New Drawing: Checking His Playlist

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I was waiting for a friend in Austin, near campus, and spotted this guy across the street. The picture on the left is an example of how I quickly lay out the drawing space to correctly grid the placement of features of the figure I’m going to be drawing. I don’t actually use grid lines, just dots where the lines intersect, but I’m showing a grid here for clarity.

I figure out an alignment of grid boxes based on the overall shape of the figure. Here it’s a simple verticle group of 8 squares, which is usually plenty. I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the halfway point between extremes when looking at the model, but on small measures I can use my pencil held out in front of me. That grid drawing with the figure took me about 30 seconds or so. It’s on 8.5 x 11″ paper. I then used that to scale it up to a larger sheet on the right that’s 11 x 17″.

The guy was a good (unaware) model, only moving once with his head and right arm, but they all went back into position long enough for me to roughly block out the darkest shapes, and get a feel for the folds in his clothing. After about a minute or two it doesn’t matter if he moves. I finished most of the shading later at home.

Self Portrait Wearing a Striped Shirt

One thing about drawing your reflection is you appear to be using your left-hand when your right-handed. This is about 11 x 13″, and was drawn with a Wolff brand carbon pencil.

New Sketch: Reading a First Draft

I’ve been in something of a slump with sketching lately, not finding anything to spark my interest, until this scene happened in front of me yesterday while sitting in a local cafe. I’m not sure what she was reading, but the man seemed very attentive. I first made a quick thumbnail outline of the figures, then tried to recreate it on a larger sheet of paper when I got home.