I was going to do a Touhoushinki drawing [from Beelzebub], that is, until I realised my drawing skills were pretty limited, and I was going to end up drawing something rather uninspired (relatively speaking).
So I took a hiatus to do some practice sketches of other people's work in a bid to improve my ability to capture form on paper. I'm trying to improve body proportions, clothing, expressions, and supposedly this is a very good way to train.
This is a sketch I did last Thursday. The character on the left was supposed to be a girl, but I didn't know that beforehand. :|
I also made the terrible mistake of trying to colour it using colour pencils. Not only was the skin colour totally wrong (due to limited range of set of 12 colours), the colour blotted out some pencilling details and gave a totally coarse texture. I totally can't wield colour pencils at all. Next time I'm going to try to stick to pencil shading completely and see how it goes; if it works then it's either I'm colouring it wrong or the lead grade is different (eg. too soft).
After uploading I realised it's not that his head is oversized, but his body is too small. Can't be helped, I had to visualise (incorrectly).
Next is a sketch that I just did this morning. I think it's from a TV sitcom or something. Just a disclaimer beforehand, since it looks totally nothing like the original art piece: the sketching was to practice scale and proportion, not photo-accurate sketches.
The most challenging part was the hands in the extra long sleeves, which probably is a hint to practice sketching hands more. The hair was really fun to draw though, especially really messy and curly hair. :D
Left guy looks like Ezio Auditore da Firenze, or maybe it's just the unshaven messy center-parting look.
Scanning in as grayscale removed the non-repo blue pencil without any photoshopping at all, as it should be. The non-repo blue covered the line inconsistencies though, so I think if I'm drawing a serious art piece instead, I have to ink it using pigment pins and erase the pencilling to ensure the lines are uniform.
I decided I didn't want to waste any bandwidth, MySQL or webspace by self-hosting a blog, no matter how insignificant the amount is. WordPress though excellent, placed many [valid] restrictions such as no embeds or Javascript. Tumblr, though really hip and typically what DeviantARTists use, didn't have a solid revenue model and thus wasn't very reassuring.
So Blogger it is. This post is probably gonna be one of the very few posts that ever reads like a traditional blog post (aka introspection), because I'm thinking of purposing this blog as a Tech Project blog amongst other things.
And I really need some lengthy text so I can see if a theme looks nice... *Browsing themes*...
Edit: Blogger's selection of fonts, helped in part by Google's Web Fonts initiative, is really impressive. I think I like my theme very much now. :)
