Skull Studies – Charcoal Pencil

[Marcin Swaltek]

Started taking learning to draw seriously about a 2 months ago using the material on this website. All of these were drawn in 30min to an hour with an HB charcoal pencil. The paper is Strathmore Recycled sketch paper which isn’t the best as you cant erase very much. I like to write little scribbles after I’m done drawing to keep note of what I think I messed up on. I’ve drawn a few portraits before and after these set of skulls and I can see amount decent improvement but I think my rendering and construction still need a lot of work. Just wondering what someone with a bit more experience thinks of these as I do not know any people around me who do art.

[sboydn]

Good work, and a very useful exercise!  Looking at your notes, I think you’re already seeing some of the issues with your own drawings, which is great–that is always the path toward improvement.  I’d add that the second skull on your first page has an overly shallow cranium and a rather flat profile (though I can’t see your reference, so can’t say for sure).  Also, I’d recommend giving less attention to individual teeth for sketches at this level of finish; just grouping those into big simple shapes should be sufficient, and would allow you to do more drawings in the same amount of time and focus more on large forms.  Others might disagree with me on that, though.

Hope this helps!

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