Derailed at the Last Minute!

So I had planned to end the month with a few short studies tonight, but got caught up helping my niece with a project for school. I chose today to finally write a letter to an old friend thinking I had the evening to myself, but nope! 'Resistance' is at it again. Anyway ...

These are gesture studies based on the Croquis Cafe videos. They start with five 1-min. poses, four 2-min. poses and finish with a 5-min. pose. I'm going through their backlog currently and dread the day I catch up as they only update their videos weekly! I need at least one daily! 270 total.

These were just doodles to break up the gesture studies. Freehand drawing is good for finding out what my weaknesses are: head tilts, humeral-scapular rhythms. I may do a few ecorches. My plan was to start Scott Eaton's Anatomy course, but I can't drop that $700 just yet. It may be for the better. I need to turn my attention to light/shadow and color studies. I've been avoiding them for too long. I'm just so fascinated with human anatomy, though.

The more detailed pieces are longer studies. It's been awhile since I've done a few and I'm itching to knock out a few more. Switching up the types of studies I do fends off burnout, I find. I used a Hard Round Brush at 100% Opacity with 49% Flow. No blending brush and only four values over top a base color. 

Keeping My Eyes On the Road

Glad summer is coming to an end. I love the sun, but can do without the humidity. Was in a bit of a spin last month. Less dizzy now and upping the study time.

Followed some of Matt Kohr's lessons from Ctrl+Paint. This was a basic color exercise where I combined A and C to get B (B+C=BC, A+B=AB). The goal was to create a value scale that matched each example.

Here, I did the same. I then blended the values to create a gradient. That blue stroke was on the same layer of the file so I said 'eff' it and left it. Up until this, I never was a huge fan of the eyedropper tool. I only used it here to compare my colors to the example - like checking my answers. 

In the video for this exercise he demonstrated a part of his workflow that I'll adopt. 100% Opacity and 45-55% flow settings. His line work is always separate (usually standard practice), but he doesn't limit his layers as far as adding value goes. More importantly, he could care less about staying in the lines. This was the hardest thing for me to let go, but when I did it helped tremendously. It allowed me to make long, flowing strokes. Perfect since I work on a small Wacom Bamboo. After you lay your values down you merge your value layers (if you have more than one) and just erase everything outside of the line work.

I just felt like doing a quick portrait study to break up the lessons. Her ears are elfish. Mouth could use more work. I do portraits a little faster now, mostly because I'm not trying to capture a complete likeness.

I had a sketch layer and line layer for this and the canvas settings for this file are ones I'll stick to for awhile. Just drawing cubes and phones to get more comfortable with the stylus and "see" angles better.

I made sure to fill this up. I was zooming in pretty close. Another of Matt's videos had to do with drawing spoons. This exercise really helped. I tried to limit myself to 1-2 strokes for the spoon line work. A few doodles on the left and lots of gesture drawings from the Croquis Cafe page on Youtube. They have 20 min. life drawing sessions consisting of 1 and 2 minute poses, then a 5 min. pose. So glad to have found that page. I drew three heads to fill in the negative space and am again pleased with the fact that they didn't take me forever to do.