Left Hand Sketches

So here's a quick update (for once). I drew this last night before going to bed. As you can see on the closeup there's a bit of smearing/ink buildup on certain parts. That's mostly because I'd been up late playing videogames on my computer with the lights off so my vision was kind of blurry after I turned on the light. And also these pens tend to bleed a little. But I wanted to try something different so I used Paper Mate InkJoy ballpoint pens, mostly for the colors.

Different versions of my left hand

They're alright as far as art pens but that's not exactly their function. I've been wanting to try these other pens, Bic Cristal Pocket Scent ballpoints but it's a bitch finding them in the U.S. A couple of users on DeviantArt who do amazing work with ballpoint pens use them to do portraits. I think because of the odd colors that can be blended very nicely to match skin tones.

Work in Progress (untitled, Moleskine)

Okay, so I've stated numerous times in the past that I have a hard time with procrastinating when starting a drawing. And it doesn't matter whether it's a sketchbook drawing from my Moleskine or a full blown piece. I find myself posting more unfinished drawings lately. But in some cases I'll post an unfinished drawing if it's taking me too long to finish and I need some content for this blog (as is the case for this post).

The other day I was looking through one of the several poster shipping tubes that I have put away in the corner of my room and I came across a few unfinished pieces. One of them I stopped halfway through because of a rather interesting object I decided to add to it. I'll explain in another post once I get a chance to pin it down and take pictures of it (since the drawing has been in the tube for several years now, it naturally rolls together like a poster). But I digress...

Another unfinished (for now) sketch

The problem with me is that I don't usually start a drawing with much of a goal in mind. Meaning that I don't know where it's going really. An example is the image above. While the two images don't really look cohesive, eventually they will once it's finished. Though I'm not sure how I'm going to accomplish that at this point.

Therein lies my biggest problem, not enough planning or organization. I just start something with not much of an idea as to what's going on really. That's usually the reason why sometimes I don't complete a drawing, that or the drawing just sucks. But then other times, in those rare instances, I end up with a drawing that's far beyond my own expectations of what I'm capable of.

Found Art

I've been thinking about doing some art outside of the sketchbook I usually draw in. So I decided to try and complete a piece for an art show coming up soon. As I was pulling out some mat boards I found this old unfinished drawing.

I kind of remember this drawing, but honestly I don't even know how old it is. I would say maybe 8 years at least. It's an alright drawing, nothing special or great but I kind of like the fish tail on the lower-left hand side. I tried to take a good closeup picture of the fin to show better detail. This is the best I could do.

closeup of partially finished fish

unfinished ink drawing

Ballpoint Pen Practice

I've either taken a break from drawing or just been lazy recently because I haven't been keeping up with posts this year. Usually I start up again whenever I see something, or someone, that inspires me. This time it was the work of Jim Rugg whose work I first became familiar with from the Drawn Blog which I frequent on a daily basis. His ballpoint pen drawings are awesome to say the least.

They remind me of old drawings and sketches I used to do in class a long time ago when I was in high school. I would have 3-5 sheets of notebook paper stacked on top of one another. The top one or two sheets I would use for actual note taking. The next couple of sheets were the ones I used for drawing and then I would usually have a final bottom sheet to give the ones I was drawing on a softer surface so that it would be easier to shade and bring about a smoothness to the pen, rather than pen and paper on a hard solid surface. Had I kept all the "doodles" (I hate that word) that I created back then (and some in college), I would have at least a hundred. But sadly they're all gone... Then again, I doubt they were even as good as I thought they were back then.

Unfinished practice in ballpoint

I wanted to try it again. Even though I mentioned in earlier posts that I was going to try ballpoint pens again, I have yet to fully experiment with them (besides this drawing). I'm going to look into getting a set of colored pens and really bust out an actual, complete drawing. Until then, there's this one from my moleskine.

Obviously it's not finished and I don't plan on finishing it unless I feel that I could add more to it. It started as a picture I found online, but mostly though the face and right arm are what I took from the original. Once I started with the pen he looked different from what I had planned so I changed it up quite a bit. So much so that even if you saw the picture you wouldn't find much, if any, similarities.

Finished Face (Ink & Marker Complete)

Fully inked

I've finally gotten around to finishing this drawing... well, as finished as it can be. I still need to go over it in ink and color again to get some of the patchy spots and fill in some of the ink that faded when I erased all the visible pencil markings. But it's done for the most part.

The first drawing is the completed ink version which, I have to admit, looks really good. Actually it looks better than the real version in my sketchbook. I think that's because of the high contrast when scanning a black and white photo with my scanner.

Fully colored

I think I might try some color changes on the inked version in Photoshop just to see what other colors it might have looked good in. Considering that now, I should have done that to begin with before I colored it in. I didn't really have a color scheme in mind when I started adding color, but luckily it came out looking good.