Skull - concept to finished piece

Oh my goodness!  I spent so much time watching art videos from Artist Network TV that I got nothing else done this weekend!!  I learned a LOT!  I was planning to apply some of my newfound knowledge in painting watercolour today, but I found that I was incredibly exhausted.  I know from past experience (and I've been instructed this way by Gordon MacKenzie) that if you are tired you shouldn't paint.  These two things just don't go well together!

So I took Mr. MacKenzie's advice and had a nap instead.  Since there is no progress to report today, I thought I might show some pics of the progress of the skull.  I don't think that I included any of the conceptual images in my previous posts.

So here's the original concept design:

Not much to look at is he?  But I think you can clearly see that I was trying to get the name to fit into the skull.  I had originally thought of adding a flame around the skull, but later discarded it.

This is a human skull image that I drew of an image I got off the net.  This is almost a medical drawing, but since I have never drawn a skull before, and I wanted it to be at least based on realism, I had t start somewhere.

You can see from these two images how I modified the original skull (traced it onto tracing paper then put a piece of paper on top to make a copy with modifications) and started to fill in the shapes.

This of course is the finished piece.  He came a long way from the concept image.  And I have to say that I had no idea how he would ultimately come out.  After I made my modifications, I mostly let the drawing decide what it wanted/needed to be complete.  I think this made it a better drawing because I had no real expectations.

Now if only I could do the same thing with painting!

Skull - Finished!

It is very rainy in Kitchener today.  And they’re calling for severe freezing rain with hail – welcome spring!  It’s a day that makes me glad I can lock myself in my studio for a few hours and ignore the world.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, you know that I’ve been trying to iron out the shading for the skull.  I tried looking at various skulls online, I made a maquette out of playdough and clay, and I checked out a whole bunch of webpages with how-to’s on skulls (gosh there’s a lot of these!), and none of these ideas really worked for me. 

Yesterday I had what I like to call “a V8 moment”.  A friend of mine has a skull jar.  It’s really nice, covered in celtic markings and relatively realistic in proportion.  I have seen this skull daily for years, but it never occurred to me to take a picture of it until yesterday. 

I positioned it with the light source in the right spot, then took the pic home and did some computer manipulation to grey scale and sharpen as I need it to be.  Amazingly (sarcasm) everything came together for me very quickly with this new reference (shaking head).  There are times when I get too clever for my own good and it stands in the way of my smarts :P

After 2 hours of absolute zen shading, I have a (mostly) finished skull.  It’s about 99% done.  I want to add more texturing in the forehead area, though not too much as the light is directly hitting there, but then I think it’s done.  What do you think?  Can you still see the name?

I love pencil work.  It’s taken me years of practice to get to the point that 2 hours straight work doesn’t completely wear me out, or cause cramped muscles.  Now I really enjoy that time - I find something so calming about repetitively sweeping the pencil across the page to blend or darken an area.  It’s very relaxing and then when I’m done the final piece looks so smooth and textured! 

Here’s a pic of the materials I used to finish the drawing (2H & 4B pencils, pen eraser, electric eraser, kneaded eraser, white eraser, and drafting brush).  You can see that it’s really shiny on the darkest part of the skull in the jaw – that’s how much graphite is in that section.  I may have pressed too hard in my attempt to darken as much as I could, but the real-life image looks really nice.  Now to do the final shading and spray with fixative.

Kitty Complete!

I took a vacation day today as my 5 year old was home (PD day).  So I took the extra time to push things further along and finally finished the kitty image.  Well, I think it's done anyway.  I can't come up with any more damage I can do to it - so I declare it DONE!

To finish things off, I worked on the darks and lights of the fur to make it seem silky and shiny.  I was trying for very healthy and luxurious fur.  Then I sprayed the entire drawing with a workable fixative.  This allows me to work on the topmost highlights and whiskers without smudging up the work so far. (Warning about workable fixative - be sure that you are not going to want to do any more erasing on the original work as you can only add to the pic after "fixing" it.  You can erase anything you add, but nothing below that.)

So, I sprayed it thoroughly (it really sucks to think you've "fixed" a picture and then find out otherwise after the fact) and then applied the whiskers and some extra white to some of the highlights.  I haven't done the final spray to protect the image yet, but here's the finished piece:

If you'd like to see the steps it took to get to this final image, check out my past blog postings with "Kitty" titles.

Do you know anyone with a black cat that would like a drawing like this?  Or perhaps someone who really likes black cats?  Send me a message and we can talk ;)

I had some time left over so I thought I'd start tackling the skull image again.  As I said before, I was having trouble with some of the shading aspects.  I've been reading James Gurney's book "Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist" and he said that one of the best ways to deal with this type of problem is to make a maquette.  Essentially this is a model of your subject, usually made from clay or some other sculpting medium.  Since I didn't have any clay, I used some of my kids' play dough (home made):

One of the disadvantages of using play dough is that it's very soft and squishy so it doesn't hold the shape well or for long while you're holding it.  The advantage to doing a maquette, I found, was that I could see how the image should be in 3D.  It helped me make the image more accurate around the eyes and cheek bones.  I still have a bit of work to do on this one, mostly shading, but hopefully not too much more. This is what the drawing looks like now (can you see the name in the skull?):

Spring is definitely in the air in Kitchener!  I took some very nice pics of the crocuses growing in my garden and I may do a painting of one of them next.

James Gurney is the creator/author/illustrator of the Dinotopia books.  I've added Gurney's books to my recommended booklist.  If you're interested in checking out his blog, you can find it here: www.gurneyjourney.blogspot.ca/