It’s been a while since I posted any artwork. I’ve been busy with a couple other side projects that I haven’t been able to post yet. Once they’re published, I’ll post them on this site.
My sister asked me to do another drawing of her friends. I guess art majors are hard to come by at a liberal arts college, :P. (They ‘d probably do a better job too!) Below is the result of my chicken scratch. At first I wanted to do a pencil sketch with flat color. Then I wanted to do a silly sketch with shaded painting. Then I wanted to do a more shaded painting without lines. Then I realized that it was 3:00 AM, my wrist was sore, and eyes were feelin’ buggy.
Anyways, this was the reference photo of two brothers…
Hmmm…
I can’t say I’m entirely happy with it since I started out with cartoon lines and tried to jam them back into realism which made this pseudo-caricature that looks awkward: the proportions aren’t crazy way off base like a caricature, nor are they tight and accurate like a Bargue drawing. It just makes the whole thing look kind of silly. The colors are ok, but they seem a little on the bland side and should have more red in them. At least one encouraging thing was that it didn’t take me as long as other drawings: 3 1/2 hours from pencil to final, but the quality still suffered.
Of course, me being a perfectionist, I get super-bugged when I notice stuff like this…
…which probably means I’ve been up too late and need to get to bed.
That’s pretty good for 3.5 hours! Portraits are hard. I struggle with the same things you do when I do them. I start out cartoony-ish, then when I color I want too much accuracy/realism and then the whole thing just looks weird.