July 15th: A New Way to Portrait

My father has given me a fantastic early birthday present.   It's a projector! 

Oh but not just any projector.  Now when people give me the smallest pictures ever (like wallets...) and want a painting or drawing done, I slide it under this ridiculous thing and bam!  I can make it as big as I need to see the details of the picture without taking it to kinkos to blow it up.  Gah!  So awesome!  Also, no more gridding unless I want to for some weird ass reason.  I can mark where the proportions of eyes, noses, chins are.  Tracing?  A little.  Helpful?  Absolutely.  My project now is to draw an older picture of my grandpa.  Here's the projected image from a 3x4 picture onto a 10x12 paper.

If any doubt remains of my artistic abilities, I really only did trace enough to get the proportions right. 

As you can see, there's a freaking ton of stuff to still pencil in.  This drawing will eventually be color which is a challenge for me for sure.  I don't often do color drawings because colored pencils aren't my forte.  Honestly, I'd rather paint.  It's hard to get the right shades and things with colored pencils, but this is for my papa so I'll do my best!

July 14th: Finished Iron Man

So I actually have been done with this drawing for a while now, but I didn't have access to anything other than my phone so... I couldn't exactly post it.  I got it done though!  Yay!  It took forever.  I actually ended up finishing it a few days after father's day, but it's all good.  My came to visit and it gave me some time to stall.  Luckily for me, once I got down to the bottom, details became less and it was a lot faster.  

I'm actually really proud of this drawing because the grid method worked well (which it never seems to do) and I wasn't afraid to really get in there and make the dark areas pretty dark.  I think that the shading is excellent and shows the different textures of the metals.  I decided ultimately to leave it black and white.  Not just due to time constraints, but because I really feared it would mess things up.  I think that in the future I'm going to do a practice drawing using graphite and a little color just to see how it behaves and whether it's something I'll want to do later on. 

 After I completed Mr. Stark, I did the background which, unfortunately, I'm an idiot and got no pictures of.  I smudged all around him with a tissue that was rubbed in graphite.  Using quick wiping motions, I got a smoky effect just like in the picture I was referencing.  Then using my kneaded eraser I blotted areas unevenly giving the background a sort of ethereal feel.  Added some shadows around the feet and lines where the cracks in the ground should be and bam!  Complete.  It makes me smile and my father loved it.