I had a confidence setback recently in my art skills, and wanted to salve that hurt by going back to some drawings of my favorite subject, Aftyn Rose. These are five figure studies rendered as nudes from a variety of non-nude sources.
The bottom two drawings, sourced from one of my favorite videos, I did a long time ago and abandoned for being sub-par. I revisited them to try to fix the anatomy, but you can see that my rendering style has changed a fair bit since then. The top three are new and show a more recent hand.
I feel like I made some breakthroughs in this set. My challenges with understanding the anatomy kept me up at night sometimes, particularly with that top middle image. My initial revisions all had problems that would announce themselves as “wrong!” in my head, and forced my brain into a state of continuous mental revision. Eventually I got them all to a reasonable level of quality.
Compared to my previous outing of this sort, I’d say they’re showing a lot of improvement. The faces and anatomy are more clear, light and shadow have better definition. The face in the upper right figure never settled into likeness no matter how many times I reworked it, but at some point I just needed to move on.
