2.7

Well, I’ll try to keep this blog short and simple. Excuses aside, I only did one drawing this week so I will not write a ton about it.

I ended up drawing another human figure, it took quite a long time  to draw, and to add to that the dimensions where not right at first, so I had to redraw them. I did this on my first two humans, so I figured that this time I would draw the picture, and see if the dimensions were right, then draw details. I did this, but by the time I ‘thought’ the proportions were right, I was so tired I did not realise the truth. Long story short, I drew all the details in, thought “wow this is great”, showed it to my mom, and she laughed. It turned out the legs were too short, and I redid them the next day when I could finally see that they were wacky looking. Next time I will look up human dimensions, and actually measure it out.

You may notice that she is much better than my last two people. I was able to draw actual clothes on her, that looked not skin tight, and I was able to draw her in a difficult-to-draw position. The only thing that still bugs me is her hand. When I think about it, the hand is in the right position, but something seems a bit off. If you can tell what seems wrong about it feel free to comment as to what that is.

Last but not least, there is a line right where the thigh that should be covered up by the other thigh held in a bend position. I did not forget to erase this. What actually happened was I happened to drag my pencil across the paper very hardly, coquenadedlty right where the other thigh should be. So in conclusion: no, she does not have see-through legs, I just could not erase that mark.

Anyways, drawing was a fun project for me, and good luck to all of you on your Ted Talks.

2.6

So this week I my main project was drawing the human figures; I drew a boy and a girl. They are not art by any means, but a) they actually look like a humans, and b) they do not look like motionless robots. So I’ll call it a success.

I did not use the drawing book on this. I’ve seen people draw humans with two triangles for the hips and the chest then connect them together. I also figured that it would not be much different than drawing animals.

The proportions on the girl are pretty accurate. At first I drew the knees way to low on her leg. I would say that the shins made up only about ⅛ of the entire leg. Of course, I only not noticed this after I drew her calves, her boots, and thighs. It took much extra time to have to redraw the knees higher. The other things that I had to correct was making the back of her head bigger, and making her shoulders and chest much smaller. Lucky I saw this at the beginning of the process.

As for the boy, I did not see that his chest and shoulders seemed abnormally big until I had already drawn his arms in position they are in. I also had to make one shoulder slightly smaller than the other since his shoulders are slightly turned. By time I did notice his abnormalities, it was too late- I was not going back and redrawing all of it. So take it for what you will; maybe he’s a bodybuilder.

Another challenge I encountered was drawing clothes on the people. You would be surprised to learn that it is really hard. Depending on the way their bodies are positioned, the clothes will have wrinkles in certain spots and will fall in asymmetrical positions. So I made both of them wear shorts and a skin tight tank top as these do not move very fluently. The thing I am most proud of, looking back on this project, is definitely the hands and the shoes. They are small, but very hard to draw. In both of my drawings they look very realistic. Ironically, they did not take a very long time to draw.

Lastly, I drew a picture of a tree hanging over a green lake somewhere where it is tropical. I looked off a picture online, but I drew it without as much detail as in real life. Almost like if someone looked at the scene without glasses. I drew it with these pencils that are supposed to look like watercolors. So after you draw the picture, you wet the paper and it becomes a watercolor picture.

After water was added

Before water was added

I have to say that it looks nice, but it wasn’t as pretty as I thought it would be. I can not put my finger on why that is. Maybe I just did not use enough colors.  Anyways, I probably will not use the water color pencils in any of my near-future drawing, but it was fun to experiment with them.

2.5

This week I drew another face; this time I learned from the book though. It took me through step by step instructions on how to draw each of the features and then it showed me how to shade each part in. Needless to say, this picture turned out much better than my previous drawing and I am very happy about it.

The first thing that I improved on where the eyes. The overall shape is much more realistic. I also put some eyelashes on and I made the pupils look like they were looking the same direction. In my previous drawing you would have thought that she had a lazy eye or something.

I also spend a lot more time fixing the hair and shaping the skull. In my last drawing I had just colored in two lines on either side of her face. In this one the hair flows a bit more freely. You can also see where the light and dark spots are in the hair.

Lastly, the way I colored her face took a long time . I had to make several spots slightly darker than the rest of her face to show how it is structured. I also shaded the spots that were naturally darker such as under the eyes and the lips. Unlike in my first drawing, I learned that the lips and the irises are much darker on the outside then gradually become lighter as they go in.

2.4

Last week I started on a butterfly. As mentioned in my last blog, it did not get finished in time to put it on there. Instead I'll put it on this blog.

It took a long time to do this. Like an unbelievable amount of time. The hardest part was making both sides of the butterfly symmetrical. There was so much detail in the picture I was looking off of, and I had to make sure that both sides looked the same. The color is what really makes the picture look good though. I used the oil pastels again. I made the mistake of putting the black parts down first, so when I went to put the colored parts next the black parts, I had trouble not smudging the black into the color.

Lastly, I decided to do a background. I put some petals under it- like it was sitting on a flower, then I put leaves around it. The background at first looked too waxy, like you could tell it was made with pastels, which gave it a fake look. So, I scraped it off with a blade of scissors, and found that the oil pastels had basically dyed the paper where I had drawn. I continued to scrap it all off until the background was a much lighter color. I think the background looks nice, but I am not sure if it looks better with or without it, so I put both pictures:

I have started learning how to draw faces. This week I drew my first face, hopefully by the time I am done, I will be able to see if I have improved. It turned out pretty good. I really liked the way the coloring turned out since I was able to see which parts of the face were darker than the other parts, then made them blend nicely together. Most of the facial features are also symmetrical and realistic- especially the nose and the lips. However, you may notice the eyes are slightly asymmetrical. If you think they are bad now, you should have seen them before I worked on them. At first I forgot to make it look like part of the eyelids were closed, so it looked like it just saw a ghost or something. It took me quite a while to fix that issue.

Last, but not least, I drew a wolf. I looked at a picture on the internet of a wolf running and I thought it was really cool, so I decided to try and draw it. It was pretty simple to draw. After all, I have started to get the hang of drawing animals. The only thing that challenged me was drawing the head, but it eventually turned out fine. When I was done, I sketched it in really roughly; you can definitely see the strokes of my pencil. It is a bit different from how I shaded in my other animals, but I like it; it captures the spirit of the animal.

Blog 2.3

This week I decided to draw some insects- so far I have drawn a bee. Honestly, I have to say I did not enjoy drawing it. It took forever to draw (about two hours) and in the end it did not turn out to be the best.

I started the picture by looking out of the book, then when I decided the book did not have enough detailed instructions, I turned to google images, and proceeded to looking off a picture. The proportions of the bee turned out fine, but the way I colored in the fluffy body made it look like a five year old drew it- sorry for the lack of a better description.

On a positive note, the wings turned out to be pretty good looking. First I made very thin lines that branched out from the body. Then I made the shading darker on the edges then gradually got lighter as I went in. It surprisingly turned out to look pretty realistic.

Before I drew my main picture, I drew a prototype one, basically to see if I could improve. This one was with no instruction from the book, and I will be honest, it only took me about 10-15 min.  The second picture defiantly looks better from the first though.

I also started on a butterfly on Wednesday night. I worked on it for about an hour then, and tonight I worked on it for about two hours.  Even so, it is safe to say that I am not even half way done with it. I was hoping to put it on this blog, but I guess I will have to wait tell next week's. So far, my butterfly looks pretty good, I just hope I can color it in in a way that shows off its beauty.

Blog 2.2

I had planned this week to start learning how to draw insects from one of the books I have. However, this Saturday I sat down and just started drawing tree- I am not sure what inspired me to do so, but I ended up coming out with a pretty nice picture:

It took probably about 3 to 4 hours to make, but I enjoyed doing it so it did not seem like to long. I started out making two trees, one of them a bit further away than the other. I was going to color it with colored pencils but I did not have enough black, so instead I used oil pastels. It turned out to be much better than pencils since it made the trees look very dark. For the bottom part, I took a chunk of the oil pastel and dragged it across the paper a few times. I did not push very hard, hence the speckled black and white texture.

 I was originally going to make the background (the sky behind the trees) with sunset or twilight colors. So either a mixture of blue and green; or a mixture of orange and red. However, as I neared the end, I decided that the background would look much better if I made it with the same colors as the rest of the picture. I smudged the oil across my fingers then smeared it across the page, this way it almost looked like fog.

For my second picture I decided to keep on the subject of plants. I looked up ‘flowers’ on google search. I came across a beautiful flower called a lotus. Here is the picture I that I was trying to make it look like:

I started out drawing the shape of the petal furthest away then I filled in all the other petals from there. I then colored the rest in with colored pencil. Here is the end product:

Overall,  I think that it turned out good. The leaves in the back found look slightly wonky or unrealistic, but my flower look nice. My only complaint is that my camera seemed to wash out a lot of the color.

If I have time at the end of my product I will come back to drawing plants because I enjoyed this very much. I will also try to incorporate oil pastels into my future drawings.

Blog 2.1

I started off this week learning to draw a lions - more specifically a male lion and a female lion. To show if I could progress, I started out by trying to draw the lions with no instruction from the book or the internet. I simply picked several images offline, and tried to copy them. As expected, I did not even know where to start drawing it. You can see below, they did not turn out great, but I wasn't expecting anything different. Also, I worked on for them each for about 15- 20 min. before giving up, and moving on to the actual project.

For the male lion I completely looked out of the book. I first drew circles for the bottom and the chest, then circles for where the knees are. Originally, I drew two circles for the head. After I drew the basic shape of everything, I realized that the lions head was wonky looking, so I went online and looked up some pictures on the internet. I managed to make his head look much better, but it took some time. When it came to shading, I drew his mane with large stokes so it looked like
long hair. For the body I shaded in the area, adding more pressure to where the dark or muscly parts were. I rubbed/ smeared the lead so it looked more fluent and natural instead of seeing the scratch marks of the pencil. I was surprised how much more realistic and better the drawing looked after I had applied shading to it.

     I also mainly looked out of the book when learning how to draw the female lion. I learned that the main point of using circles as starting points is to get the proportions right. At first I drew the body then looked up online how to draw the head (the book did not describe how to do this well enough) only to realize that the head was too far apart from the rest of the body! Not wanting to redraw the head, I erased the body and redrew it with the right proportions. Again, I shaded in the lion and smeared the lead with my finger. I was very happy when I finished this lion because I think it looked much better than the previous one.

Lastly, I decided to draw a deer. This time I had understood the overall idea of how to draw an animal- mostly by putting circles proportional to each other then connecting them with lines. So instead of learning from the book, I tried to copy a picture that I found off of google images. I picked the first deer that was on the page. Overall, I had no problems drawing the body. However, the face was pretty tricky. The head was slightly turned so at first I thought I should draw a lopsided circle to make the face look larger on one side. This was ultimately a mistake, and I found that I had to simply draw a regular circle then position the eyes in the appropriate places to make it seem like the face was bigger on one side. I then completely erased the lines on the  side of the face the faces the body, and I shaded the part where the neck reaches the face. This way there is no definite place where the face ended. I think I did pretty good on drawing this deer. My big mistake though, now that I look at the picture, is that the body seems a bit too long.

For this next week I will either continue learning how to draw animals, learn how to draw insects, or learn how to draw plants- I have not decided yet.