Sketch of Suz

Well, I have decided after looking at "sketches" (ie drawings better than I usually do for "final" work) done by Jason Seiler to "warm up" or "practice", to get back into the habit of practicing myself. Esp useful to get my digital hand into shape on Painter with the Cintiq.

I "stole" a profile picture of my friend Suz (photo credits?) from Facebook, and did this sketch with a Real 2B Pencil brush in Painter tonight. It was fun as it was the first time I have tried flipping both a sketch and the reference photo horizontally to do corrections. It is also one of the first times I have tried selecting and then modifying (moving, scale) elements of my sketch to do corrections. For instance I made one of the eyes smaller and moved it without redrawing, moved her whole face up and over since I had drawn it too long and wide compared to the position of the hat.

It was really fun to see how fast I could eyeball a change by dragging an element to a better spot rather than erasing and redrawing. That is often one thing that hindered me "fixing" errors I could see in a sketch: the prospect of "losing" the work I had already done. Ie if a shape of eye or face silhouette were well-captured by badly placed, I'd avoid erasing and redrawing, and just finish up the sketch knowing that proportions were wrong. Using the lasso select tool and then moving individual parts of the portrait really freed me up to correct errors.

Another thing I need to work on that I have started playing with is the opacity of the brush medium. I was finding the 2B pencil to shade in much too dark with very little pressure when trying to shade Suz's face. I helped that by changing the opacity from 100% to 40% and then finally to 25% and was much happier with my ability to manipulate the digital pencil.

I can see that one thing I should do is save the sketch next to the reference image, and then look in Photoshop Browse at the thumbnails when they are wee and tiny. Amazing how fast one can see incorrect angles or proportions then. Of course I just realized now when I had saved the native Painter .riff file as a .psd file, closed Painter and opened Photoshop to resize the image for uploading to blogs etc. Next time I'll look at them with that sort of distance while sketching.

Well, there you go for tonight. I really should do this very regularly: it is so long since I really draw from reference and get in some practice vs drawing from my imagination, and going direct to work for clients.