Oops sorry, I should have made that more clear Colleen! Those are oils, wet-in-wet... the ones above that were pastel and pencil!
now... I can breathe a sigh of relief (and maybe find time to clean my house
) because I have finished my 100 also
(I actually finished them yesterday, 2 days before the end of this challenge's duration!)
here's the last 11!
assortment of pencils... I'm not keen on the shire, I gave him funny legs.
oil/acrylic studies of a Standardbred and Friesian, and the same Welsh Cob stallion I sketched earlier
page of a Lipizzaner (never sure how to spell that one) stallion who I just love, he is so expressive and proud-looking. The galloping one looks odd, it was the photo distortion... I purposely chose that photo as it emphasised his compactness, despite the weird angle. The head/neck shot on the left, I realised I had sketched out the head at a bit too extreme an angle, so what did I do?... I just turned the paper a bit and did the whole thing at an angle
nothing to say I can't do that! LOL
Number 100, which actually I like probably the least out of all of them... but no matter. They're done!
And, since Colleen asked if I could do some kind of work-in-progress to show how I sketch, well I have attempted to document it in some way... excuse the terrible nighttime photos!
I break everything into main shapes, and rough them out first. For some reason I seem to usually start with the chest/shoulder area, I just find it easier to build things up from this starting point. I mark it down as a roughly three to four-sided shape - a curved line for the point of shoulder, a slope down into the chest, then round off the bottom of the chest, finishing with a line coming down off the point of shoulder and connecting at the 'elbow' behind the foreleg. From this starting point comes the neck, then I'll usually block in a roughly rectangular tapering shape for the head, along with the cheek/jawbone, and mark in roughly where the eye sits. Then back to the curve of the belly, the back/topline, and a squareish shape for the hindquarters. While I'm doing this I'll mark in whatever forms stand out in the reference, I'm at a loss to explain what exactly I mean lol... but if you look at the first picture, you can see in the hindquarter area the shapes I've marked in. (I like putting in lots of curves and suggestions of form and muscle, anything I can pick up from the reference... after a while certain things stick in your mind when you see and draw them all the time, certain muscles that are always visible or well-defined such as the ones in the hindquarters or shoulder.)
For the legs, I start at the top trying to concentrate on how they 'grow' out of the shoulder/hindquarter, and then roughly mark down to the knees. You can see in the picture I make VERY rough marks for where the knee/hock sits, then a simple line down to the fetlock joints. I make a little circular mark for the fetlock joints, then mark out the angle of the pasterns, and usually make some kind of indication of where the hoof will make contact with the ground - sometimes I'll extend these into horizontal lines if I need help lining up the legs.
Once you've got that far, pretty much all you need is there, in basic shapes. Then I just define where needed, fill in the details, and draw in the legs (I normally leave them til last, apart from the tail). I've been using the sanguine oil pencil for sketching lately, which is fairly un-eraseable, so I've just left my mistakes. The hindlegs are slightly off (they are angled a bit too far underneath him compared to the reference).
One thing I've drummed into myself to do when sketching is to always see 'reference points' in my ref photo, and compare them to my sketch, checking angles and lengths against each other. I do this as I'm sketching - checking the angle of the head against the slope of the shoulder, etc. Also if I run into trouble with a certain area, for example where the knee sits, I mentally draw lines between points in my ref photo, for example a horizontal line from the knee back to the hindleg, and then do the same for my drawing, to check I have things lined up.
I hope that made some sense.
Thank you for all your encouragement during this, I have to say it has helped change my thinking a bit, improved my sketching technique... and pulled me out of an 'art block', I am very glad I took part in this and I have enjoyed seeing everyone else's progress too. Thanks to all of you for the inspiration, and to Colleen for setting up this challenge!!
CONGRATS Colleen! And thank you for starting up this thread, and keeping us all spurred on (bad pun, even worse of me to point it out)
Pastel and oil pencil what is which here... is the white pastel, how did it react to the oil pencil
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