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.  

June 12th: Graphite Iron Man

Procrastinating is bad.  Especially when Father's Day is getting so damn close.  I'm getting there though.  The first thing I'd like to share today is the fact that you can never, ever wash your artist chamois.  There was an incident with a cup of coffee and... well... I tried to wash it and it ended up a crumpled mess of useless.  So now I'm gonna have to go out and get another.  Sad face.  In the meantime, I'm stuck shading big areas with my old fall back, tissue.  

Ok so basically, same old, same old.  I really do like Iron Man's suit.  Even though it's made out of pieces of metal, the light play on each piece is awesome.  There are little reflections bouncing off everywhere.  This really gives me an opportunity to play around a little with metallic textures and finishes.  

Basically, when I see a lighter area, I make sure I outline it with a really light pencil.  That way if I find myself getting all shade happy, I don't go over the brightest spots.  A kneaded eraser can only pull out so much graphite.  If it's too dark, forget it.  I do think that the very best tool in my arsenal is my kneaded eraser.  It just pulls out the smallest bits of light.  A regular eraser would screw the whole thing up and erase way too big of a spot.  

There was a fair amount of fudging as far as around his helmet and mid-section.  I had to print out a version to take with me and draw from and the quality wasn't all that great.  So I guessed.  I think despite the fudging, it still looks pretty decent.  When it comes to things that aren't faces, I can fudge and get away with it.  Over the next 2 days, I'll be hauling as much ass on this thing as I possibly can.  

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!