Poseidon and stuff

Once again, it's been a while.

I've been fiddling around with digital stuff a bit. Tom got an iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil and it's freaking amazing. It's inspired me, with my old iPad and a nice enoughish Adroit stylus, and it's gotten me going.

This allows me to get into digital drawing and art. I still SOOOOOO need to work on my basic art skills (namely, use of value and color) before I get too far with the pastels or another medium, so I'm hoping that I can keep my interest up enough to get through these elementary hurdles so that I can REALLY explore whatever talent I might have. I think the whole concept of value will be much easier to learn digitally because I'm really not getting too distracted by the MEDIUM itself .... So.

I've taken some online lessons (w charcoal, pen) and that just really hasn't gelled (I'm such a slow, procrastinating starter and get sooo frustrated that I don't have the basic skill level to back up my (arguably(?sp) NOT basic talent level), so now I've got Tom teaching me and guiding me w what I should be working on.

SO! We're starting out in black and white. I've taken the photo of Poseiden here,







And brought it into the digital painting program Procreate. Please keep in mind that the following images are essentially TRACED and thus are total copies and not really indicative of any ability on my part!! This lesson is not about my drawing skills. Having said that,

.... I'm trying to focus on defining Form with Value, so I basically gave myself a limited grayscale and came up with these two pieces.








I think my next assignment is to try to add color to the image, keeping the same value structure. I'm also learning the program as I go, so that's a bit of a challenge too (tho not as difficult as fighting with pastels or paints, at this early stage).

Looking at these now, a few days after I did them, I think my highlights should be just a bit lighter in places ... They each took about an hour.

Then I did a tradition pencil value study (on paper) of the same figure; this took me a couple of hours:




and I am pretty pleased with it. I am again LOST with hair and mustache, but that's a problem for later. I used an HB pencil and, for he first time ever, used a stump for blending, I like it!

I had to stop here, even though it's only maybe 85% complete. Everything I did for this point on seemed to detract from the sketch rather than improving it, so I folded.