Ink practice

I was traveling for the past two weeks. Which means that I didn't do much drawing or painting.

The result? My eye-hand coordination degraded quite a bit. (It happens every time I don't practice for a while.)

So today, I decided to go back and work exclusively on my drawing fundamentals again. Proportions, values, mass... that kind of stuff.

No colors. Just line and tonal values.

I started with warm ups. I drew nothing but basic shapes, cylinders, ovals, squares, lines... for an hour or so.

Then, I went on to drawing Asaro head for a bit.

Only after all of that preparation, I started with "serious" work.

But, rather than using photographs as a reference, I've put on some instructional videos and practiced drawing the presenter as quickly as I could.

It's quite interesting to see how the ink sketches improved.

Here's the first one (after all the practice above):

Notice how rigid and clunky it still is, even after all the warm up. I've spent the most time on it and the result is not that great.

But then, something changed. The rest of the drawings turned out visibly better...

I suspect it's because I decided to approach them more like paintings. And instead of starting with line drawing, I used the brush pen from the get go.

Here's a few of them from this last batch: