Timing and Spacing

This weekend I was watching the Directors Cut of "Kingdom of Heaven". After I finished, I thought I'd watch the film again with the sound off to pay attention to some of the visuals. As I was doing this, I did a couple of pages of some storyboard style sketches of the frames.

These were a lot more time-consuming than I thought. I draw pretty slow, but each page took me about 45 minutes. I only got about eight minutes into the movie.

Here's the first page:

I like the way a few of these turned out. The opening shot with the horses, the cross and the priest. I like the shot of the priest looking over his shoulder the least. Faces and portraiture are just hard.

Posted by David at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was rummaging through the room we call "the library". It's basically one of the two rooms where I keep all my junk (the other being "the office"). I stumbled across this old drawing I did at a SAFA "Drawing Jam" several years ago. It's one I had forgotten I had done and I was amazed to see it.

I'm not normally into portraiture, but I thought then and think now that this turned out pretty well. Of course, I can see a ton of little things that I know aren't right, but I still really like the overall effect.

Posted by David at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm preparing to rig one of the models I have using a muscle/skinning plugin and cloth.

In getting ready for that, I've been doing some muscle studies.

Posted by David at 04:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was looking for a new sketchbook to work in and found one that I started using two years or so ago and abandoned (for no particular reason, I'm sure).

I think I did these in about twenty minutes. As you can see, I didn't have the fingers and toes thing down back then either. I tried in the second drawing (I probably had a little extra time).

All these were done in pencil. Again, some of the scans are chopped off at the feet. These are in an 11x14 sketchbook, and it doesn't really fit onto my scanner very well. I guess I should look into some stitching software.

With this one, I was trying to be a little looser.

Unfortunately, I think I've probably backslid a little; I'm not sure I could do these today. Better get to some life drawing this week.

Posted by David at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of my drawings from today. First, are some five minute warmups. Afterwards, I look at these and wonder where the five minutes went. I look at how few lines I've drawn and realize how slowly I draw. I had to bump up the contrast on all these to make them more visible. They were all done in an HB or an F pencil and they're pretty light. Also, I had to chop some of them off at the feet when I scanned them; they were done on a 14" by 20" pad and are a little large for my scanner.

Now we have a fifteen minute drawing.

And finally a twenty minute.

I really try and adhere to a three stage drawing process. First, draw the gesture. You can make out some of my gesture lines inside the "final" drawing. Second, draw the shapes. Finally, draw the features i.e. the muscles. I must admit, I tend to blend these last two stages much more than I should.

I should focus some of my time on just getting the shapes and orientations in place. I'll work on this and then post some of those. As an aside, I was thinking that when I sketch on the tablet, I can use a separate layer in Painter for each of the stages. It'll be interesting to try that and see how it works. Maybe it will force me to separate the stages a little better. More likely I'll just end up with muscles drawn in the shapes layer...

Posted by David at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've done a lot more figure drawing over the last few weeks than I've done in the last two years. I used to maintain a list of all the drop-in figure studio sessions that I knew about here in Seattle. I've updated the list, and put it up into Google calendar. If you want to see what sessions are running, check here.

I've got both the Summer and Fall quarters at SAFA/Gage Academy entered in. I've got contact information for all of them. I'll try and keep the info up to date, but if you plan on going for the first time (or after long hiatus), call the organizer first and verify the session is still on.

Let me know if you know of others or there needs to be a correction made.

Posted by David at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a few five minute life drawing sketches I did with the tablet.

I'm still having difficulty with my line widths and drawing too dark, but I have that problem with pencil and paper, so... there you are.

I'm also still getting my tools setup and accessible. I've got a custom palette with scripts that will create portrait and landscape paper and useful drawing tools, but saving is still a pain. I need to get some colors quickly selectable (and then figure out what the settings are to match conte crayons). I'd love an script that creates a directory with todays date and saves each drawing with a sequential number (if that's even possible).

Posted by David at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)