Practice with the low angle figure drawing continues. I was mostly doing sketches this week. You might think that’s me taking a shortcut, but with the refinements to shading styles I’m trying out, they usually take longer than the simplified paints. I’m starting to like my ink shade results. Where you see the capsule figures to the side, that’s evidence of my procedure. I draw a simplified figure over the reference, then hide the reference and do a freehand version of the mannequin. Then I show the reference and draw the figure over the freehand capsule sketch. Shading guides and shading are the last steps.
Discrepancies between the “traced” capsule figure and the final sketch are my own errors, and what I am practicing to minimize. They are definite improvements over the versions before I did that step.
Contour shading lines are really starting to take shape here.The Love Life Drawing community is doing a Pose of the month theme. Everyone draws the same figure, then comment on each other’s work. It’s good I lack an ego about my drawing because there’s some humbling work in there.This shading style looks good but was very tedious to do. I keep staring at the fact I left out her right calf and wondering why it still works.I realized something about my colors when I was painting these figures, and why it wasn’t working. I had been focusing on hue and saturation, but not really paying attention to value (lightness or darkness). Something I’ve been figuring out is that you can vary hue dramatically, and as long as the value is right, the brain will accept it. The wrongness I’ve sensed has been a result of me getting the values wrong. So for a while here I’m going to focus on value studies, like this one.
