22 April, 2020;
Vail AZ
More landscaping is happening . . .
Still in demo mode, and doing the hardscaping. Two mesquite trees are leaving today (one was in bad shape and the other too close to the house - never fear, I have dozens! A raised planter area will hopefully get done today as well as the rest of the rock work and some land clearing on the east side of the house.
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| Goodbye old tree. |
I'm taking a portrait class from Sktchy.com
Sktchy.com has a bunch of great classes and community for online learning. I signed up for '30 faces in 30 days'. There's a tutorial and then I download a reference photo and draw it keeping the tutorial tips in mind.
Here are a few from this last week.
The tip for this first one was to warm up and learn about your model by doing 5, 10, and 15 minute sketches. You get a better likeness this way as well as working out values and other decisions you might want to make in the final drawing. I can see that on the first two on the right, there was quite a bit of distortion (a problem when you're working flat). I like the top left one the best; I think the 15 minute sketch on the bottom left got too heavy and dark.
The tip here was to block in the major values early on and to put something in the background to ground the figure.
The goal here was to very quickly draw in the face using a modified contour approach - almost a doodle. This resulted in an overall looser drawing and I mostly like it. I used a water soluable ink and then applied a water brush for the shadows - not too happy with the result because the shadows got way too dark too fast.
The tip here was to fully develop the focal points (the two faces) while leaving less important places pretty sketchy. This was hard for me but I'm pretty pleased with it - could have used less detail on her right arm.
This profile gave me the opportunity to focus on the structure of her ear (ears are notoriously difficult to understand) and to practice doing hair as shapes and masses instead of individual hairs.
That's all for now - better go check on the landscaping team - make sure all that rock is going in the right places!
