185 - Inking practice

Admittedly, this is not a great copy of a Mort Drucker illustration, it's meant to be the Godfather. However it did give me the opportunity to try out a couple of new pens and it was a good exercise in inking. All of the pen work was done using a Tombow ABT dual brush pen and it is one of my favourites at the moment. I bought mine from Cult Pens in the UK and highly recommend them. I was going to do a wash for the grey tones but the paper was too thin so I used Copic Markers instead. 

178-184, TV Sketches

I recently discovered a great feature on my Panasonic TV, a Hold button which freezes the current image enabling me to do a quick caricature or sketch. I used the technique outlined in Tom Richmond's book on caricature for doing a 'live' caricature and was quite pleased with the results. I only spent about five minutes on each drawing and then added some shading with Copic Markers. I'm not quite ready for a real 'live' session yet though and probably never will be, but it was a fun exercise and I will definitely be doing some more. 

176-177 TV Sketches

A couple of sketches drawn direct from the TV, ballpoint pen and coloured pencils. 

170-175 Strictly Sketches

I thought it would be a good exercise to do a group picture of some of the Strictly Dancing cast so these are 'the start' of my trying to get a likeness sketches. I'm a big fan of the 'Mad' comics and artists like Mort Drucker and Tom Richmond and would love to do a picture in a similar style. 

154-169 Drawing the figure

Following along with Charles Bernard videos + Loomis and Jack Hamm books. 

151-154 Drawing the figure

The above sketches were drawn digitally with Sketchbook Pro following along with some of the exercises in Charles Bernard's Figure Trek video (part 7). The top sketch started off as a simple proportion drawing 8 heads high using Andrew Loomis's 'Drawing for all it's Worth' book which is widely available on the internet in a pdf format. I drew the basic figure first then added a more muscle definition before finally adding the costume on top. 

It's an approach that Charles Bernard uses to great effect and I'm looking forward to using it with more expressive poses.