0.33 (yikes!)
finished pieces: 1 (2 if you count a digital thing that will never see the light of day, for the foreseeable future)