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.