March Sketchbook - Week 3 (Patreon)

March 15th - Another background study, this one of a rainy street. I struggle so much with environments, especially cities and interiors, so this was an attempt at a foggy, rainy city. I don't hate it, I don't love it, but it's useful practice :P

March 16th - After my struggle with shoes, I decided to do foot studies (which brought me to the part of Deviantart where I felt distinctly like the 'stock photos' were for more than just drawing reference) but I digress, useful for anatomical studies. It's not frequently I need to draw feet, but when I do, I struggle every. Single. Time. So these studies aimed to help in that regard by studying different poses and angles. While imperfect, it does still help as a brain teaser trying to workout the structural forms without getting too bogged down in detail.

March 17th - To follow up the feet, I went with animal paws, specifically dogs. The weird part about anatomy is that it's weirdly transferrable from human to animal study, because the bones and muscles and tendons are all...pretty much the same, just aligned and proportioned differently. Again, I went with different angles, and tried to get some puppies in too because their proportions are different.

March 18th - Bird studies! I love birds, and drawing birds is fun, because wings. So I went through a bunch of saved posts on instagram and drew the different birds in flight. Because all the wingies are different shapes and that's neat.

March 19th - A follow on with another bird, but this time a lighting study. Was interested to draw a cockatoo when, though the feathers are white, the lighting cast a lot of different colours in the shadows and light. I'm not thrilled with it and wish I'd done it on the desktop with SAI, because colouring on the iPad is a nightmare (the colours look totally different between that screen and desktop). It was good practice but infuriating.

March 20th - By the weekend I was running out of gas, so decided to do a bunch of random portraits for facial variety. I drew them from my head and didn't use refs this time, just went with the flow, trying to fill up the space available. I put some effort into line weight variety as well.

March 21st - I've been hitting the bottom of the barrel energy wise, so on Sunday I did this doodle and quit out after that. I was too exhausted to do more because a hiccup in the drafting of my novel threw me for a creative loop and left me feeling pretty daunted by all the work I had ahead of me. So I took it out on Rowan and Briar by doing this doodle.

While I'm still really enjoying these exercises, I'm starting to think that one every single day might be a push in the future. Maybe one week of the month I do things like this? It might be more sustainable that way. I tend to work best in short bursts of major productivity so working around that tendency might be best. It would give me time in between to gather reference or subjects I wanted to draw. ^_^* This week is the last full one, so onwards from here!