Sketch of the week #1

Already I'm enjoying the ramifications of doing a sketch of the week. After forgetting I'd planned on this and spending my week on gestural quick studies, I remembered it. Thus, I found myself encouraged to sit down and commit to something today, when normally I can often find myself only drawing on the bus.

I decided on a safe topic, my old favorite subject that, honestly, I draw far too much: heads at 3/4 rotation, lit from a side and above, caricatured and old.

I also discovered a great trick for blurring today. I scan these in at 600 DPI to get a lot of the fine line details. The problem is that then the little scratchy lines aren't blended into the full value regions I'd want. Normally I'd set a copied layer to multiply, and blur it to get the lines turned into shapes. But a quicker, dirtier way of doing it is just use the blurring power of aliased resizing; just transform the layer (Command + T) and shrink it down. Then transform again back to the full size, using snaps to get it pixel perfect.

www.oscarts.org
oscarbaechler@gmail.com

Sketchbook dump, birthday style!

First off, let me say that I'm going to switch to a "sketch of the week" formula for getting my art off of my daily sketching habits. Two main reasons for that; first, scanning half a sketchbook always eats a whole evening. Second, I think I'd enjoy the challenge of getting out a really solid drawing out every week, rather than doing too much flippant quick drawings.

That being said, on to the art.

The premise of this is a Heavy Metal-esque space harem, where some space dude's women just sit around bathing and smoking space hookah. Undoubtedly influenced by the egyptological art of the Napoleonic era, which had a number of fantastic harem paintings. (Do a GIS for Jean Leon Gerome if you need a new desktop background.)

A dinosaur.

Pachycephalosaurus drawn from a skull at the Colorado dinosaur museum.

Also, dinosaurs and birds have a freakin' bone cupping their eye! The sclerotic ring, look it up.

Compositional exercise. I find I'm doing more drawings like this, where I focus on perspective, figure and element placement more than full-on rendering of details.

Elf head study.

Monster thing.

Lady on the bus I drew. Good to get away from imagination drawing all the time

Should have some more news coming soon...

www.oscarts.org
oscarbaechler@gmail.com