Sketches, color, and emotion

With my daily sketching, I’m looking for two things.  First, just that I get in a daily sort of practice so that I can get better at what I do.  Secondly, it’s to explore new techniques and new ideas.

I’ve never really drawn from pictures before, I’ve always pulled everything right out of my head. In some ways that’s great, I can reasonably generate most things that are asked for.  But I think it tends to give my art a look that’s slightly off of the norm.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it is what it is.  But I think sketching from real life or from photos will eventually help me learn how things work together, how they intertwine with one another, far better than what I can do on my own.

That said, it’s very frustrating when I look at the final effect.  When I build something from scratch, the rules in my head connect everything, and it looks ok.  Looking at a picture though, I’m having problems sticking with proportion, angles and how things really do work together.

I think that’s because I’m more interested in the parts that I’m sketching from a picture, and less the overall piece.  That’s the reverse of how I do art from scratch, when I’m so concerned constantly with how things are together.

It’s a learning process, one that you can see on my Flickr sketching project.  Many of them aren’t so good (a few of them are pretty decent though), but I’m trying to accept that it’s part of the process and continue forth.

Instead of wallowing in the idea that the last sketch is so-so at best, I did something about it.  I worked with it in Photoshop a bunch, and below is the result.  It actually came out far better than the original sketch, and it’s a reminder to me that I just need to work things out, and maybe I’ll get somewhere yet.

I call this piece, “Then rang the bells both loud and deep. God is not dead nor doth he sleep.”