June 21, 2014

Revisiting Old Drawings & Working on New Stuff

A few months ago, I got really into drawing food with colored pencils. It's a really fun process for me and I've always been much stronger with dry media than wet (i.e. paint). Lately, I've been working on sorta figuring out my drawing style. It had been a really long time since I just drew what I like. So naturally, when I started drawing again, a lot of my stuff looked a little bit like the artists I admire. And I was obsessing too much about how I was drawing and what I was drawing. Being in the graphic design world for a little too long, I had forgotten what it's like to work loosely. 

Once I got back into the groove of things, I realized that the food I had drawn a few months earlier don't really fit the style of my work. They mostly looked like studies that you were draw for a drawing class. So I revisited them and found that all they really needed were faces. 


This week I had a breakthrough in how I draw people. For a while, I was obsessing over the texture of hair. Don't get me wrong, when I really focus I'm pretty darn good at drawing hair! But what I found was in my attempt to give hair shape, I was making it look really flat. So I thought, "If it's going to look flat anyways, I might as well make it a whole shape!" That then opened up my mind to the possibility of infinite shapes for hair. Everything from something natural to something that looks like it's from another dimension (or a dream!)


Something else I ended up liking from just playing around: working with just two colors. What I like about working this way is it's a constraint that makes me have to figure out how to make something work. So after a drew a few heads, I challenged myself to figure out how to make this work with a body.


As you can see, I'm slowing working my way up to doing full figure drawings and eventually whole scenes. This is also my way of prepping myself for the Art Walk I'm participating in next month at The Community in Anaheim. I'll be doing live drawing during the event.

Thanks for following along! I'll be posting more works in progress soon!

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