Marigo Art blog

[marigodraws]

Starting to feel used to the new brush pressure.
Still just doing whatever studies I find easy and comfortable so I'm capable of focusing on adapting instead.

[marigodraws]

In my quest to become used to my new brush pressure I have gotten really into doing portraits.
I used to focus really hard on one thing at a time, just grinding away at value studies or anatomy for a month at a time.
Right now I'm really just enjoying taking "side trips" to study whatever infatuates me in the moment.
I should probably do some more finished pieces of art, but there are so many things to explore, and polishing things for hours feels like wasted time when I could be exploring more.

Am I wrong in thinking that i learn more by not polishing things fully and just focus on each study until it reaches a stage where I feel like I've captured the essence of what I was looking to do?

(old still life studies from June. I did 3-4 of these a day for 3 weeks straight until i started feeling insane from it)

[marigodraws]

Still just doing head studies at the moment. There are so many different types of heads to explore!
Mostly just trying to separate the form into light and shadow since it feels like it holds the most information.
These take around 40-60 minutes so it is definitely not fast, but I'm spending a lot of time just trying to gauge the planes and values.

In terms of gestures things are progressing slowly but i´m having trouble separating overlapping forms (and I kinda feel like I tend to over-abuse wrapping lines to show direction instead of capturing it in the general flow)

[creARTive_Paul]

hi there ... if u want to construct humans on ur own the books of Andrew Loomis helped out many artists before

[marigodraws]

Thanks for the recommendation.

I read "drawing the head and hands" by Andrew Loomis a few months ago but I din't fully grasp most of it at the time.
I'm definitely thinking of going back to reread it now that I have more of a grasp of some of the fundamentals.
Are there any of his other books you would recommend?

(Still just doing studies from photographs since I don't feel confident enough to study without reference at the moment. Tried giving them a bit more polish today)

[marigodraws]

No major updates today.
Just reading Loomis and trying to take notes.

I tried doing some studies and after feeling frustrated about one of them i decided to just experiment with it using a textured brush.
The anatomy is way off but i sorta ended up liking the feel of it.

[creARTive_Paul]

hi ... when i'm wright the other two books are "successful drawing" and "figure drawing", both covering the fundamentals ... David Finch showed his way of using the head method in one of his youtube videos ... it was quite easy to understand, probably easier than Loomis texts tho

[marigodraws]

Thanks a lot. I´ll be sure to check out those books as well.
David finch also looks very interesting, i'll be adding him to my list of things to watch during lunch

---

I got through "Drawing the Head and Hands" by Loomis and started trying to re-enforce the structures of the planes of the head by doing trace overs on photographs.
Definitely feels like I could use it.

I'm using Marco Bucci's "Understanding and Painting the Head" video course to go over individual parts of the head whenever I have questions about something specific.
I find it quite nice as a supplement to Loomis's book since each part of the head is split up into 30m videos with live examples on how to paint the planes.

(I din't have that much time to draw today since I had to read so much will continue tomorrow)

[marigodraws]

Continuing the grind to reinforce the planes of the head.
Struggling a bit with the chin & complexity of the areas around the eyes.

[marigodraws]

Still studying the head and reading up on everything I can.
I've been having fun trying to capture likeness of some more recognizable faces.

Mainly having trouble keeping proportions and distances between the planes which causes the faces to have resemblance but look off.

This took around 2 hours (Still feeling pretty slow)

[marigodraws]

In my quest to try and get better at drawing faces I've been experimenting with breaking down famous faces into simple shapes.
I feels like the simple structures of the face holds the secret to creating good faces (and achieving likeness)
I don't care too much about achieving likeness but it bothers me that I'm not capable of doing it well

Here is Emma Watson (which once again shows that I have trouble with proportions and spacing I need to get better at planning out the face and measuring before i start)

[marigodraws]

Still just doing basic 20m studies and trying to get the essence of the faces down.
Starting to feel that I'm becoming a bit stagnant in my studies so I'll probably be changing my focus to revitalize my energy.

Definitely feels like I've picked up a bunch of smaller knowledge bombs in the past week that are helping me create faces better/faster.

[marigodraws]

Been sick so I decided to let the pen rest until I got better.

Currently trying to gauge what I should be working on next. Mainly just experimenting with different drawings to see where I feel uncomfortable and what i have issues drawing.
I'm moderately satisfied with my anatomy, but hair and hands are still a struggle.
I'm also not great on clothes which is why I tend to draw figures in underwear.

I'm leaning towards sorting out those 3 subjects and getting a better grasp on them and then trying to get better at rendering.
I can do rendering to an okay extend if I have reference but when I'm drawing from imagination like below, it tends to looks unfinished and messy.

As a side note I've been trying to do gestures by drawing using exclusively my elbow.
They lose a lot of proportion and "finish" but gain a whole lot of movement from it.
Regardless it is helping me let go of my need to populate gestures with anatomy and details which lets me focus on the flow of the pose.

[marigodraws]

Been switching between practicing hands and clothes today.
Sticking to line-art since it feels like if it can't describe the form using line-art I probably won't be able to shade it anyway.

For clothes it mainly feels like I need to treat it like any other object and start with large shapes then work down into details.

My main issue with hands is figuring out which folds best describe the form without making the hands look too old or manly by giving them too many wrinkles.
I find that if I leave out too much detail on the hands they end up looking more feminine but require much more thought regarding which lines are kept and which are discarded.

[marigodraws]

Still studying hands and cloth.

Tried starting my studies with a shotgun hour of 60second hand studies since doing things fast usually reveals where your flaws lie pretty quick (as you don't have time to correct and just have to apply your knowledge on the fly)
I'm struggling quite hard with the proportions + attachment of the thumb and the foreshortening of the tips of the fingers when I don't have more time to draw guidelines.

I was surprised at just how difficult it was and just how bad some of the hands I tried drawing came out.
Definitely a humbling exercise to pinpoint the gaps in your knowledge for anyone interested.

Spent the rest of my studying time circling out the hands that were lacking and then focused on studying the specific poses that gave me trouble.

[creARTive_Paul]

Ur doing very well so far ... don't try to rush thru a sketch or painting. Take ur time, speed comes naturally whilst studying. I personally like to do a rough gesture drawing first followed by a more defined sketch and a clean line drawing afterwards ... that works best for me ... guess what i want to say is focuse on quality rather then quantity while studying

[marigodraws]

Thanks, perhaps I explained it poorly.
I wasn't looking to become faster by doing this, I was trying to figure out what I should focus my studying on.

I'm not good yet so when I finish something like the first set of hands i posted, I look at them and have a hard time seeing my mistakes.
But if I spent less time on them (like the 60 second ones) and then look at which type of hands I mess up the most, then I can easily spot where the gaps in my knowledge is.

I've always found that you can mix fast and long focused studies to achieve better results as they have different purposes.
It might be controversial but I don't think that doing things fast is bad, as long as you stop after a set interval and make notes on your mistakes and why they happened and then work on them with longer more focused studies.

[marigodraws]

Haven't had much time to draw these past days but It should be better in the coming weeks.

Still just trying to unlock the secrets of hands by drawing the type of hands that I messed up the most during my 60 second hand galore.

Feeling small improvements here and there in my understand but there is still so many facets to hands and so many places where I fall short.

Main point I've taken away today is that the fingers are a lot more flat on the dorsal side of the hand, and that the contrast between that flatness and the more chubby sections on the palm side can really help describe how the fingers are rotation/bending.

I'm also noticing that I feel less uneasy about drawing hands, so overall positive progress however small.

[marigodraws]

Today's main project: Master studies on Disney artist Kin Jim

I absolutely adore the emotion and feeling of movement his hands have.
I found a few character reference sheets from the Disney movie Tangled and tried to decipher what makes them feel so alive.
It felt like a good way to start the day before doing more hand studies.

What surprised me the most is how many small muscle/fat pockets the hands have, and much they can be emphasized to get all kinds of movements a relatively simple hand.

Doing this also made me realize I have been ignoring the skin folds opposite of the knuckles (on the palm side) in my hand depictions so far.

Definitely a good day with lots of small discoveries!

[don_ghebray]

Hi Marigo,

I like the gesture in your work the characters have dynamic figures and I think the figure drawing grind really shows. I would recommend that you focus on defining the forms of the figure so that your work does not always look 2 dimensional. One thing that helped me is understanding the very basic cylindrical nature of body parts. I similar to you, do gesture drawings to start my drawing day so I would recommend you add cylinders to the various body parts to show form and direction.

Cheers,
Adonay