The conclusion of the 50 days drawing project

Day 50

This is it! Final day. I'll let the picture to tell the story as there is no way I could do it any better. Thank you all for visiting this blog during these three months. And thank you for your support and the encouragement. 

Doodling on second last day of the project

Day 49.

As the final day of the project approaches I find myself not quite as productive as I wanted myself to be. My head is just... blank. Maybe I'm a bit fatigued of the project itself by now or maybe it's just the realization of that it's almost over. Or maybe it's the "Pirates - Tides of Fortune" which I started to play 4 days ago on facebook. That thing is the time killer. But who knows. :) Or maybe it's the "produce something every day and move on to next thing" - process which have taken slightly a toll on me as many times I don't have time to finalize something I want because I have to move on to next  day and next thing.

Anyway. It has been great so far and I've learned a lot but at times I have this feeling I could take whatever task I'm working on and perfect it further for more than couple of hours or a day. So, if you're reading this and you're thinking about doing something similar as me, one lesson for me was to pace yourself in a way and that you have tasks with different length. Try working on something for longer than just one day.

So, tomorrow is the final day. I have to think how to summarize this whole experience and in meanwhile, here are doodles from today.

Ryder concepts

Day 48.

Various ideas/concepts on "rider" girl theme with brushes by Maciej Kucera. Still learning how to apply those properly.

The Pilot

The Chase

Rider girl, sketch.

What two years old could ask one to draw?

Day 47.

This morning before my two years old daughter (2 yrs 2 months) was taken to the daycare, I asked her what I should draw today. Here's what she said: "A robot." What kind of a robot? "Hedgehog." Where does it live? "In Africa." Okay. Actually it was the same thing she said day before, but I just didn't came up with anything on that day, but since the same wish was repeated there was no other way than start drawing.

So, I did some sketching out on paper and came up with the following. I have no idea if my daughter will make any sense of it when I'll pick her up from the daycare and show the result to her. In meanwhile, here it is:

African hedgehog robot

Around 3 hours of experimenting in Photoshop. First sketching out, then "finalizing" the final outcome, which is still quite rough.

Forest in moonlight

Day 46.

Further testing of brushes by Maciej Kucara. Almost found ones, suitable for the purpose (bush, grass..). Fast sketch, test. Around 30 min on Photoshop. I like especially the light on the foreground, white reflection, kinda accidental. :)

Cuteness

Day 46.

As in contrast to stuff posted previously today thought about drawing something cute. I didn't have to go further than my 2 year old daughter for the inspiration. :)

Random ideas in digital

Day 46.

Was testing out brushes by Maciej Kuciara  which I downloaded yesterday. The package of brushes is huge. So huge that I only scratched the surface of the brush package while testing out some ideas and probably abused most of them rather than used them in an intended way. Here are some of the sketches. All in Black & White.

 

Visual Development, random ideas

Day 45.

Was looking at the interesting tutorial by Noah Bradley about Master Classes (will do those exercises at some point!), and sketching out some ideas with graphite pencils on my sketch pad at the same time.

Here are few rather fast outcomes on several ideas/concepts, all done in photoshop.

Helsinki dystopia

We live by the sea here in Helsinki. Was exploring the idea of the flood and remains of the city with people coping with the situation. Rough sketches, in total around 1hour.

The dock.

Can't escape sci-genre. That's just too deep in me! :) So here it is a rough sketch (1 hour in photoshop) of a dock with medical ship landing. The idea was to add some people running towards the landing ship, add more contrast to the drawing and make the whole thing more angular, edgy and interesting, but I'll leave this to rest for now.

Castle in sunlight

Day 44

Digital drawing. Castle in a greenish light, the sun is setting down behind the horizon. Took me surprisingly lot of work to establish somewhat natural balance in overall image, also between the front and the background. Nevertheless, fun exercise. 2-3 hours on Photoshop.

Rescue Mission

Day 43

Digital drawing of vehicle on the rescue mission, moving through arctic-like scenery.
Photoshop 2-3 hours.

Down the hill

Day 42

Just couldn't make up my mind today, what to work on today. Did try to draw the GT version digitally of the old Moskvitch 412 car we used to have when I was a kid, but it didn't work out. Somehow lines felt out of place, so I thought to continue with that another day. Next time, when working on that car concept I better do it analog first, draw several versions with pencils on my sketchpad to find that line work I'm satisfied with and then take it to Photoshop. In addition to the car concept today, sketched out one scenery with the castle on top, but that somehow didn't have the novelty for me, so I left it aside for the time being.

So because I felt its one of those days when you know it's not working out, I thought it was the perfect time to work on other stuff for your mind to have a rest. Therefore I took the sketch I did yesterday with two kids on the sledge going fast down the hill, and started working on that. Added some color and something I would never do - a filter. I used the "sponge" filter in photoshop and that gave the whole thing a slight postcard feeling. Even though, this is not 100% ready yet, and values are not quite right, there's something in this image I like. Overall, 2 hours of work and I'll get back to this one again at some point. 

Preparation for the take off

Day 41.

No more portraits for the next 10 days or at least I'll do my best to avoid drawing any portraits deliberately. From now on, it's only digital: photoshop, maybe sketchbook pro too at some point. I use photoshop on daily basis as a designer, but to use it as a drawing tool as an artist... To me that's completely different story and that's why I feel I need to spend some time to work on getting familiar with digital drawing.

As the first exercise I picked up (suprise! :) ) sci-fi theme, with the pilot sitting in the cockpit of the machine of some sort, fiddling through buttons etc, as if waiting for the take off. I ended up working pretty much the whole day. The first image was born after 3-4 hours and the final one for today in 6-7 hours. Sounds crazy to spend that much time, but that was mostly because of constant fixing and painting over. The lesson learnt during this exercise is to draw outlines first and do color blocking as the last thing, when the composition is ready. Otherwise you'll spend too much of valuable time overdoing things.

Javier Bardem

Day 40.

Last portrait for this project

10 days left after this one! Man, it feels weird. 40 days have passed and even though I feel I'm slowly getting hang of this, portrait-drawing-thing there's still so much to learn and improve the technique. However and despite I want on one hand continue with portraits, on the other I feel I should hurry up and move on to other subjects as the project will end quite soon.

Therefore during next 10 days, I'll focus more on depicting environments and people (maybe animals), mechanical objects (maybe sci-fi) in it and will use digital drawing as the media. So more of that tomorrow, but today here it is, pencil drawing of Javier Bardem. Inspired by the movie "Biutiful" me and my wife saw yesterday.

Javier Bardem.

2 Hours with graphite pencils and 1 hour experimenting with colors in Photoshop.

Digital drawings: City ambush & Mangrove Forest.

Day 39. 

Couple of fast digital drawings. First one is "city ambush" (working title, bare with it). Spent around an hour in photoshop on it. The second, called "mangrove forest", which I actually did yesterday ended up looking something else than what mangrove forest looks like I think, but looks dramatic enough. The only thing which it misses now is LIFE to me. It looks like something is about to happen... Not sure what. I let it rest for a while, maybe I'll come up with something.

City ambush

Mangrove Forest

Hideout

Day 39

Wanted to do some drawing in digital today. The way I typically work, even in digital is that I create rather fast thumbnail sketches by hand on paper to get the feel for overall composition up until I think I've found something interesting. Then I scan it and import to photoshop (or other software). I do tend to draw without references in front of me if I feel like imagining something, but if I feel uncertain how something is drawn, there's no other way than look for the reference. Because if not, you'll get unnatural result or something will be a bit off.



In this case I did look for reference images of mountains, boulders and rocks. I bumped into amazing article by John Muir Laws about how to draw rocks. I do highly recommend it.

After spending some time drawing out rocks, and believe me, there's tons of rock types, so it's not that easy as it sounds! I felt like I had an idea what the drawing will be like. I wanted to picture somebody hiding behind pile of rocks. Somebody who'd likely to completely avoid the confrontation but would do it if he/she needs to. Not a typical ambush situation that is. At the beginning I even thought about making it a robot/machine chasing men, but at the end I felt like using men to even out chances of survival of those who are in the hideout. But who'll win in the end and will they be discovered at all - no idea.



The work itself: Original sketch on paper 30 min. Digital work in photoshop around 1,5 hours.

Pumping Iron

Day 38

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Legendary. 1,5-2 hours with graphite pencils on sketch paper.

The Dragon

Day 38.

Bruce Lee, one of childhood/youth movie stars. 1 hour sketch with graphite pencils.

Paul Giamatti

Day 37 Portrait.

Paul Giamatti, one of my favorite actors. The first movie I saw him in was Sideways I think and I liked him ever since. He just had that cheekiness, charisma and the subtleness in the humor in his roles.

So, the work. Graphite pencils on A4 sketch paper. Had a bit of struggle with this one in terms of resemblance of the actor, and did several adjustments of positining his lift eye (his left), but at the same time had fun with getting the shading of the skin right. I think, that part ended up quite nice.

This girl is on fire!

Day 36 portrait

Alicia Keys. Did this one from of the suggestion of my wife. Thanks Taru! :) 2 hours pencil drawing, 1 hour coloring in photoshop. I also had her eyes slightly adjusted, as the placement was not initially right.

Also the original file

Here Alicia ended up having eyes a bit too apart. Luckily we have photoshop! ;)

Борис Немцов (Boris Nemtsov)

Day 35 Portrait

For the sake of remembering. Wouldn't normally draw politicians, but wanted to draw Boris so I would remember. Couple of hours of work in total, first an hour of pencil drawing, then thought to apply ink on top of it and finally coloring in photoshop.

Second take on Leonardo Dicaprio

Day 34 Portrait: Leonardo Dicaprio

As you might or might not remember, I drew Leonardo once before on the 8th day of the project. You can see the result here. I guess there's slight resemblance and I think I was somewhat even satisfied back then, but still in retrospective the result could have been better.

So, take 2. 

For a start I thought that taking different photo reference would help. This is because in the first portrait of Leonardo I used photo reference which appeared to me to be slightly photoshopped, there's something with lighting or something is... wrong.  To me Leonardo doesn't have his "typical" characteristics visible enough in that photo. Anyway. The lack of these characteristics to me might have caused poor starting point to draw the portrait. So, the lesson learnt is: Always pick up the photo reference where you can see the true character of the person you're drawing.

The following portrait is therefore take two on Leonardo and even though I can see here and there possible improvements, in general, I'm satisfied with the result and it was fun also to try markers along graphite pencils just to bring this sort of stylized feel.

1 hr, graphite pencils (also a hue of color pencils) and markers on A4 sketch paper.

Heart of Gold

Day 34. Neil Young

1 hr with graphite pencils on A4 sketch paper (Fabriano, 90 gm/m).

Day 33: All Digital

Sea castle & Hayao Miyzaki

Today was apparently to be all about Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. I was looking for some inspirational images and bumped into one from Porco Rosso and used that for the reference as I thought colors were great. 

Here's an initial sketch with 2 steps, outlines and initial color draft. Spent around 1,5 hours, drawing outlines and getting the feel of colors in Photoshop.

Then, after working a while on the scenery and being quite satisfied with the result so far but felt that having a break and coming back to it with fresh eyes later would do some good. So. Had a break and felt that I could continue with the "theme" of Studio Ghibli and got an idea of drawing Mr. Hayao Miyazaki himself. I'm a huge fan of his art and have been since childhood when I first saw Totoro and later on most if not all of his works, so it's a pleasure to draw this amazing person.

Anyways, here it is. 1,5 hours in Photoshop.

And what comes to the "sea castle", I think it needs "something", so I'll let it rest and come back to it later at some point.

Day 32 portrait

Martti Suosalo

Feels good to get back to drawing after the weekend. Just realized I didn't draw any Finns. Here it goes, Martti Suosalo. One of the best Finnish actors in my opinion. 1,5 hours with graphite pencils on A4 sketch paper.