What About Bob?

This was Bob (face #93). 

He was walking through the office with his brown-bagged lunch, when he was suddenly aware that he was in a land of giants...One of the devices used to show depth in a painting/illustration, is vertical placement. So through the magic of Photoshop, I moved Bob up to where he belonged so he would no longer be in a land of giants. The illusion of distance/depth has been achieved. I played some more,and changed the scale of Bob, but didn't post the pics here.In the end, Bob was erased. In the end, Bob was replaced...by a departure gate at an airport! 

A couple of ink drawings are up next...

Face #94

Face #95

 Next, some pastel paintings...

Face #96

Face #97

Face #98

Face #99

And last, but not least, a pencil drawing in progress...It is 18" by 24" , so I couldn't scan it. Sorry for the low quality of the pic...But you can still double click to zoom in for a better look!

Face #100

I can't believe I am a tenth of the way to my goal!!!!

Pears, Pink lemonade, And Such

These first two pieces are done in soft pastel...

Face #82

Face#83

The next three are done in colored pencil. Colored pencil, while it doesn't have the richness of soft pastels, or paint, is still an excellent choice for illustration.

Face #84 (the shirt is actually done with marker)

Face #85 (a layered colored pencil technique)

Face #86

A close-up of face #86. Even though it doesn't appear to be too complex at first glance, there is a lot of shading. The skin tones of the face are done in about seven different colors of pencil. Conversely, the pear is done with only one colored pencil (except for the stem), and the varying shades of green are achieved through different amounts of pressure on the pencil. The next faces are done in ink. Ink tends to be very edgy on its own, without the need for a lot of color to mute that effect. There are people in the comic book industry who do nothing but the inking!

Face #87, #88, #89 (double click on image to read text)

Face #90

Lastly, two more faces done in pencil. Pencil is the most immediate of any drawing tool I use; just grab and go. Also, whether it's an ink drawing, a pastel or acrylic painting, or a colored pencil illustration...they all start with a sketch in pencil.

Face#91

Face #92

Hope everyone reading had a nice Thanksgiving! I sure did!

So Many People, So Little Time...

With so many faces to do, I'm not able to do them all in color. I have really wanted to increase the amount of them done in color, though. But where it's Thanksgiving week, it wasn't going to happen for this post. I will shoot for more next time!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Face #69

A close-up...

Face #70

Face #71 and Face #72

Face #73, Face #74, Face #75

Face #76

Face #77, Face #78, Face #79

Face # 80

Face #81

Faces 58-68

Last weekend, I got a day ahead on my "3 faces a day", and was able to take Monday off from drawing.I am not so sure I would try that again because I came back feeling rusty and demotivated on Tuesday. Yesterday, I dove right into face #58, without any warm up or hesitation. A lot of these faces in this particular post have an exaggerated quality, face #61 especially. I tried to be diverse, knowing I have so many faces left to do to reach my goal! But it is encouraging to have even come this far.

 Face # 58

Face #59

Face #60

Face # 61

Face #62 and face #63

Face #64

Face # 65

Face #66 and face #67

Face # 68

I hope everyone has a good weekend!

Character-Driven

This first face, face #48, is actually shown cropped here and is part of a larger piece I just started. It is done in pastel on toned pastel paper, although from the picture you can't see the subtle coloring of the paper itself.

These next two pastel faces were kind of done in a hurry...

Face #49

Face #50

And a bunch of pencil sketches follow. I photographed these instead of scanning them, which I sometimes do. The program for my scanner takes a long time to load, as the scanning itself does sometimes. So it is just easier to whip out a camera, point, shoot, then crop the image accordingly.

Face#51

Face #52

Face #53

Face #54

Face #55

Face #56, and Face #57

I'm up to fifty seven faces! At fifty, I was one twentieth of the way to reaching my goal! Thanks for sticking around.

Surface Does Matter

Even a lowly pencil sketch gets elevated in quality on this toned paper intended for pastels. I even broke out the blending stumps for these first two.

Face # 43

Face # 44

But these next three are done on some really low quality sketch paper....

Face #45

Face #46

And a low quality sketch paper for pencil renderings, for the most part, is fine. I was pleased with the way this little girl at the beach turned out, except after drawing it I realized her head was slightly out of proportion. I erased it, but when I went back in to add in the delicate facial features I had an inconsistent grain of the paper due to the erasure. It was impossible to render the face as finely as I wanted to, some areas filling with an uneven amount of lead because of the damaged surface.

Face #47

Of all these drawings, the girl at the beach is most likely the one I would want to do on a larger scale, and in color. I will be sure to take care in the surface I choose!