Good Enough is Enough

I finally have a candidate for this month's drawesome prompt. I'm not entirely happy with it, but for a first attempt it came out better than I had expected. The proportions are off and the balance is wrong (among other problems, the legs should be farther apart to keep it from having that "about to tip over" look). But I won't be mortified to post this if I get to the end of the month without anything better to submit. (I want to try re-doing it, but I have a bad case of the lazies this month so no promises.)



If you didn't watch Orange is the New Black, here is the inspiration:

(icon available for glomming)

The skull and the dragon are both based on different videos from Art for Kids Hub.

I found a decent figure-drawing tutorial. YouTube is overflowing with art "tutorials" that are awful.

( rant about annoying videos )

But there are a fair number of art teachers on YouTube who do explain what they are doing clearly. I'm always pleased to find another one: Richard Smitheman

( good video )

Look! My human came out human-shaped.

(Please ignore the hands, feet, and head, because he didn't cover that in the tutorial and I mostly gave up.)

Richard Smitheman, tutorial #1

drawesome has a nice prompt this month about diverse body types and I'd really like to try to come up with something for it but I fear I may also spend the entire month practicing the "ideal" body types from all the figure drawing tutorials because until I get a hang of the basics, I can't improvise anything else. (Note that from the point of the view of art tutorials, "ideal" means skinny enough that bony landmarks are visible. It's not even intended as a judgement call by most of them; skinny people and muscular people are easier to draw than average people.)

The one on the left is an ink drawing with a watercolor wash. (But this is just in my sketchbook and not on proper watercolor paper so I can't put as many layers of color on as it really needs.) The one on the right is a digital edit trying to convey the general idea I had in my head. I don't exactly know what he's meant to be, but it seemed important that he have rainbow hair.

I'd really like to make a better attempt at this at some point in the future, but January is almost over and I really wanted to do this prompt before the end of the month.

heads-up for anyone reading this Tuesday afternoon: I'm going to post this and then keep editing it until I've got all the photos uploaded. (I don't want to risk putting in all the effort of linking all the photos only for the computer to glitch out or something, so this will be a save-as-i-go process.) Hence you may have stumbled across an incomplete post. Done!

So here it is. Pens for scale.


Only after I was all finished, did it dawn on me that "Sketchbook #11" did not have a single drawing of Eleven in it, so I drew this and taped it onto the cover with packing tape. (People who worry about archival-quality materials are probably cringing right now, but there is nothing in this sketchbook that needs to be saved for posterity. And most of the pages are done with marker which isn't archival either.)

This is a Crescent Rendr sketchbook and I HATED it. I like the paper but the binding was super annoying, made moreso by the false advertising that it was a "lay flat" sketchbook. I only bought a sketchbook this small because of the "lay flat" promise, thinking I would be able to draw across the fold and effectively double the page size. (I can do this with my Talens Art Creation sketchbooks.) So basically every day working with this was a frustration.

Which conversely meant that I felt free to just scribble whatever crap I wanted without that nagging anxiety about "wasting" pages in a good sketchbook. (Sometimes liking a sketchbook too much is also a problem.)

I wouldn't normally post some of these, but the September prompt for drawesome was to finish a work-in-progress and, in the name of completion, I took photos of every page.

Click any image for a larger version:
( all the art )

So the semi-regular redraw of Jared Padalecki is complete and I am underwhelmed.

Comparing the colored pencil versions over the years...

2017 April colored pencils sketchbook #1

2018 January colored pencils sketchbook #1

2020 December alcohol markers colored pencils sketchbook #5

2022 September alcohol markers colored pencils sketchbook #13

Between 2017 and 2018 there was a quick and dramatic improvement that mainly came down to my gaining a better understanding of how colored pencils work. Between 2018 and 2020, I'd figured out how to improve the color with a layer of alcohol marker under the pencil, as well as developing a system to cheat and get the proportions more realistic (take lots and lots of pictures as you go and compare the photo of your drawing to the photo reference, which for some reason is easier than comparing the physical drawing to the photo reference).

But between 2020 and 2022 ...
( 2020 vs 2022 )
the only real improvement is on getting the stubble more realistic (which was my main complaint with the 2020 version, the beard stubble was too cartoonish).

And the thing is, I know I could still work on this longer and get the shading and coloring better. (The eyes aren't quite the right color, the shadows aren't dark enough, the texture of the jacket is a bit unfinished, et cetera, et cetera.) But... I don't want to. This much detail isn't fun. I'm tired and I'm bored and the more I fiddle trying to fix things, the more irritated I get.

In some ways, I think this drawing is a little worse than the last one. Specifically, the thing that struck me about this photo reference was the quirky worried expression on his face which I think I captured in the 2020 version, but somehow lost here. (I do like the shrunk-down icon version though because most of the details that bug me aren't noticeable at that scale.)

Hence, I'm still torn on whether this is really "done" or if I'll poke at it in a few days and try to improve it. But I think I'm in "screw it, good enough" territory.

On the other hand, compare these sloppy ink drawings (from 2019 and 2022)...


I like both of these better than the more realistic colored pencil drawings. Neither is realistic or necessarily a "good" drawing, but they were both fun to do and I think they both did a much better job of capturing the mood. That is a man who knows he's about to get pounced on by monsters. This last colored pencil drawing somehow lost all the emotion.

The new art supplies have arrived and thus the obligatory swatching.


The two Sakura Pigma Microns and the Staedtler are the only new pens, but I needed to compare them to my existing brown pens.

(For the record, the "caramel" Pilot ink is in the wrong pen. The caramel pen is only available as part of an expensive multi-pen set that I am too cheap to buy, but the refill ink is available for individual sale so I just bought the ink and put it in a black barrel.)

Each ink then got both a water smear test and an alcohol-marker smear test. The sepia Pentel seems to be the only one that smeared noticeably with the alcohol marker. (I suspect the carmel Pilot smeared, but it's just not really visible since its smear color is close to yellow.) The brown Sharpie Ultra Fine seems to be the only one that didn't react at all to water, but the Microns helped up quite well. (The Staedler smears dramatically enough that I'll play around at some point in the future with deliberate wash effects and see what that looks like.)

In the meantime, this means I have officially begun Sketchbook #13 ... despite not having completed #10, #11, or #12 yet. (I am on track to finish Sketchbook #11 by the end of the month.) But all these sketchbooks are different and better for different things and I need this colored-pencil one for the next project.




By the way, if the "sepia" Pentel looks black to you, it's not a trick of the light. I was so excited when I heard that the Pentel Pocket Brush Pen was newly (pre-pandemic) available in "sepia" and "gray" and ... so disappointed in the actual pens. Total waste of money. The inks are both basically just slightly different shades of black. The gray is barely lighter than the full black and, depending on the paper and the lighting, usually I can't even see a difference between the sepia and the black. I've had these pens for a few years now and I always forget why I don't like them. My brain refuses to accept that they're that bad so I'll dig them out again ... and I'm annoyed every time.



Am I crazy or is the sepia even darker than the black?

So does anyone want a spare Pentel Pocket Brush Pen? I now have three of them and I don't need that many. (You can still refill them with the black ink if you want.) The only thing that indicates the (alledged) color is the little dome on the top and a thin band around the middle of the pen so if you re-filled them with black ink, I don't think it would bother you too much that the pen wasn't 100% black on the outside.)

So the drawesome prompt for September is to finish a work-in-progress. This is an excellent prompt (if not 100% welcome, because I procrastinate for a reason).

The first thing that came to mind is this heart that I've done three versions of (I'm not including one of them because attempt #2 was pretty similar to attempt #1 just ... worse. I got it into my head to put slightly more realistic eyes on the face and it made it so much creepier.)

The second thing that popped into my head is that I want to finish up sketchbook #11 because I hate it and it's annoying me. So that's a goal of one to two drawings per day to fill it up and get it over with.

And the third thing that popped into my head is that I am overdue for a Jared Padalecki re-draw. A few years back after a gap of years of not really drawing anything, I gave myself the challenge of filling up an entire sketchbook without tearing out any of my drawings. This after a lifetime of ripping up drawings that I hated so I'd never once actually filled a sketchbook. One of the first drawings in that sketchbook was a *hideous* colored-pencil sketch of Jared Padalecki and it took a lot of willpower not to tear it out and throw it away. I'm so glad that I stuck to my vow and saved it because later in the same sketchbook I tried again and it was so much better. And thus I made a tradition of re-drawing that same photo reference once a year or so and it's now been almost two years since the last attempt.

And I now have nine completed sketchbooks that I haven't torn any pages out of. Here's the inside cover of #10. It's about half full and I hope to have more stickers in here by the time it's done.


Anyway, back to the heart drawing... this is another reason I like following art tutorials aimed at little kids. (The other reason is just that they are relaxing.)

Following this tutorial...


...I came up with this...


...which ultimately lead to this...


I'm still not 100% happy with it and want to give it one more go, but this is already so much better than I could have done without the kiddie cartoon practice. Being able to break up a drawing in my mind into a simpler drawing helps so much. (Remember, kids, it's not plagiarism if you label it a "study"!)

based on seleneheart's squiggle:





Additional crosshatch shading with a red ink pen, but everything else is Posca Pens.

Semi-inspired by my previous monster because I wondered what it looked like from a different angle. Was it a unicorn? (I decided it was not.) Did it only have one big bottom fang? (I decided it did.) I also changed my mind and gave this one ears so it's not exactly the same critter. (So you're free to imagine the other one had a single horn or whatever.)

This time I swapped out the Pilot pen for Posca pens, which means that even though most of the background color is watercolor, the colored dots for scales are Posca pen and ... that's the only thing I dislike about this version. I think the watercolor scales worked much better on the other. This one is a cute pose, but it feels much flatter to me, just less alive.