Dancer

Usually I use mechanical pencils, but recently I bought a pack of medium soft Derwents for life drawing class. I never realised traditional pencils had such potential. It's ironic, considering it's usually he first writing/drawing medium given to you as a kid.

By gripping the pencil from above and using the entire arm instead of just the wrist I felt that it was a lot easier to create fluid lines. The size of the paper is A4.

Sketches from China

A sketch I made while I was in China this summer...

It's from the Tang Dynasty Cultural Park in Xi An. The park is an artificial reconstruction of what the Tang dynasty supposedly would have looked like, so the impressive-looking buildings have no historical value. They are very shiny though.

The weather had been extremely hot and stuffy that day, but as dusk approached a rain cloud breezed past in the distance. For a moment the light took on the golden sheen which contrasted nicely against the dark clouds in the distance. Even though we didn't get any of the cooling rain, the wind took most of the heat away so it was a great evening to spend in the beautiful and uncharacteristically empty park.

Setting goals

Many people who list manga as their prime, perhaps even only influence are quite young when they start drawing and do it mostly for fun. Speaking from personal experience, when I started out all I wanted to draw was "manga-people". My parents, once they noticed my new hobby, sensibly suggested that I should try studying real people but I would turn my nose up at the thought - real people weren't pretty!

For a few years I learnt by copying and studying other manga artists and in the beginning the improvement was quite rapid. Learning the box & ball anatomy took some effort... folds quite a while, and don't get me started on the hands, but eventually things started to shape up.
Now, the first few years were great, every other new drawing I was drawing something for the first time and I had fun improving. But after that, things plateaued. When I started my goal was to learn how to draw pretty manga pictures. So what do you do when your pictures start looking pretty? Personally, I stopped improving.

That being said, not everyone aims for constant improvement. Drawing for fun is fine, more than fine, terrific! It beats shopping or drinking your allowance away if you ask me.
My point is, if you are looking to improve your art, whether it's for fun or dead serious - being aware of where your goals lie is a very good idea. At that time I thought I had reached my goals, and for the time being I had.
A few years later I found new goals and started bashing myself for having stopped improving but looking back now I'm realising that it was a matter of maturity. Your frame of mind grows just as you do so there's no point in regretting lack of insight from those early days. The best thing to do to avoid stagnation is to make sure that you keep on developing your art as well as your mind.

Mushroom Fighter!

Saturday was mine and Faye's workshop on "Designing your futuristic manga hero" at the Victoria & Albert museum.
We decided to approach the subject by showing that inspiration for outlandish character designs can be found just about anywhere. Google image search provided some random imagery and I did a pre-design on the train to London...


... after a quick breakfast. I swear, these make me look forward to train journeys.


Can you spot all the images used in her design? It shouldn't be too difficult.

The backstory involves a future where humans are cultivating space mushrooms which are in constant peril of being garbled up by giant grasshopper-like aliens. Our heroine is a pestilence fighter, wearing a lethal chemical pack and brandishing a set of anti-pestilence emitters, whose light repel any hoppers which might sneak up on her from the back.

Right. Maybe it's not an award winning design, but you get the idea.
The second point we wanted to make in the workshop was that a world and a back story is essential for a believable character design.

Life drawing at The Shop

Fridays 2-4 pm, The Shop, Cambridge is on my agenda from now onwards for life drawing sessions.
Today was the second time I went and we had a male model, which apparently is quite rare. Whenever I've been to life drawing so far it's been pretty evenly distributed between male and female models, so I'm guessing my sampling population is still too small.


The life drawing classes are organised by the Cambridge University Architecture Society and is open to the public. Each session is a mere £2 for members (anyone can join for £15) and £4 for non-members.
The sessions are quite informal. There is a teacher who will dictate the length of the poses and suggest things to focus on, but you are also free to do your own studies. Drawing material is supplied, but today I grabbed my own pad since I find huge sheets of loose paper hard to handle.

It 's interesting how the first drawing of the day turned out rather badly, but how things got progressively better. It's a bit like exercising I guess, warm-ups are needed.

Most of the poses were around 5 minutes. These are roughly in the order they were drawn.

If there's something I don't get it's blind drawing, where you look only at the model and not at the paper. The teacher was introducing it as a way to loosen up and get some new marks down. We were also encouraged to use out left hand. When it comes to blind drawing I found that it doesn't matter what hand I use, the result ends up the same, which is pretty interesting.
The final pose was 25 minutes.

At the moment I have quite a hard time controlling the medium - charcoal in particular, since I have almost no previous experience with it. You can get some nice subtle shades with charcoal by smudging it, but for me it ends up rather messy. Also, drawing big seems essential. With my sligtly-larger-than-A4 sketch pad it was difficult to do any renders at all with charcoal.
Instead, I found it easier to use a soft 6B pencil, only I forgot to bring a sharpener so it quickly got worn down.