I have been drawing too, you know

And the good news is that they look like human beings. The first one is supposed to be Audrey Hepburn. There's this pretty famous photo of her that I like a lot, which gave me the idea to try some charcoal practice. In this one I sketched her head and face, realized her nose was too big (although according to initial measurements it was right), fixed her up some more, and started shading using one of my recently purchased "Willow Charcoal" sticks. In retrospect the nose is still too big, and the head should be shorter overall. I do like the shading for the most part. The blacks are way more black than I've been able to get with the 8B pencil, so I think once I'm combining charcoal, conté, pencils and I can make some cool stuff.

The next one is supposed to be Monica Bellucci, one of my adolescent crushes. Someone shrank her mouth. I don't know - must've been aliens or something.

She's very good in Maléna, and here's the trailer.

In other news I picked up the Danish version of Draw Like Da Vinci. It's not as in-depth as I'd like, but I'm sure I'll learn something.

A free education in art history, part 4 - The Medici

The Medici were a group of bankers in Italy who played a very important role in funding some of the greatest Renaissance art. They're kind of important, and what do you know - there's a documentary about them.

It runs slightly under an hour. I feel slightly smarter having watched it.


Also, two important milestones for this site were reached recently. Firstly it has passed 1000 page views, which I'd say has to be the record for any drawing blogs created by Norwegians named Andreas in 2012.

Secondly it had its first visitor who came here from a google query. The person was looking for Jessica Alba's cousin, and probably not my drawing, which I find kind of funny.

But I hear you ask, but what about drawing updates? Well I've finished up Art Academy - Beginning To Draw, which was the very first video I started watching back in June. It made me realize that I need conté sticks too. I've also drawn Monica Belluci. The deal, if I can remember it correctly, was that she was supposed to visit me, but instead I've had to settle for a photo. Next up is Audrey Hepburn. She didn't reply to my messages, so yet again I'm going the .jpg route.

A free education in art history, part 3 - Raphael

Nope, not this guy.

But instead, this guy.

Sure he didn't rescue the world or whatever on a routine basis, but he did make some awesome art.

If you've got about 45 minutes to spare then you could do far worse than checking out this documentary.

If you're want more then here's one that runs for two hours. Are you up for it?

Also, as a bonus, here's an interesting round-table discussion on techniques for learning art.

Climbing the mountain #3 (NSFW)

I'm going to spare you of photos of weird looking contours and gestures today. I also found a better site for gestures, which helps. Today I used that, along with TV shows. I found the latter a fun challenge because obviously the gestures are changing all the time, so I have to keep the mental image while I'm drawing.


After finishing the workout I drew another naked girl. This is probably not safe for work, depending on where you work.

One difference that I noticed drawing this girl was that I'm starting to incorporate the mindsets when drawing gestures and blind contours. I don't measure angles quite as carefully anymore, and I'm using blind contour drawing here and there to good effect. Also, I'm screwing up less and getting stuff done faster.


TNWTD statistics so far:
Total time from start to finish: 375 hours / 15 days and 15 hours
Time spent drawing: 9 hours


Contour drawings: 22
Gesture drawings: 135
Percentage: 2.4%
Times considered quitting: 0

Climbing the mountain #2

I haven't yet decided how I'm going to structure these updates, because the bulk of them won't be very exciting, pretty, or probably even educational. Contour and gesture drawings are good things for an artist to practice, but it's not something I plan on showing off to my guests. Still though, there's a possibility that some of you readers are considering following the same course, and are curious in the development of the "scribbles". Because of that I think I'll include some that are representative of the progress, and focus on the supplementary things that I draw.

Today was the first day of gestures, and I did 70 using posemaniac's 30 second pose page. The author wants the student to use a nude model as often as possible. Unfortunately that's very difficult to come by, so I will be using a mixture of that page, drawing people on TV, people outside, and so on.

Looking at other people's progress in doing this book it seems like the very quick gesture drawings don't change all that much, but the ones where they have more time do change quite a bit. It's a lot about trying to feel the pose, and to translate that with regards to energy, weight balance, and so on.

Without further ado, here's something to look at.

TNWTD statistics so far:
Total time from start to finish: 375 hours / 15 days and 15 hours
Time spent drawing: 6 hours

Contour drawings: 18
Gesture drawings: 70

Percentage: 1.6%
Times considered quitting: 0

A free education in art history, part 2 - Albrecht Dürer

While roaming around art related sites looking for fun Renaissance stuff I stumbled across a German named Albrecht Dürer. Apparently he was an essential guy to check out, and when reading my huge book on drawing masters the selection of his stuff stands out in many ways. The amount of detail is ridiculous. I didn't know anything about him, except that I liked his style.

I don't like being clueless about things, or people that I like, so it's time for part 2 of the education in art history.

There are a few documentaries about him on Youtube. I like this one.

Kimon Nicolaïdes built a mountain

The mountain is called The Natural Way to Draw, and I'm at its base. The book has daily workloads of about three hours, including small breaks.

As you can see day 1 has a lot of blind contour drawing. The first time I tried this, in "Drawing on the right side of the brain" I found it very hard, not very useful, and definitely annoying. This time I'm doing it slightly differently. I start by drawing as much of the contour as I can in one go, look at the drawing, move the pencil to the next starting point, look away, and draw some more. This way I can judge smaller sections of work, and it looks less terrible than the first time. What more or less sold me on the idea this time was a section that you can read about here. Seeing that you can make such a statue without actually looking impressed me a lot. This time I was focusing a lot more, trying to "feel" the subject as I went along the contour.

(also did some basic line and circle practice)

Yesterday I linked a discussion thread of a guy who went on the same journey as me. He was following the book very closely, and got a lot of "are you sure this is wise?"-questions along the way. Often they would encourage him to diversify a bit and try other approaches as well. This is basically what I will be doing. What I like about TNWTD is having a schedule to follow, as well as the large amount of work along the way. The thing is though, there are other ways of drawing figures too, such as following Figure Drawing by Andrew Loomis - probably the most recommended book on the subject at conceptart.org. Additionally there's the matter of anatomy and detail in general. I don't intend on going a year without working on those areas too, so as of now the idea is to follow my drawing workout as provided by the book, and supplement that with other fun stuff.

(made it to cartoon character #21 of 101)

TNWTD statistics so far:
Total time from start to finish: 375 hours / 15 days and 15 hours
Time drawn: 3 hours

Contour drawings: 18
Gesture drawings: 0

Percentage: 0.8%
Times considered quitting: 0