Recent Pencil Drawings

[Rich54]

Lately I've been studying figure drawing—full figures and portraits. Been drawing my whole life, mostly in an intuitive, observational way. But now I want to be more academically "correct" and more formal about it, including a detailed knowledge of anatomy. I bought about eight books on how to draw, I've looked at a million YouTube videos and I joined an online art school where you can download detailed instructional videos and get a certain amount of feedback. I keep flipping between charcoal and graphite, but I think I've finally settled on graphite for now. Charcoal is very hard to control.

I'm mostly drawing nude figures, which I don't think I can post here. I'll send a few to @IamSam in a PM to see if they're ok or not. Maybe I can censor-out the naughty parts.

For now, here are some recent tries: an attempt to draw hair in charcoal, a charcoal study of a tilted head (the eyes are terrible) and some studies of feet (graphite).

 

[thebestcpu]

Wow @Rich54
Great work. I think you are being way to hard on yourself.
John Wheeler

 

[IamSam]

Excellent! I agree with John...........too hard on yourself!

As I stated in the PM, faces, hands, feet, and hair are the most challenging! Like you, I was never very good with charcoal so graphite was the choice for me as well.

Also like you I have drawn for most of my life. However, after college I settled into other preferred mediums which I was much more proficient with and pretty much stopped drawing.

These are great! Keep up the work you're definitely on the right track and doing well!

 

[JeffK]

Having tried my hand at graphite, I know how difficult these pieces are to produce. Excellent work and well studied!
- Jeff

 

[Rich54]

Thanks all. I'm going to keep plugging away and I'll post things from time to time.

 

[ex_teacher]

This photoshop artisan is impressed and the ex-art-teacher in me is even more impressed I have to confess to having a huge smile upon seeing your post. I find immense beauty in seeing someone undertake a great learning experience and benefiting so obviously from it.

The old saying that 'all roads lead to Rome' is metaphorically true and the folks responding to this thread know this very well. There are a huge variety of paths that are fun, provide a great learning experience and provide a satisfying, if similar, outcome. Some of these paths are better and some worse but that always depends on the individual traveler. Hopefully we all get to Rome many times via many ways. Enjoy the journey and if you hit any roadblocks, your GPS will go about 'recalculating' or just post here on the forum for directions. And please continue to share your progress.

Bruce

 

[ex_teacher]

...and BTW, the "hair" in 'Head.png' is rendered exquisitely.