So, following yesterday’s face painting, I got extra inspired to go back and work on some of the facial features more, hence the following noses and eye sketches.
The cool thing is, with all of the practicing I’ve been doing I think I’m actually starting to get better at some of this drawing stuff. With the noses especially the lines were coming out more or less where I wanted them more often than not, which is a nice change of pace. It would be nice to reach a point where I don’t have to fight my hand to get a line placed where I wanted it to go, and only had to deal with fighting my eyes and brain to actually get things in the correct perspective.
With a little bit of practice under my belt, I decided to go ahead and try a second face study. Practice makes better after all, and I do think that this one came out considerably less Nicholas Cage looking. I did end up falling back on the liquefy tool a little bit to adjust some of the perspective in the final product, but the adjustments weren’t nearly as major as they could have been. All in all I count it as good progress.
I’m also particularly excited because I just realized that Sketchfab, a site for hosting 3d models, also doubles as a great art reference site. I’m already using it as part of my cgcookie.com training, and planned to use it to post up my own 3d models here during the 3d 30/30, but I hadn’t considered the reference benefit of having models that you can rotate around, zoom in on, and adjust the lighting for. And there are whole batches in there that pretty much just exist as anatomical reference guides for artists. In theory I shouldn’t have to wonder what happens to a body part when its viewed from a different angle. You can’t pose them, and I’m not sure I’d trust the mesh deformations when posed anyway, not as a reliable body reference, but still, that’s a wealth of visual information I’ve been overlooking, and I’ll certainly be adding it to my study regimen.