An Indian's Child

Wow, its already February. I've got to get a move on on my New Year's resolutions. 

Now, before I start on my workings during the past week, I wanted to say that yes, I do remember I had started the Robo Man drawing last week and no, I will not be continuing it this week. Frankly, I did have every intention of doing so until I opened it on Painter and just couldn't get the mood for it. Sorry about that. However, this week I've been in a more down to earth mood and thus I have been drawing in my sketchbook during convenient moments at school and home whenever I got the hankering for some led. 

So this week I started on this, a portrait of 'Edward Sharpe' as he is performing in his alter ego, that certainly looks a lot like Jesus holding a microphone and indeed has been mistaken as Jesus several times. Maybe he is, who knows. A modernized one perhaps but you've got to be don't you in the 21st century. 

Anyway, Jesus or not, its not quite finished yet because I had to start on other things during the weekend and didn't find the time yet to finish. I will probably finish this doodle during school next week, if I'm lucky enough. Just to talk about something, I thought I would show you my tools for doing this, even though it is a extremely obvious statement. I like to use the 2B graphite pencil the most, don't know why but I feel as though it always does the job and you can see it has been used the most compared to the 2H and 8B. I haven't found the 2H pencil useful, unless I'm working on hair or something with great detail like that. 

My magic makers are my erasers and my smudge tool, ah I

 could not survive without them. These are what make your life so much easier when drawing with graphite pencils: if you use the grey eraser shown below, its perfect for lightening your colors to your liking without ruining your lines or erasing all your work. On the other hand, the more regular eraser that is also harder and thus, more powerful is great for erasing out detail from your darker surfaces and comes into equal need during your process, or at least my process.

To be honest, mostly for smudging I use my own fingers to do the job but of course, I'm a more get down to it person and I don't mind getting my hands a little dirty sometimes in the name of art. It's not for everyone and that is why we have these awesome little pencil-looking things called smudge tools.

Alright, now that that is all dealt and done with, I'm ready to go on to the next subject. Today I started on this project of an Native American child with a headdress on. After watching a documentary last night on Johnny Cash and his performance in one place or another, I saw these Native Americans in the audience listening to his songs and I just got this light bulb moment and I just had to forget everything else and start drawing. It actually does fit nicely along with the totem poles and the eagles that have featured in my past posts, and I've been eagerly working on it since 12 o'clock this morning.

 So, I just downloaded a picture on my phone of a child with a headdress and another one of a woman wearing another type of headdress and I sort of combined the two; I wish I could post the pictures here but I couldn't download them onto my computer since I downloaded the pictures onto my phone from We Heart It and getting the pictures off my phone onto the computer is too much of an hassle for the day.

Anyway, here is the 15 minute sketch I came up with as a guidance. I opened a layer on top of the canvas so that I could move or re-size the sketch if needed. 

After this, I started blocking in the colors by opening another layer under the sketch layer and turning the opacity to about 85-90%. I also set my sketch layer to Multiply, so that I don't lose any sketch lines. For the block, I use a Digital Airbrush that is a round brush without the point. Also, when blocking its important to use a large brush size, so that you won't worry about the details or waste too much time on refining shapes and ideas; the main point is to get the color values right. 

Here, I've blocked out pretty much all the colors I need and I've started on the background. As you can see, I haven't started on much detail and I've kept my color values fairly simple. I found this stage enjoyable, since you don't have to concentrate on getting the shapes or details correct yet, just get the values of dark and light correct and you're half way there. Because I've used the Digital Airbrush, my image looks quite hazy doesn't it? But this is the point: after refining my picture numerous time, hopefully I will achieve the look of haziness but not too much to make you squint your eyes in order to find some detail.

 At this point, I could choose to implement some alternative colors than just black and white in my picture, but I've made the decision to keep it simple and colorless. 

Now it is time to go into some more detail, not to quite all the way to the nitty gritty as you can see in the picture below. I've added a new layer, so that I can start fading away my sketch lines and finding a more specific shape to the facial characters and the headdress. 

You can see that I've started to reshape the ornaments on the headdress and find a general shape to the face and begin to fade away my sketch lines on a new layer. I've also started adding darker shades of gray to pop out the face of the child and bring more life to the whole atmosphere of the picture and you can see how it has gradually lost its haziness at parts of the image. Honestly, I'm quite frightened to begin on the feathers, since they always require so much attention and detail and frankly I'm not good on feathers, my patience just doesn't last that long. But as they say, practice makes best so I try not to complain too much. 

After this stage, I didn't get too far until I had to start on my weekly blog post right here so there's not much difference to the previous picture and the one below except the ornaments or whatever they are on the headdress. They took quite a while to do, believe it or not. 

 I'm actually pretty psyched to see what will come of this. Now, I can't waste too much time blogging since I've got to get back to work and finish this bad boy so that I have something to show next Sunday..