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Great work here. One assignment you can try is to look at photos of people and draw the skull as you would imagine it would look like for that particular person from that particular angle. It will start to bridge the gap between trying to learn the skull to why the skull matters to us. Also once you start seeing “faces” on your skulls you can start taking advantage of the FFA fusiform facial area of your brain which correlates with recognizing faces. That will help you see what is “off” about skulls more easily. And yes, of course imagination studies are always illuminating.
Thank you Erik and yes I also hope that it will pay off at some point.
Also a big thank you to you Joshua. I already had ideas for an excercise like what you described but without knowing about the benefits you are talking about, so I’ll definitely do that. Additionally I will research about that FFA topic, that sounds pretty interesting to me.
Day 84 & 85
Unfortunately I got sick over the night from Tuesday to Wednesday. That’s why I haven’t posted yet but as usual I haven’t lost a day yet, even if I haven’t done and probably won’t do that much the next days since I have a hard time concentrating.
So the last two days I did draw overs of different NMA references. After I watched some more Reilly demos from Mark Westermoe today, I already see some mistakes I did in terms of having misunderstood how to place some of those lines.
But the good thing is that even if it looks hard at first, after doing some draw overs I at least got the lines memorized.
About the goals I set up for day 74 to 84: Overall I’m pretty happy since my focus stayed on what I planned to do and that was most important, even if I haven’t done the plane draw overs and stopped the box warm ups.
So for the next days, let’s say until day 95, I would like to work more from real references and do what Joshua suggested. I have something in mind like looking at portrait references but drawing skulls, the Reilly abstraction and planes of the references aswell as still doing more studies of each of the three using skull and plane references. I hope to get to a point where I can bring it all together for the first time and maybe finish the challenge with some portrait drawings to see where I’m at.
Day 86
Here’s my first try of drawing an abstraction and a skull based on a reference of a real person, in this case Rajiv.
Surprisingly I’m far more happy with the skull than the abstraction. I thought it would be the other way around. It’s especially surprising because I measured the initial head shape and feature proportions for the abstraction but not for the skull.
I had a diagram of the abstraction and an anatomy book for the skull laying on the side to look at but I ended up not doing that. I’ll probably do that for my next skull since this one ended up really simplified which shows that I haven’t internalized the subtleties yet. Even if I’m not sure if that is even needed currently.
Sorry to hear you are sick! Johanna and I have been battling food poisoning over here. Not fun.
Really good study. Just knowing Rajiv I would guess that the muzzle should project forward more (this is known as prognathism) and the nasal bone too. His face has quite a bit of forward projection, whereas the “standard” skull we often learn is usually more straight up and down.
I would say that’s a result of the number of skulls you’ve drawn in the past couple of months! How are you finding doing abstractions? There are so many approaches to head drawing! Your goals for the rest of the challenge sound good; it will be really interesting to hear your conclusions at the end. I hope you’re feeling better now 🙂.
Joshua, I hope you and Johanna recover quickly too!
Food poisoning? That sounds worse than having a cold, I hope both of you get well soon!
And Deborah about the abstraction: I agree with what Joshua said a few weeks back about being careful with any kind of simplifications from other artists because even if they might be 100% anatomical correct it still might happen that my work then looks similar to everyone else’s work who uses this system besides the danger of internalizing bad habits if it’s not anatomical correct.
But I really enjoy it as a learning tool since there’s anatomy and there’s artistic anatomy and the Reilly rhythms are artistic anatomy, meaning they try to relate all this bones, muscles and fat pads to each other in some way.
I’m being really careful referencing everything back to the real anatomy and trying to understand the reasoning behind the abstraction lines instead of just looking at a diagram or YouTube video and just memorizing the lines.
I think an abstraction like that is just another tool that in my opinion is especially useful for lay ins or for draw overs to find errors.
That said I can’t even say if I use it forever but I’m a huge fan of creating your own simplifications and abstractions to create your own process, make your life a bit easier and develop somewhat of a style since simplifications of reality are already somewhat stylistic + for me it’s just fun.
So I thought being a beginner without enough anatomical knowledge, why not start with such a system while learning anatomy to get a sense for how to think abstract and creative about all of this as a whole.
Sorry if that’s might not exactly what you asked for but I really enjoy thinking and drawing rhythmical it’s like solving a puzzle and that’s why I always wanted to learn this method 😅
Day 87
Yesterday I switched things up in terms of drawing a imagined skull from the same reference twice. That really helped because even if I pursue or lean more towards the construction method’s I always thought accuracy and likeness is intertwined with careful measuring. But everytime I start a head shape, measure it’s height/width relationship and it’s feature placement, it for some reason looks worse than if I just follow my gut.
So after what Joshua said yesterday about Rajiv’s instinct features I did the first skull like usual then analyzed it and approached the second one completely differently, focusing more on what stands out to me in the reference and letting my shapes reflect that instead of measuring everything beforehand which tends to normalize and kill it’s likeness for me.
The abstraction was done the same way and I think I’ll do that one also again. It might be tedious but it’s really good practice to do it once and then repeating it while focusing on what went wrong in the first one.
Day 89 & 90
Top two are from yesterday, bottom two are from today. The two skulls on the bottom left are based on the 3d model since I had some issues accessing the NMA site for references today.
I’m still experimenting with approaches and go back and forth between careful measuring and quick sketches measured by eye. The mentioned skulls are a good example since the first took almost an hour and the second maybe 15 to 20 minutes.
Especially looking at the two sepia front Reilly abstractions of rajiv I think that taking more time for a careful measured lay in makes them look cleaner but not necessarily more accurate.
I took the drawings and hold them against my laptop screen afterwards and most of the time the vertical distance between the features seems to be accurate but the overall head shape often ends up wrong/to wide. I don’t have worked out yet what I’m doing wrong since I do measure the height to width relationship but at least I’m conscious of it.
I think I eventually found the issue. Right now I’m working of a photo of Lillias and after I established the measurements and the overall head shape, I again layed my paper over/against the screen. Almost everything lines up perfectly but not as a whole because the horizontal and vertical axis of the face aren’t in proper relationship to each other, so I think I need to check angles more.
But I’ll carry through with this one anyway since it’s mainly practise for seeing the abstraction, developing a process and improving accuracy or in other words I’m preparing for the last days of the challenge where I want to try drawing real portraits.
Hi Christopher. This is all looking good. I think I know what you mean about measuring, but the final drawing still being off sometimes. I find that too. For me anyway, I think during the process it’s easy to subtly change things and the cumulative effect is to throw a measurement out. In my last head painting, the nose ended up too long again or the eyes too high (I need to go back and check). It’s easy to trust the measurements and not realise you’re making small changes that throw things off. They don’t need to be off by much on a head to look wrong. That’s what I’m finding anyway. I think that as well as trusting the measurements you’ve made, it’s also necessary to keep looking and trust your eye/gut as well. I find looking at a drawing a day or two after putting it away will also help me to see things which are off.
I’m glad you’re finding the abstraction process helpful. I think your system of using this alongside anatomy and drawing by eye seems very solid. I’m looking forward to seeing the portraits you end up creating. I hope you do another challenge 🙂!
Thank you Deborah,
I have the feeling if the aim is likeness or accuracy but your not working purely observational and therefore not just from measurements it’s all about the process.
In my opinion the drawings I did there some parts are drawn by eye and some are measured ended up being closest to the reference. Not necessarily if holding the paper against the reference but from a general perception which lets me think that likeness doesn’t necessarily means to have 100% accuracy.
So I think the trick is, at least for me, to find the right balance.
For today as example I started without measuring but then checked not necessarily the accuracy but how everything established related to each other. It’s just difficult to find what’s working if there are just an endless amount of possible ways to approach it.
After the abstraction was finished, I then got carried away taking it a bit further and I think you can definitely see that it’s supposed to be Yoni.
Day 91
Day 92
Threw in a “repetition day”. Since I want to memorize all this anatomical knowledge I’m going to go through some of the excercises and lessons again and again from time to time.
One front view is a repetition of Mark Westermoe’s lesson and the other one isn’t finished yet but is supposed to be my more detailed version. I again plan to overlay these with the muscles to reinforce them.
The empty space on both of them is for notes like names of the bones.
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