Stay Motivated to Draw,Post your Work

For years I have tried to improve my drawing skill, but I could never sustain the motivation I needed to keep practicing and producing drawings. I would get the idea that I wanted to start drawing look up tutorials on YouTube draw a couple of things see a small improvement and then just stop.
Its not that I didn't want to carry on its that I lacked a purpose to draw and lost motivation to carry on.

I didn't see the point in drawing more and improving until I came across something on the internet that said to show your art. I can't remember which article it was or who wrote it (if it rings any bells with you let me know where it is). The article suggested framing your work and putting it up around your house. Now the kind of things I like to draw are primarily comic book based and there is no way my wife is going to let me put them up around the house.

So I though of something different, I started posting my work on Instagram. The prospect was quite daunting to start with, I had never done Instagram before signing up was pretty easy just needed an email address and a password then start posting.

Iv posted statuses on Facebook and I've tweeted every now and again but I never got any likes or comments apart from people I actually know, and even that was a rarity.

Instagram seems to be different I always got some likes for my picture. I would recommend putting hashtags to get your pieces noticed by people searching for drawings and art and you will defiantly get some likes.

I was worried about getting negative comments but to date I have never had a negative comment about my drawings, I did have one about my spelling but who gives a crap about that.

Back in 2014 I posted the following drawing, I was practicing gestures, I got 5 likes for it which for having no followers I was pretty chuffed with.

I did have about a year break from posting and drawing because me and my wife had a child (some times not only lack of motivation is the reason you can't draw more).

My latest post is this inked drawing of batman and I have received over 100 likes for this piece which is my first drawing to break the 100 barrier. 

So if you find yourself just to being bothered to draw I recommend that you post some of your work, preferably on Instagram because the community there seems to be really nice and if you are looking for your first follower comment below with your Instagram tag and I will follow you.

Good luck and keep drawing.

Entering my First Compatition

I entered an online art competition on Instagram its the first time I have ever done any thing like this. Each week the Instagram account magnificent.art runs a competition with a theme and last weeks theme was Anime and manga. Now I have been a fan of anime since before it was called anime and on of my favorite series  in recent years has been bleach. so I figured lets have a go at drawing Ichigo.

I found a reference drawing for the pose on google images but he was wearing his hollow mask so i found other pictures of his face and practiced by drawing a close up version of his head and colouring it with pro-markers to get an idea of the colours I would need for the finished piece. I have posted my close up of Ichigos face on my Instagram account if you would like to have a look. Just follow the link on the left.

I got to try out a new pen that I had bought for the inking which was a Faber-castell Pitt pen with a brush tip. I like how it allows me to be able to vary the thickness of my lines in on stroke depending on how much pressure I apply and the angle at which I hold the pen. 

I bought a dark grey pro-marker especial to colour his clothes as I thought it would be better than just coloring the whole outfit in black which would have ended up rather flat.

In the end I posted the full version on the competition page 5 days before the deadline and received 182 likes and 2 comments which was a far cry from winning but was by no means the worst performing piece. 

I think I will enter more competitions on Instagram  its nice to expose my work to a larger demographic to see how it is taken and compare my work with others to see how I need to improve and where I am doing ok.

What do you think to my Ichigo drawing I think his face looks a bit odd especial around the mouth but I do like the pose.

Proportions and Pose Practice How to improve with minimum time.

Recently I have been on a mission to improve my drawing proportions and to create more appealing poses. As I don't get much time to practice I think I have come up with a fast way to improve. The first step is to get to google images and search for action poses or sexy poses or any poses you would like to draw.  

Once you have found a pose you like draw a simple stick figure as quickly as you can while taking particulate note of the proportions and the positions of all the joints. These stick characters only take a couple of minutes and I have found that I am getting quicker the more I do.

Once the stick character is complete I like to flesh them out a bit which helps me check that I have observed all the right proportions. If the stick character is totally out then this is highlighted when you are adding detail. I find I have a bit of a problem positioning the hips in relation to the torso but I seem to be improving. 

Practicing this way you can draw loads of sketches any time you have a couple of minutes as using only a pencil and any scrap paper you can find. I have defiantly seen an improvement in my drawings since adopting this method. Also I find it has helped me become less attached to my drawings which may sound like a bad thing, but it allows you to keep drawing new things and not spend so much time trying to fix a drawing you have spend loads of time an and are totally invested in. 

You may have noticed by the sketches I have posed here that I proffer to draw women. I also noticed I was neglecting the male form so I had a go at a quick spider-man pose which includes a bit of for-shortening. 

What do you think to this method have you tried it let me know in the comments. Also do you like me sharing tips even though I am just learning myself. 

Frost Walk to Work Photography

This morning was great. I dropped my son off at nursery and for the first time in what seems to be an age he didn't cry at all he even looked happy. So I was in a great mood for my walk to the train station and to top it of it was very frosty and everything look so beautiful I had to take some pics.

All I had on me was my Samsung  Galaxy S7 but I think they turned out quite nice. 

I did have a go at filming me walking to pick up the sparkles from the path but they didn't show up on the end product. 

My walk from nursery every morning is quite pretty, some times its easy to forget to notice things but this morning I found it hard not to stop and take it all in.

I don't think the frozen duck pond turned out that well i just couldn't get it to show the ice well enough.

The close up pictures with the galaxy are surprisingly good i even managed to get some depth of field in to the pic.

I hope you liked these I wasn't going to make a post today and I always intended this blog to just be about my drawings but I just had to share these and photography is still an art form. 

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions on how to improve my photo taking just leave a comment. 

Classic Harley Quinn Art Project

Last year I bought a book called How to Draw Batman, Superman and other DC heroes and Villains. I have already posted one of my favorite drawings from this in my last post in the form of Super Girl. 

some time last year Suicide Squad came out at the pictures and everyone was drawing Harley Quinn from the movie. I thought to myself I need to jump on this band wagon so I got out my book How to Draw Batman, Superman and other DC heroes and Villains and had a go at the tutorial to draw Harley Quinn in her classic outfit from the animated Batman series in the 90s. (in my opinion still the best representation of batman on screen and don't get me started on Mark Hamill's take on the joker, absolutely excellent) anyway I set off on the tutorial of Harley Quinn with her iconic hammer and totally cocked it up. The pose was wrong and her face was terrible. So I scrapped it and decided to practice her face. 

And you know what? the face turned out pretty good so good i though I'd add some colour. Then I put it away and moved on to what ever drama my 3 year old son was causing and totally forgot about the drawing. 

Harley Quinn Pencil Body

Fast forward to a week ago when I was looking through some of my drawings for my 2016 round up blog post and I found Harley's head and thought she deserves a body. So once I had a bit of spare time, which is generally laid in bed while my wife writes in her diary, I grabbed my 2H pencil and got drawing. 

I decided to make up my own pose because the pose in the book wouldn't make sense with the room I had left on the paper (you wouldn't be able to see her hammer). unfortunate I didn't take any pics of the stick position I made I was a bit to enthusiastic to  flesh her out. 

Google is a great referencing tool so I was straight onto google images to find out how her costume works and I also found a reference for her gun. 

Added Inks

 My inking skills are a bit basic and I want to work on getting my line work to look a bit more exciting but that's a task for another day. So my basic lines are inked in the next night and thank fully I get the weekend to add some colour.

Harley Quinn in technicolour 

Most of the reference material I found just had flat colour but I was a bit worried that she might look a bit odd if her right hand boob just disappear in flat black so I added some highlights to the blacks and some shade to the reds. I'm proud of how it turned out because I pretty much played it by ear and the feel of how it should look.

My final obstacle was the colour of the gun because I didn't have an appropriate promarker colour so I hunted through my art draw and found a metallic coloured pencil I got with draw the marvel way and it worked a treat although you cant tell that its metallic even in real life.

And so ends my 4th blog post I know I still have a lot more to learn and I'm still not sure I'm uploading content that anyone is interested in so if you have any comments or addvice for me please just leave a comment below. 

Thank you and see ya later.

My Favorite Drawings of 2016 Cont.

We left off last time with a picture of Ariel the little mermaid and keeping on the sea creature theme I loved drawing the picture below. This is another tutorial from Steve Beaumonts book How to draw fantasy art. My interpretation of the subject turned out to be more cartoony than the actual tutorial but cartoony is pretty much the style I like. I think she looks like a Bratz doll only with tentacles. 

This was the first time I had done a pose which was slightly erotic and I did enjoy the process of creating the pose.

Octopus Girl

My next pick is an old favorite of mine. when I was a kid I loved drawing Sonic the Hedgehog and I got pretty good at him. so for nostalgia's sake I though I would give him another go. I used various reference images found on google to get a look I liked. All in all this drawing didn't take all that long from sketching to inking to colouring may have taken only an hour spread over 3 nights.

Sonic the Hedgehog 

 During the summer I went on my first family holiday with my wife and three year old son. we went to Great Yarmouth and I thought I could do loads of drawing. It turns out that going on holiday with a three year old does not leave much spare time for drawing, but I did manage to start and finish another tutorial from Draw the Marvel Way. Arch vial of the Hulk, Abomination. I think this is my first ever attempt at drawing a monstrous creature and you know what I pretty sure it won't be my last. I found the for shortening of this drawing particularly difficult and I not sure I have total pulled it off but luckily I had quite a few green pro-markers with which I managed to give a good finish.

Abomination

I was browsing the same discount shop where i found the how to draw fantasy characters when I found How to Draw Batman, Superman and Other DC Super Heroes and Villains. I was a big fan of Batman the animated series back in the 90s and this book used the same style so I had to buy it. 

My favorite thing I have attempted from this book so far has been super girl I loved the flight pose. I had to use both pro-markers and coloured pencils to add the colour because my marker collection is still very limited. The hardest parts were the hands I practiced these over and over on a separate sheet but I think it paid off.

Super Girl

The final piece I was really proud of in 2016 was my attempt at a realistic eye. I had been researching how to improve my eyes and the same advice kept cropping up. Learn how to draw realistic first so you know each component of the eye when it comes to drawing stylised and cartoon eyes. So i did just that I know I need more practice but this exercise has helped me when drawing eyes.

Eye

So those are my fave pieces from 2016. If you have popped over from Instagram you have probably seen these but I think its nice to add a bit of background here and maybe open the a way to communicate easier. So if you have any comments please feel free to post them any tips on improving would be greatly appreciated.  

My Favorite Drawings of 2016

Because I have been taking getting better at art for about a year now before I started this blog I thought I would go through some of my favorite works of 2016. I posted all of them on Instagram and they all got pretty good responses.

At the beginning of 2016 i just happened to find a book in a discount store called How to Draw Fantasy art: Create Amazing Fantasy Characters by Steve Beaumont. This book contains lessons on creating fantasy characters and the picture below is the first tutorial. 

The Elf Princess

She is supposed to be an elf princess but mine seemed to turn out more like a vampire princes. The tutorial was easy to follow and the shading tips were great. this was my first post on Instagram that got a great response even though it was not lined to a well known # and is spurned me on to create more art to post.

The next piece is a tutorial from Draw the Marvel Way. This is a magazine I get every 2 weeks. I started off doing every tutorial starting with spider-man then wolverine then Hulk and then in issue 4 this Black Widow. This was the first time i tried to add a bit of colour using coloured pencils. I think it turned out pretty good but i was never pleased with the dullness of the colour. I still get draw the marvel way but i haven't done a tutorial for ages.

Black Widow

 After my relative success with colouring i tried to find another method of colouring that would give a more vivid effect and found promarkers. These markers are alcohol based pens which give a good strong flat colour which can also be blended together. You may of heard of copic markers the promarkers are pretty much the same and they are both pretty expensive. I bought myself a skin tone pack and a few other common colours and decided I would have a go at drawing something Disney.

When I was a kid I think my first ever crush was from a Disney movie in the form of the red head who wore nothing but shells, Arial from the little mermaid. I think this is still the favorite thing I created in 2016. I statred off using an online tutorial I found but made the picture my own by adding flounder and colouring with the promarkers i had just bought. Unfortunatly I didnt buy a yellow marker so flounder had to be finished off with coloured pencils but I think he turned out pretty well.

This post has gone on a lot longer than I thought and I'm about half way through my pics of 2016 so I think I will cut it here and carry on in my next post. I hope you are enjoying it so far let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions. Thank you and see you soon.