May 23rd: Graphite Iron Man

Lazy.  So I just did an arm tonight.  Shading, shading, shading.  Smudging.  Pulling out graphite.  The hardest parts are almost over.  The helmet and the hand.  Hands are always hard.  But here, there's so much dark shading, that really, I only had to draw like... a finger and a thumb.  Not bad.  I still don't know if I'm going to add red.  It sounds like a good idea in theory.  But so did Chernobyl.  

Unfortunately, I think I might have to go over the whole thing in 8b where the dark areas are.  I thought that 6b would be dark enough, but I don't think it will be.  I think I'll finish the whole thing and see how it looks from there.  I dunno.  The shading on his forearm looks odd.  Like he got dented.  I might have to fix it.  Maybe it's just the way the lighting is in the picture I'm going off of.  Maybe I'm just over analyzing like I always do...

May 20th: Graphite Iron Man

A lot of progress was made today for some reason.  Yay!  So, I did a lot of fine-tuning the basic outline, added a lot of the major armor plating and then got rid of the grid.  I find that at a certain point, the grid does more hindrance than help and it's time to erase it.  Once the grid was gone, I took a ruler to certain points of the helmet and made sure that everything was as close as it should have been.  Or at least could be fudged.  Once you get something major within proportion, everything else can be measured from that point.   In this case, my entire drawing will be measured from the helmet.  So obviously, if the helmet is too off, then a little proportion problem can turn into one messed up drawing.  Measuring=good.

After that, It was time to add some shading.  Lines can only show so much.  For a black and white drawing, it can be hard to convert colors into shades of gray.  I don't know why.  So it's helpful to paste my picture into a paint program and make it black and white when I'm ready to do shading.  This way, I won't screw the values up.   I found that the more I shaded, the more fine tuning I had to do.  Once the shading is added, mistakes become much more vivid.  For something as linear and mechanical as Iron Man, you really can see if something isn't symmetrical or is drawn at the wrong angle.  So there was a hell of a lot of measuring, blurring lines, drawing them over entirely... I mean really?  It's ok.  I kind of like the process of refining.  

I'm getting excited about how this one's going to turn out.  I'm sort of reluctant to add in the red color because I don't know how it's going to look or if it'll even work when it's colored over the graphite.  I'm going to have to do a little test strip before I begin on that venture. 

May 16th: Graphite Iron Man

It has begun.  Let me preface by saying I may have had too much of my sister-in-law's homemade spiked apple cider when I started this drawing.  So lord knows if anything is even remotely where it's supposed to be.  But I digress.  I"m out of regular weight drawing paper with medium grain.  I only have this stuff with really fine grain and it's pretty freaking heavy.  I've never done graphite on paper like this.  Usually this paper is more suitable for watercolors or pen work.  I think the worst that could happen though is that I have a really sturdy copy to ship to Florida.  

So using my grid, I decided, once more, that I hate grids.  These little boxes are supposed to help.  It seems like I just want to keep dividing the boxes into smaller and smaller ones to get something correct and by the time I'm done dividing boxes, I have a bunch of lines and it looks a hot mess.  So I mentally try and figure out where the center of the square is and kind of go from there.  The grid system takes a lot of refining, but I think it's better than free handing in the long run.  So I started with a basic outline of course, which you can barely see in this horrible photo.

 

Then once I felt that I had the basic shape, I began to add more important details.  The most important part of this drawing is going to by Tony's mask.  If I get the head wrong, then it'll mess up the whole thing.  Iron Man's head is very iconic.  No one will notice if his leg armor is off, but the helmet is a central focus.  In the next couple days, I'll be adding more detail to armor and refining the proportions.  

May 13th: Iron Man Says: Stop Gridding Like A Tool!

Grids.  Oh grids.  Tron would be nothing without you and neither would my drawings.  When I'm not tracing like a retard.  No tracing this time!  Father's day is coming up and before I knew who Iron Man was, my dad was the only one.  He used to come home from the gym or a hard days work and exclaim: "I am Iron Man!"  and proceed to show some muscle or toss me and my bro around, one under each arm.  Crazy.  So my dad was always Iron Man to me, not this Tony Stark guy.  However, Tony Stark has a much cooler costume and a bajillion more dollars than my dad, so his costume shall be the one I draw.  It just occurred to me the other day that I get most of my pictures from the internet.  So why, oh why, am I not drawing my grids from the computer?!  Why hasn't this bit of brilliance entered my brain before?  So I took Mr. Stark, pasted him into a paint program and gridded his butt in 1 inch sections.  Ah yes.  Easy peasy.  

In theory, I'm going to start this piece of awesome tomorrow.  Now that's a pretty looking grid!

May 12th: Watercolors and Masking Fluid

Masking fluid is one of those magical tools in an artists arsenal.  It basically keeps paint from getting on some part of the paper you don't want it.  Usually, it's used for areas of white, so the paint doesn't bleed into it.  So last night, I was trying to figure out how to use said masking and I don't know if I failed or succeeded. 

 

So I took an old wash I'd done forever ago and splattered some red and gold paint on it for the hell of it.  Then I drew what I can only assume is a flying swallow on it ( I didn't really care what it was because I was just testing technique here).  Then I painted a portion of the wing with masking fluid.

 Now, I don't know much about masking fluid, but the stuff I was getting out of the bottle was thick, gloppy and not easy to spread.  Seeing as how masking fluid is supposed to paint on, I'm not sure if I have an old bottle or if it's supposed to be that annoying to get on paper.  Regardless, I'm glad I only chose to do a section of the swallow and not the whole freaking thing.  Then I proceeded to paint the negative space black, deliberately going over the wing with the masking fluid to see if this gloppy crap worked.  

I peeled it off.  It had the sticky consistency of dried rubber cement.  It worked.  No black paint got on the wing.  So... test successful I guess.  I still don't think it's supposed to be thick and crappy looking.  Also, now I'm left with this random painting and I have no idea what to do with it.  I'm thinking collage sometime down the road.  Maybe I'll cut around all this badly painted black stuff and keep the bird.

May 11th: A Mother's Day Gift

Most mother's days I send my mom a card.  On the rare occasion, flowers.  My mom lives pretty far away so I can't exactly clean the house for her.  But since I'm trying my best to get back into art, I decided that I'd draw something for her.  It was hard to find something that wasn't complete cheese.

I chose this picture because, even though my mom's no longer a mom with a little baby, I knew it would bring tears to her eyes.  My technique on this drawing was simply layering.  I just kept making the shading darker and darker until it looked decent.  I find it difficult to layer on skin sometimes because I use an artist chamois for smooth skin tone and when I do this, of course all my fine stub lines are smudged out.  So I essentially have to keep drawing and re-drawing lines.  The only way to prevent that I think would be to get the exact tone needed from the chamois right away.  But I'm not that ninja.   I ran out of time (as I always tend to do) and I don't think I got the exact desired effect in the end.

It's ok.  I wanted to make the inside darker.  I really wanted those little baby feet to stand out.  Also, the thumbs are only sort of hinted at here.  There's not much to them.  Just a few simple lines.  I don't know if that makes this drawing better or worse.  Hands and feet are really hard to draw.  I know that a lot of artists struggle with them.  It's hard to make fingers look like fingers and not some deformity... regardless, for something I did last minute, I'd say it passes.  And my mom loved it.  ;)

May 4th! (It's been sooo long!)

It occurs to me that I haven't drawn anything in such a long time.  My priorities have been elsewhere and really, that makes me sad!  I have a talent, I should use it!  So I'm hoping to just become a drawing machine like I used to be in these next few weeks. 

This is another baby drawing that I did for a friend of my aunt.  Honestly, I kind of cheated on this one.  I procrastinated and waited until I couldn't possibly wait anymore.  Being the slow drawer that I am, and having issues with proportion, I totally traced the outline of this kid.  Tracing is something that I've always considered to be off limits.  It's just... it's cheating.  Anyone can trace something.  Granted, all the shading and things I do are obviously my own.  And I just traced the outline for proportion.  But come on!  That's terrible. 

My father suggested that if I were to take a photograph of something and trace that, it would still be an original work since the photo is my own.  I think that tracing a photo is more okay than tracing another drawing.  Tracing another drawing would be like taking a photo of a photo and then claiming it's your own.  

Gah.  The lines are just so blurred here.  I think the drawing turned out great, but I feel bad for not using my usual grid method or even just eyeballing it.  I sort of feel like a phony... I wonder if any other artists that draw from pictures do the same thing or if they always use some sort of grid.