And again... it's been awhile! Thankfully all these months I haven't been completely remiss in my drawing habits. Not as productive as I was in Aug/Sept or thereabouts, but still, a lot more interested in drawing than I have been in over a decade.
Time to do a sketch dump again. While I did quite a few more pages of sketching than I thought, the following is all that seemed worthwhile posting.
Some Bridgman practice:
Super happy with my experiments with new dragon types below. I often default to the same old simple, angular lines, (usually) slim wedge-shaped head, and lack of proper detail in the interest of simply getting something down on paper. Those below are a big step forward for me and were tons of fun to draw. So nice to give myself time to do things properly.
Quick rough-in of the overall body for the first dragon above. Not quite right yet.
A head-on perspective challenge:
A study from William O'Connor's wonderful Dracopedia books. I loved this dragon design and his sketchy lines and shading technique. So, I wanted to try and practice similar lively lines that aren't as shaggy and excessive as my usual sketchy style, or as restrictingly "defined" as my "finished" sketches always turn out.
Snake-like cave dragon thing, and tall lanky draconic alien walking thing.
Life drawing from online refs. Terrible face on the woman, but I was liking the flow I achieved in her torso. Badly captured masked man and pissy elfin woman as a bonus.
My attempt to start some Christmas cards this year with a holly dragon (failed to find the time to continue...), and a mistletoe dragon.
A study of a drawing of an eye from Valerie Winslow's "anatomy for artists" book. Very happy with what I accomplished (and learned) from the exercise. I've since used this study to replicate a similar eye for the current daily sketch challenge:
Attempted to learn constructive anatomy from the IFX anatomy guide with DVD. Even though there was no audio for the tutorial, and the written tutorial seemed to barely make sense with the drawings in the book, I felt like I managed well with this technique; it's really simple and (almost) foolproof! Sadly I think I drew just a bit too much trunk and then made her bum too big right at the start (was too busy trying to watch the vid and pause it frequently to catch up), so her lower half feels much too big and too low for her upper half. Oh well. It still felt like a great method as I worked on it. Now to repeat it again and again...
I was sketching outside one day this summer when an interesting cloud drifted by. I swear it looked just like a giant multi-headed turtle with a European-styled city on its back belching smoke/steam from its various chimneys! Well, OK, maybe that's just my imagination finally coming back to me with all this drawing. But it sure was a detailed-looking cloud...
Some quick body practice after the anatomy exercise above. Not perfect, and I couldn't exactly remember all the steps, but I still like the dynamic look to them.
I have a desire to draw a feathered serpent (Quetzlcoatl), so I did a snake study from a brief Google search, then used my drawing to practice a dragon-ified version of the head. Too bad I ran out of room at the bottom of the page (I'd like his mouth to gape much wider).
And which brings us to yesterday; Day 1 of the daily sketch challenge: perspective practice with dragon gazing down (imperfect head but very pleased with how the lines capture the drama I'm going for); quick feathered dragon/serpent pose to plan out a sculpture of one of these too; and a dragon's eye closeup in the vein of the eye structure practice done earlier (ermagerd I'm lernin!).
And today: very random. Some life drawing from my head (mehhhhh, meant to warm up my hand and get a sense of flow going), that dang eye again (brow and lid raised sharper, looking in different direction), and some other stuff just because.
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