Jeff skull attempt. open for thoughts and critique on the lines, thanks :)

I researched the list provided and found a couple I really liked but I went with Glen Keane for this assignment. His sketches and line work really spoke to me. He has a sense of movement and flow in his work I really admire. This assignment has certainly inspired me to study more masters!

Studying Dave Malan. Honestly, I've been terrified to do this assignment...I'm still not sure I did it right, but at least I tried. I was a bit confused whether I can do a sketch first, or am I only "allowed" to use as many lines as the original artist?

This morning I started on the Roberto de la Torre examples. He was a new artist to me and to my surprise I enjoyed trying to copy his characters. Then I chanced upon somebody's post about one of his horse drawings, so I googled for a Torre tiger drawing. I was delighted to find this one (screenshot) as it gave me a chance to copy his then progress to one of my own tiger photos. Tbh I lost the plot a bit on the outer fur and just started adding light strokes, but I recovered and added some darker outline hairs. Can anyone give me some advice on how to tackle mid tones in this style. I attach a B&W image of my photo. Thanks!

I ended up drawing the skull example on my warm up pad yesterday. I wanted to keep the drawing so I cut it out. Tbh I struggled with the soft thick lines. As I'd been doing warm us, I was using my 2mm 2B propelling pencil. I have more, so I took the point off another one to use for the softer lines. I'm going to investigate some of Jeff Watts animal sketches after changing upon his sketchbooks tour.

A study of lines of artist Juan Carlos Castagnino. His drawing is in ink, mine in charcoal.

Studying Nico Marlet. He’s an animator and character designer, best known for Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. His work is so cool!! As always my proportions are off, now watching the stick is giving me a headache, I made it so short hahaha but it was pretty fun.

My hand constantly smudging the paper combined with my own lack of control brought the value and edge range down.

Tried to draw a skull but from a photograph.

I did a master study on some of Jeff Watts quicksketches. I believe the original is charcoal on smooth Newsprint, but mine was graphite on regular printer paper...for reasons that will become clear later. Thanks to finding actual videos of his quicksketch process, I was able to distill some notes on his pencil grip, line types, and how he uses them to represent form. I also bought an easel and coloured pencil for this one, because J.W. seems to draw on an easel in most videos and this makes sense for his overhand grip. However, since this was a new paper position for me, I kept breaking my delicate charcoal pencil, so I switched to graphite. Despite all these revelations, it was still very difficult to copy his confident strokes, especially the broad light tapered strokes he often uses to indicate internal forms like muscles. In any case, I now understand what lies beneath even the simplest sketches of a master, and will keep practicing. Apparently both sketches took Jeff 6-10 minutes, but it took me 2 hrs total; the second one being twice as fast as the first.

A study of Eliza nova, a big thing I learned from this demo was to study the way the artist uses there pencil/tool i felt like I was copying the lines in my first attempt of Kim jung gi but not copying the way they were made, this time I tried to use my pencil in the same way Eliza used her tool to make the lines, lots of room to grow

Used stuff from Peter Hans dynamic bible and the monster hunter illustrations book.

I tried to study Glen Keane’s line quality.

I studied another David Malan portrait. He uses a lot of lines for shading. I think this is his style and I really like that. I tried to replicate those lines but when I do that, they look just random lines instead of integrated with face. Another challenge was that I used graphite pencils only -perhaps I should use charcoal too.

I sharpened a charcoal pencil for this one. Wow, what a difference. I can easily create the different line types. Only problem is that the sharp lines are too dark and contrast too much with the light blurred lines. Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. Going to use this pencil more often.

I loved having to change the way I hold the pencil to try and replicate some of the lines. The whole process was quite experimental, but I loved trying it.

After a long time, I am resuming this course where I left off.. My attempt.

My first skull ever! Ignore the proportions. I tried, but got lost on the way as I focused on the lines. There’s really so much variety! I struggled with my tools a bit, but that’s what I had: print paper and these pentel woodless charcoal. Question: when you want to draw in charcoal but for a drawing you want to frame ( give or sell) which paper do you use? I know newsprint is not archival, so I’m curious, can you get similar lines on a “proper paper”?