Candle Girl: Long-term Photoshop Practice

I started this piece as an exercise in realism and color months and months ago. I was planning on it being a rather lengthy project but I forgot about it after a while. I remembered it and finished it up in the last couple of days, so here it is!

This isn't a piece which is meant to strengthen my creativity or anything. I was strictly replicating a photo reference. I used the eyedropper tool to get the exact colors from the photo and putting them on my drawing so while I wasn't creatively coming up with color choices I was able to see and acknowledge the many different shades. Who knew there were so many shades in one cheek or shoulder?! :) So I think it was still pretty helpful. And fun!

I also did a "Step-by-step" thing as I went in case any of you would like to see that. (I also did it just because I thought it was interesting for my own benefit, but I will share it with you :) )

Figure Drawing: Week Ten

This week we worked on legs a bit more and then moved onto... FEET. Faces are hard and hands are quite hard-- but feet have always been my nemesis. Thank goodness my teacher is so awesome at explaining anatomy and such! There were a couple feet drawings that I thought turned out decently (much to my surprise) so it wasn't completely aggravating! :D

As I predicted, female legs were much harder to draw.

I feel like one of my most successful feet I drew was the one I did for this pose where we were just drawing legs. We hadn't even talked about feet at this point! C'est la vie!

(I got tired of gestures so I drew just legs for two poses-- male legs are just so much easier so it made me feel better about myself haha)

And... here we go.

What a difficult perspective this was! Feet just don't look like feet when you are looking at them straight-on in this position.

(Sorry this picture didn't turn out very well-- graphite on newsprint doesn't like being photographed)

Figure Drawing: Week Nine

This week we focused on LEGS! I always thought I hated legs. But one awesome anatomy lesson and demo by my awesome teacher later... I have discovered that legs are super cool! And I like drawing them quite a bit. Although, maybe I was just getting it easy since our model was a guy with very lean, easy-to-see muscles. I'll tell you if I still like drawing legs as much once we have a female model. :)

Also, I was having a pretty good gesture day so I am actually putting quite a few gestures up here this time!

(It's a good thing we were focusing on and drawing nothing but legs for most of the class period because I realized that I was giving pretty much no thought to the legs in my gestures haha)

Disembodied legs are weird looking, but this pose I think looks the funniest with just the legs.

Figure Drawing: Week Seven and Eight

So last week we only had one day of class and that was only about an hour long because there was a guest artist demo at the same time. So since I only drew like one thing I waited until this week to make a new post.

We were focusing on hands the past couple of classes! Hands are great fun and really difficult so it has been good studying them specifically. Also I just discovered using white nupastel to make my drawings two-toned. I am still experimenting with it and trying to figure out the best way to use it but I like it pretty well. I enjoy trying new things with my art!

The proportions ended up being pretty awful but since this is the one where I first started trying the white nupastel I thought I would share it anyway.

Interlaced fingers are the weirdest looking. SO MANY FINGERS!