Trying a continued focus on the shape of faces and position of eyes. I think it's getting better, though the tilt of the face is off a bit; at least it is decently proportioned and the eyes aren't all over the place.
This is the last of the Porsche character sheets in this series, and I'm going to dive in to finishing the hands and feet Goldman book before switching gears to faces. Still, this exercise turned out not too bad ... and I am now seven days ahead on drawing every day AND scheduling them for posting.
Drawing every day, on average, posting as far ahead as I can.
Next up: editing work on SPECTRAL IRON, Dakota Frost #7!
In theory I should be writing tonight, but I'm so close to being a week ahead on drawing (meaning, tomorrow I can fully coast if I want to) that I feel like I should just power on through. More Goldman studies of how the hand flexes towards the radius or ulna.
Drawing every day, with a buffer; posting in advance when I can.
Another study of a Midjourney-generated character sheet for Porsche the Centaur. (All of these similar-looking ones were generated using variations of a similar prompt; they never got much better, but they're good variations on a theme). Overall, getting better on the eye placement, now that I'm focusing on it; also the head to hair ratio is better but not great; also the shoulderpads are high or the chin is low ...
Drawing more or less every day; posting as regularly as I can.
SO! I am still chasing down places in my life where I have been “letting things pile up” and, as a consequence, causing myself stress down the road when I have to clean it up. And I found yet another one - tied in with my drawing / blogging projects.
I have a tremendous complexity tolerance compared to some of the people I’ve worked with, to the point that I’ve been repeatedly told that I need to focus the information that I’m presenting in a way that more clearly gets to the point.
But when piled complexity passes even my tolerance level, I get EXTREMELY stressed out. I knew I got stressed from time to time, but as part of examining my behavior and mental states looking for triggers - inspired by Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism - I zeroed in on dealing with the piles as the actual problem.
Online files aren’t quite as bad - I think it is the actual physical piles that become intimidating, though I think any task too big for my brain to wrap around all the things that need to be done, like editing a novel, may cause the same problem - and so, as part of working on Drawing Every Day, I decided to clean up those files.
I already had a good system for this, broken down by day and year … which I was not using. Now, in theory, you could throw all these files into a bin and forget about it, or even delete them, but I hope to use my files for a deep learning project, so it will likely benefit me to categorize the files as I go.
But, as part of trying to “get ahead”, I’d been working fast, letting the files pile up. This, I realized, easily could turn into one of those aversive pile situations, so I dug in today and fixed it. As a result, I didn’t get to all the things I wanted to get to over lunch.
For decades I’ve had the habit eat-read-write, and my weekend lunches and brunches are a particularly precious writing / coding / thinking time for me. I gets a sad when I don’t get to fully use that time, as today where I spent time on cleanup and I have remote meetings with my friends and my small press in the afternoon.
But this work has to get done sometime, or it won’t get done. And for this project, my collected files for Drawing Every Day will become useless if they aren’t organized - not just for the hypothetical deep learning project, but also for me, in reviewing my own work purely artistically to decide where I should put my learning effort next.
For me, I’ve had to learn not to be so hard on myself. By many metrics, I get a lot done; by other metrics, I feel unproductive, disorganized, even outright lazy. But the truth is that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be put in to make progress.
I’ve been trying to teach myself game development since, hell, the early 2000’s. Most of the time, other than a little side effort on interactive fiction, I didn’t make any progress at this, because it was always more important to code for work, to draw, and then, after I got my drawing laptop stolen and got a novel contract not too far apart, to write.
After I got laid off, I decided, “now’s the time! I’m going to do games!” Of course, that didn’t happen: I and my research collaborators had a major paper in flight, a workshop to plan, and I had to launch a consulting business - all while still writing. While I did read up on game development, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, no coding got done.
But most of your learning is on the plateau: you don’t appear to be making progress, but you’re building the tools you’ll need to progress when you’re ready. So all the work I’ve been doing on consulting and for the research projects is looping back around, and I’ve used what I learned to start not one but three tiny games projects.
It’s not likely that I’ll release any of these - at this point, I am just futzing around trying to teach myself - but it is striking to me how much we can accomplish if we put in continual effort over a long period of time and don’t give up.
I can’t tell you how many people over the years have told me “well, if you haven’t seen progress on something in six months, you should quit” or “if you haven’t worked on something in two years, you should get rid of it”. I mean, what? This is terrible advice.
If you want to be productive, don’t take advice from unproductive people. Productive writers and artists typically have apprenticeships lasting anywhere from a year to a decade. It can take years of work to become an overnight success.
And many of the steps leading to that success are unglamorous, tiresome, unsexy scutwork, like organizing your files so you know what you have, or reviewing them so you can decide the next learning project you need to take on to master a skill.
The work has to be done sometime. Best get on with it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the Drawing Every Day project files, post-cleanup and organization. There’s still a bin of files that need to be filed, but they’re a very contained bin, compared to the mess there was before. Also, a picture of this essay being composed, at my precious Saturday lunch-read-and-write.
Reviewing my past art, I noticed that mis-aligned and mis-spaced eyes, and generally poorly placed and scaled faces, were a problem. So I tried to focus on that problem this time, and ... it didn't turn out bad.
As usual, it's Porsche the Centaur, via a Midjourney character sheet, again. Though her hair is WAY too huge ... I guess I really do romanticize big hair.
More Goldman studies, featuring an early prototype of the One Ring that just made the wearer's flesh invisible, an effect Sauron is reported to have described as "too creepy, even for me."
Drawing on average every day, posting every day that I can.
So, the root bones of the hand - the carpals - are mostly stuck together and can be thought of as a half-moon shape. But it is the act of dis-assembling the hand, breaking it into its component parts, identifying them, and grouping them, that really enables this act of re-integration. From 2 days ago:
It's all starting to come together. Drawing (on average) every day.
Another drawing of Porsche from a generative AI character sheet (I think this one was from ChatGPT+DALL-E, which seems to be a bit better than Midjourney at taking art direction and creating centaurs). I modified the face to more closely match Porsche, whose ears are located more closely to a normal human's ears.
I've started to build up a buffer, like I am for the Blogging Every Day series, by trying to do two drawings at every sitting. I can't manage to draw for an hour and a half every single day, but if I do it most days, then I slowly creep ahead, and can put more effort and thought into each drawing.
According to my spreadsheet, I'm now about six drawings ahead, drawing-wise, and two posts ahead, posting-wise. Maybe I can take some time to, you know, write about these characters now.
And, it turns out, there's a handy mnemonic to remember all those bones: Sally Left The Party To Take Cathy Home. If only I remembered the names of the bones that the letters SLTPTTCH corresponded to ...
So apparently fingers look longer from the back of the hand (dorsal side), where the webbing between the fingers is lower than the joins of the fingers themselves, and the palm looks longer from the front of the hand (palmar side), because the webbing obscures the roots of the fingers. Who knew?
Quick sketch of a young woman with GREAT hair - I'd say almost Cinnamon-style hair, if there hadn't been a woman with almost EXACTLY Cinnamon's bi-colored hairstyle at the same Barnes and Noble about a week ago - whom I decided to sketch after finishing my last drawing.
She moved too fast through the store to get a really good picture, and from where I was sitting it was hard to see what she was looking at, but I think you've got to go beyond just drawing from practice books and start drawing from life, or you're just regurgitating other people's drawings, like an AI.
And I like AI, but regurgitating other people's drawings is NOT why I am drawing every day.
Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for sharing this mnemonic for understanding the lengths of the parts of the hand. This has helped me more than anything I can think of to understand how the hand works and how to draw it. Knowing that the length of the fingers is half the length of the hand - and that the knuckles of the middle finger are half that, and half that again - has taught me more about the hand than anything I can think of.
Also, and not explicitly said in your breakdown - but something anyone can confirm, by placing one hand over the other at a 90 degree angle, or placing the middle finger over the back of the opposite palm - your diagram taught me that the WIDTH of the hand is half the LENGTH of the hand. This has been equally useful in setting proportions so, again, Mr. Goldman ... thank you.
Me drawing from yet another Midjourney character sheet for Porsche. Misproportioned, and I am still having trouble on the eye placement and face proportions, something I've seen on a fair number of old drawings; once I finish the hands and feet book I think it's probably time to go back to practicing faces.
This certainly is rendered better, but if you look closely at the edges of the hair, especially where it meets the armor, it doesn't make too much sense. Oh well, it's still inspirational.
