Weekly Sketch Review | Faces & Strange clothing

Ahhhh.. A weekly sketch review. Takes me back to junior high.

To help garner success in my endeavors to magnify my skills, I will do a little “reporting” every week with sketches. With a different subject to explore every week in my drawings or paintings, I will try to become more diverse in my skill set, build on foundational skills, track progression, and just sketch more.

To kick it off. Here are some sketches, from the recent past, of face and other similar things.

I was duplicating some Disney style characters one day this week, and I thought to myself,”Will, you make too many unnecessary lines.  Too many strokes.”  (Yes, I did refer to myself in the third-person).  And after thinking this, I tried reducing the amount of lines and strokes I used in my sketching.  Sometimes really concentrating on where the line should go, and sometimes, drawing loosely for things like hair.  The concept that a only a few lines are all that is needed to get an idea across, is not new to me, but this little exercise brought that back to the forefront.

It’s interesting to see myself struggling at it for a moment.  Sometimes I had to force myself to draw a single line instead of scratching one out.  Pencil scratches are a bad habit, and something that I will work on eliminating in the future.

These two sketches were derived from random lines, and then rendered.   Hoods and heads on my mind.  Trying to keep those creative juices flowing.

This sketch is from my Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet, done in Sketchbook Pro.  Practicing African facial features. And I exaggerated the eyes and the lips for extra appeal.

For some reason drawing in red feels better to me.  Less serious than a dark pencil, and it seems to encourage me to stay loose with my lines.  I started drawing with red and blue pencils when I took some animations classes in collage.  Stuck with me since.

For next week’s sketch review.  I am going to focus on thumb nailing and placement, in relation to composition. And maybe I will play with some color theory as well.

I hope to keep these sketch reviews consistent, and as it says in the title, I want to do a post about it every week.  So, stay tuned.