[erikdennes]

JGreen,

Vilpuu uses a lot of skills put together when he draws, so I think it is difficult and a little confusing for the beginner.  You should check out Steve Huston’s lessons on gesture where he defines gesture as simply the long axis curve.  Also, I really like Karl Gnass’ lectures.  He begins with gesture kind of the same way as Huston, simply a long axis line placing each part of the body with the correct proportion and attitude.  I also like Gnass’ progression from gesture to shape/volume to anatomy.  This approach really  makes the most sense to me.  Good luck

[erikdennes]

Greetings.

I like your focus – just draw everyday and be nice to yourself while you are doing it.

Nice drawings by the way.  Keep up the good work.  Often, the drawings I enjoy doing the most end up looking the worst because when I am doing them I don’t care how they turn out.  You have to give your self permission to let go and just draw a bunch of junk, but have a bunch of fun doing it once in a while.  At least for me anyway.

Good luck, and keep drawing.

[erikdennes]

Boxes are hard to draw because our eyes can easily detect any errors in perspective.  It just won’t look right.

Hopefully this will help you make some corrections:

• Lines going off to the left vanishing point (green) are higher than the lines going off to the right vanishing point creating a horizon line that is not horizontal.   Solution- when laying in the shape, go ahead and lightly draw in the orthogonals to the edge of the page (as shown below) so you can visually tell better if the horizon line is horizontal.  There is also an “in picture” method called the Brewer Method for creating a grid so you can construct your box when the vanishing points are way off the page rather than just relying on observation.  I’m pretty sure there are tutorials for it available online.
• The top lines for both the left and right vanishing points don’t have enough diminishment (they are sloped too high).  Solution – Again, extending those lines out to the edge of the page will help you visually determine if all the lines on one side indeed go to the same vanishing point. (Or construct it using the Brewer Method to create your grid)
• The slope on the right hand side vertical (yellow) looks too kicked out.  Solution – Instead of worrying about 3 point perspective, just make the verticals all vertical.  If you choose to go with 3 point perspective, then go ahead and lay out a grid so you know your verticals will be correct and meet up at a vanishing point off the page.
• Try drawing a little smaller so you can have a little more length on your orthogonals.
• When shading have a little more separation in value between the top side of the box and the right vertical plane of the box.  This will give it what is called a 1 2 3 read  and makes each plane read very clearly on paper (even if that is not what you observe).

 

Hope this helps.

 

[erikdennes]

I haven’t been checking the forums for a while, but i thought I would look in today.  Wow! you have really improved during this challenge!!  I hope you are really pleased with your progress, you should be.  Nice work on the casts.  I hope you continue to post fairly regularly even if you don’t do another challenge.  I am interested to see your continued progress.  Cheers.

[erikdennes]

These are nice!

[erikdennes]

Hey Jan, nice work!  I think the mouth and teeth need to read more like a cylinder.  The sides of the cylinder need to be pushed back (darker) more.  It looks too flat.

[erikdennes]

yes, it is the dynamic bible.  I got it through Superani.us.  A lot of the Draw-a-Box.com lessons are exactly the same as what is in the Dynamic Bible, so you could save some money and just do those if you want.

[erikdennes]

Nice work Alex.  These are looking good.  I just got Peter Han’s book and am going to be having a go at some of this stuff myself.  You have further inspired me to get busy with it.

[erikdennes]

Deborah,

Take a couple of weeks off!  You’ll be glad you did.  You have my permission.  Sometimes in our drive to get better, the fun starts draining out of our art process.  You should feel like, “I can’t wait to sit down and do some art”  when you are creating.  When that starts to go away, (and it naturally happens to everyone from time to time) its time to step back and give things a rest.

[erikdennes]

Nice work!  Looks great.

[erikdennes]

Day 100

Thanks to all who left comments and/or viewed this thread.  It has been really beneficial for me posting everyday and getting feedback from the NMA community.   Hopefully, some of you have gotten some benefit from my posts as well.  There is always a little bit of the teacher in me that comes out in my work and in my posts.

I feel like I have learned a lot from this challenge. I’ll probably do another 100 day challenge, but take a little break for a while before starting it.

 

For my post today, I had the idea to use the tiles on the wall to help make the composition instead of trying to fight them.  I came up with this idea where the focus is creating some nice color harmonies between the tiles and juxtaposing that with a hard edged, graphic, smoothed airbrushed rendering of a hawk.

Here is what it would look like on the wall.

And here is the image I created.

 

 

[erikdennes]

Welcome to the challenge!  Looks like you are doing great with your proportions.  The hat looks really good too.  To help you reach your goal of drawing heads from imagination, you will need to learn the planes of the head and the skull.  There are several different lecture series covering this on NMA from several different instructors.  I really enjoyed Chris Legaspi’s head drawing series, Charles Hu’s head construction, as well as Steve Houston and Glenn Vilpuu’s.  The Russian Drawing series in excellent for more advanced study.  There is a ton of information on NMA, just dive in and get drawing!!

[erikdennes]

Day 99

Thanks Nick!  Yea, the blue car is a little small.  There are a lot of things that are not quite right in the perspective probably because I didn’t use a grid and just used my gut.  In a piece like this though, I don’t think the perspective needs to be very accurate, in fact it is really sort of not accurate on purpose.  My thought with the car was that I wanted to communicate a faster diminishment toward the right and left edges of the mural.  My thought with the street sign as to make it big to clearly see the form and the cast shadow which gives the image more depth.

I did a sketch for another section of the same wall.  I think I might dump this idea.  I’m not sure I could pull it off at the scale that I have to paint it, and those pesky stripes from the lighting might interrupt it too much since it is mostly the same value.  I think I need an idea with strong graphic shapes and more range of contrast in the values.

[erikdennes]

Looks great Elizabeth!  You have been working hard.

[erikdennes]

Day 98

Thanks Gordan and Christopher.

Gordan, the lighting on this wall is driving me crazy.  There are overhead lights right next to the wall which make very pronounced alternating light and dark stripes at the grout lines.  My perspective is fighting these strong horizontals and it makes me dizzy looking at it.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the other two huge sections of wall in this space to try and tame that lighting situation

Christopher, To answer your question, after being an elementary art teacher for 10 years, I got a job as a resource teacher helping with programs in our 5 visual art magnet schools.  I first started doing murals during my lunch break and if something I had scheduled got canceled for some reason.  The job evolved through several different phases, but I kept doing murals on the side with any free time I had.  Now with Covid, because our district is all virtual now, I’m doing murals full time until my boss tells me to do something else.  So it was really something I just stumbled into.

Im replacing a culturally insensitive image in the gym with the school’s red hawk logo.  It was kind of nice just painting yellow ochre and not having to think at all.

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