Sketching (pencil and ink) skulls from Andrew Loomis’s Drawing the Head and Hands. This seemed familiar, and as it turns out, checking through my files, I had actually tried this exercise of rebooting my drawing skills before, in early 2019, without the forcing function of “Drawing Every Day”.
In some ways, I seem to be getting better, but in others, I feel I am getting worse. I know I’m specifically optimizing for quantity over quality, and on top of that, optimizing for enforcing the habit and getting over my embarrassment over doing a good rendering – using a Sharpie if I have to – but still, some things just seem worse to me now. I know I was limited by the above to what I could carry with me (back in the days when I did this over lunch, usually out) and that I’m cheating on the above by explicitly using extra-dark lines to emphasize the outlines, which is a crutch I am trying to stop leaning on; but still, compared to my recent drawings, I feel like I was getting closer in some ways to what I want.
I skipped the hands and cartooning sketches this time through the exercises, though I may loop back to them. Nevertheless, I can see good things and bad things about my more realistic earlier renders. The renders are definitely nicer than the quick Sharpie sketches, but, for example, the eyes below are too big compared to the original, and the hair is if anything too large. Clearly, I need to keep up the practice.
Nevertheless, drawing every day.
-the Centaur
