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Once upon a time my good friend, Wrenja, suggested I do an eye study and work on drawing eyes. I meant to, but, as the dates on this site indicate I got away from drawing altogether. Last update, I made a few global changes to the code and made a drastic update to the underlying site-structure because my friend Mark is difficult (and on top of that, I’m a moron.) Anyway, I needed people to double check all the pages and make sure I didn’t screw up the coding or some links, and after obliging (thanks Wren) she again suggested (read: ordered me to) do an eye study ... or else. “Your eyes are flat,” she said, “Draw lots of eyes as big as you can so you can cram in as much detail as possible.” And, hey, I have not one but two big-ass expensive sketchpads and charcoal that I have not used in six years! Heck, I even have a small neglected drawing pad just for charcoal! Since I’m breaking out the good pencils and good 9"X12" sketchpads, why not let that stuff join the party too? So, the images to the left are presented in roughly the order they were drawn. Almost all of the sketches were done with a 4H pencil and drawn from an excellent little book called Drawing the Head & Figure1. In said book, four full pages (7,8,9, and 10) are dedicated to various approaches and tips about drawing the eye. As the title implies, the book covers other aspects of drawing the head and figure, but the later illustrations also contain nice renders of eyes such as the ‘Suggested Simplification of Hair’ on page 19 and ‘Differences in Male and Female Profiles’ on page 29 (hopefully that will explain the seemingly contradictory sub-titles under the charcoal renders.) The ‘5A.M. Eyes’ are my eyes at an obscenely early hour after a night of insomnia. The original photograph (along with about a dozen others) were captured by my awesome new Canon Powershot G9 so I could see their ugly tired 5A.M. redness in all 12.1 megapixel glory (this same camera let me snap the pictures of both Charcoal drawings, btw.) Anyway, that render and its five pages worth of warm-ups kicked off the use of my Canson Sketchbook. I used to only use the expensive books just for final renders, but that led to timidness of actually using the damn thing (which showed up in the drawings I did do in them.) My new advice for starting artists: get a sketchbook and/or drawing pad and good pencils ... and just scribble in the first dozen or so pages. Find out what each and every one of your pencils can do with those scribbles—apply different amounts of pressures, try cross-hatching, try shading a smooth gradient, scribble with the pencil at different angles—find out how everything effects the line quality. Just go crazy. Then do a liberal number of warm-ups and drawing exercises in that same sketchpad. Point is: if you’re afraid of wasting money and you’re timid to draw in it ... it will show up in the renders. I think some of my best work actually wound up in drawings I didn’t care about for that very reason. Okay, I’ll get off the soap-box now. Trivia for anyone who cares: 5A.M. eyes was rendered upside-down. All the others were rendered right-side up. Lastly, the large charcoal renders. While I’m not a fan of charcoal, I do love the sheer speed that comes with it. The fragile nature of the charcoal fibers kept me from fully embracing the medium. At any rate, on the large sketchpad I did the top render first, which is actually just a larger version of an above 4H sketch shown above. The bottom render is the only profile eye I’ve done in this study (hopefully it won’t be the last). Both of these charcoal drawings combined took me less time to do than the 5A.M. eyes. Now I need to perfect my technique in getting medium shades of grey and applying fixative to the finished things. Oh, the joys of charcoal ... 1Drawing the Head & Figure by Jack Hamm. |
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