More Work

I’m secretly really enjoying the training period of my new job, because it means I get to make study sketches of really, really great quality art. I’ve been looking at a lot of Disney stuff, so legendary artists like Glen Keane, and making study copies. But this time, I’m actually learning construction in drawing and sketching as I draw. It isn’t mindless copying, but actually analysing the shapes, lines, and forms that underlie each sketch and every composition. It’s great fun, actually. Being surrounded by monitors and Wacom tablets has also meant that I’ve fallen in love with my traditional old school tools again. I’m the only one in the entire studio who draws using pencil and paper, so my space is rather conspicious with all those pencil shavings. But I look forward to work every morning, which I realize makes me pretty lucky.

So for instance, I began this sketch with a bunch of rapidly drawn lines that analyzed the shapes in the reference image I was using (A Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild promotional art image). 22 year old me would’ve mapped out the details like points on an invisible graph and acheived a respectable resemblence, but my now 24 year old self is quickly learning the secrets they teach in traditional art academies. These are the secrets that will help me progress beyond a good observer and into a competent creator and visualizer in my own right.

The result was that I worked much faster. I like sanguine sketches very much, so I went wild with my sanguine pencil, and later used a nice dark 6B Faber Castell 9000 series to emphasize the bolder marks. I also went through the drawing practice folder assigned to me by my Head of Department and did some line of action studies.