What a difference two months makes

I decided to post a comparison between the sketch of my Rogue I drew today, vs the version of it I scrapped a couple months ago, to show how much I’ve improved just since then. I think my big breakthrough was getting myself to think of everything in the image as a physical object in 3D space, vs just shapes on the page. That, plus studying and drawing lots of anatomy sketches, so I have a better handle on how the human (er, Night Elf) body fits together, and a better sense of what makes for an interesting pose.

Seeing how much I’ve improved in just the last couple months has me excited for where I’m going to be in 2 months, or 2 years. That’s what’s going to keep me going, I think.

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Practice sketches

I've been doing a lot with pencil lately, so I'm switching things up and spent the last few days doing practice sketches in Photoshop. I've filled quite a few pages in my sketchbook with human figure/pose practice sketches over the last month or so, and I've improved to a point where I'm not embarrassed for people to see them. Comparing these to how much I struggled to draw the pencil sketch of my Rogue I drew a couple months ago (which is what made me decide to start practicing figure drawing) that practice is really paying off.

The face is an attempt to practice drawing clean lines in Photoshop, which is something I still struggle with.

The sketch of my Rogue is a second attempt at a picture I started drawing a couple months ago and never finished because I wasn't happy with how it was turning out. Again, the improvement I've made since then is pretty significant, which is really exciting. I'm probably going to try to turn this one into a finished painting.

Queen Padme Amidala pencil drawing

I haven't been slacking on my Draw Every Day 2016 project, I promise! I've just been spending the last five days working on one drawing. As I said in my previous blog post, I recently re-watched the Star Wars Prequels, so I drew Queen Amidala in graphite and a bit of colored pencil.

This started out as a simple quick sketch, and quickly grew into something more detailed and complex than I'd initially planned. I'm mostly happy with how it turned out, though I didn't notice that the eyes weren't quite lined up until it was too late to fix it. I'm just taking it as a lesson learned: Even if you think your sketch is lined up correctly, quadruple check before you start drawing dark lines!

If you want to see the progress photos, they're in my Work-In-Progress gallery.

Draw Every Day project for 2016

So, I've been really inconsistent in how often I draw lately. Some days I'm just not feeling it, so I don't draw anything, which makes me feel bad, which makes me not want to draw the next day, which makes me feel bad again, etc. It's a brutal cycle that's holding me back as an artist. I have been doing a lot of practice drawing that I haven't been uploading, but even so, I haven't been doing as much as I'd like.

One of the artists I follow just successfully completed a "draw every day" project last year, and it's inspired me to try the same thing this year. So, here's what's going to happen: I am going to put pen/pencil to paper, or stylus to tablet, or whatever, and draw something at least once per day, every day during 2016. No exceptions, no excuses. Even if I'm super busy, or tired, or not feeling well, I can find the time and strength to at least draw a little doodle. There's no rule about what I have to draw, or how complex it has to be, I just have to draw something.

To kick this off, I drew a silly colored pencil doodle of Pepe wearing a BB-8 hat.