I decided I don't draw enough SO I'm going to try to do a drawing a day. They probably won't be perfect, I'll probably hate a LOT of them, but it's good practice and fun. Also, feel free to critique!
Here's the first:
Not sure how I feel about this. I was listening to Paul Brant whilst I drew this; I don't think that had any obvious impact on it. XP
@Gringoamericano, I was sort of thinking about the elephants from "the Elephant Alphabet Book" and the creatures from "Where the Wild Things Are"- two books that I grew up with! I'm going to look up those that you've mentioned though, 'cause now I'm interested.
Here's some of the pictures from those books I mentioned in case you're curious:
I had originally drawn a cartoon rabbit for today, but it was really boring and I didn't like it. I tried uploading it as an attachment from my ipod but alas, the file was too big so you were spared the boringness of it all. Anyway, then I drew this because I've been wanting to draw feet a lot lately. XP
I wasn't going to use this picture because I wasn't planning it as a drawing for this... it was just for fun and sort of as practice because I want to be able to draw realistic people, but it's late and stuff so here it issss:
Started out drawing a portrait of Drew Barrymore... Spoiler
But then I stopped because I got excited that it was looking less cartoony and did my own thing. XP
I really like this last portrait, but if you want to go less cartoony, then really push your shading. When you're shading something, do light strokes and build up on them, so never really push too hard until you REALLY want to get something dark.
Look at the image you have there, and see how far in the shadow goes on the cheek. You should be able to shadow that far in on your own drawing as well. The more you push shadows and highlights, the less cartoony it's going to look.
If you have a highlight that's near a line, make whatever's on the OTHER side of that line a low light, so like, if the background is on the highlight side, then make the background dark. Conversely, if the background is on the shadow side, make the background LIGHT, this will help balance out the image AND erase your lines. After all, we don't walk around outlined, so your entire drawing should be shadowed to hide those lines with highlights and shadows.
...this illustrates my state of mind right now pretty well XP I wanted to do something really cool and fun but nothing was working, so he happened. SO original, I know. *sarcasm warning*
Regarding @Aley's advice on shading, here's a sort of trick for you to make it somewhat easier: squint. For some reason, when you squint, you can see the shadows better, then you can try copying that onto paper.
Thanks for the tip, @EscaSkye! I'll give that a try sometime. I don't really have trouble seeing where I need to shade - I don't think - but on faces I tend to either do an incredibly sloppy job or a hardly shaded job. I think I need to learn to be a little more patient with my art! Anyway, I'm going to try the squinting thing! XP
Also, just so people aren't like "D: SHE QUIT!!!" I was just going to say that I think I'll post a bunch of pictures after a few days, because posting daily adds to my reviews and I don't like that because it makes my reviewing number feel fake.
