Tub Time

Got a new commission that is as exciting as it is daunting. I hope I can pull it off!

Bear Claw 9

I can't seem to stop reworking this...! Made a significant change to his nose as well as toying with the original background idea I had planned (and can't seem to get to work). And I've reduced the rendering on the hair again...

Current Mood 11.11.16 part 8

I'm trying to get this series out, but I'm still not certain what techniques I'm using to finish it. So in the meantime, I redrew the hand near-completely.

Bear Claw 8

Sorry, I keep doing little drips and dribbles of this thing... and I keep rendering more and more, but now am wondering if I should reduce and make it feel more spontaneous. The irony of my work is, I take a LOT of time and effort to make it look more effortless, haha

Reading

I didn't want to work on any of my current illustration projects tonight, so I decided to put (digital) ink down on pixels and see what came up. It started with what turned into the profile of a man with a large nose looking down, then he got a long, vintage "Thomas Jefferson" hairdo, before he was holding a book while standing. Mind you, this was all done in one stroke (the silhouette, that is) without lifting my stylus once. It was quite fun! I added teh backgrounds later for some visual context.

Bear Claw 7

I confess: I haven't had much time or energy to draw again once I started with another permalance gig last week. I can barely muster the apropos adjustments to my ongoing drawings. That said, I drew for nearly 3 hours the other day and could NOT for the life of me get the cable knit glove right! But I'm hoping to ace the face. He's looking like a pretty boy (which is not my style) so I'm gonna try and quirk him up a bit, I hope.

Bear Claw 6

I think this is a better direction but maybe in the white context it does look less like knitwork and more like gnarled wood.

Bear Claw 5

I do not know how to render cable knit mittens in watercolor. I really don't. They look like Giger alien appendages.

Bear Claw 4

I'm focusing less on the actual 'claw' and more on the guy supposedly wearing it!

Bear Claw 3

I'm having a hard time (as usual) with constructing the jawline from this pose/point of view, but it's the whole point of the pose: it's what models do all the time, currently. But even as a kid I've tried to draw this pose and it was never easy. Too many things to do: foreshorten, how to draw the nostrils right, how to render the chin and jawline. how to render the bridge of the nose... and all while not copying from a photo (I'm using references, but not the exact position).

Current Mood 11.11.16 part 7

This series is as much a work in progress as my mood about politics. This time I'm cleaning up my 'ink' lines.

Despondent

Fearful of things that may come to pass, and feeling powerless to do anything.

Widespread

The wide 80s shoulders have made a comeback at more than just Balenciaga, and now his eminence Dries van Noten has included them in his FW17 collection. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I was there for that shoulder the first go around in the late 80s, and I don't know if I want to go back to that well.

Bear Claw 2

Subtitled: Bearly There

Hehe. I'm putting this as a placeholder as I have had a busy day and evening.But I did manage to structure the pose of the face, which is one of the harder things for me to do: these upshots are so fashionable right now, but I was always rubbish with rendering them. Hopefully I'm improving.

Bear Claw

This will be anoher fashion sketch I hope to have done fairly soon. Pre-sketch of the idea for now.

Current Mood 11.11.16 part 6

I started it but I'm too in my cups to upload it just now.

edit: uploaded a day later, I basically did tweaks and fixes that wouldn't be as obvious to anyone but me, I don't think. Well, except for this water slick effect.

Strapping 2 (Done, I think)

I'm not quite sure of the shape of the blouson at this point, but I'm putting it out there.

edit: I fixed it, and I did a colored background version, which doesn't looks as fashion-y to me, but I like it for the piece.

Strapping

The overlong belts I first saw styled a few years ago (Fingers Crossed Fall 2015 collection, actually) are reaching the saturation point, but just almost. Milan Vukmirovic's sporty new collection for FW17 featured a utilitarian take on the overlong straps. But while his reference might have been more mundane military or even extreme sports, I saw anime superheroes!

View To A Thrill 4

This was an old homoerotic piece I started in 2014 and never touched again since November that year. I decided to open it up again while I was looking for #FlashbackFriday images I could post to Instagram. Just a little tweaking on the face, but  what I see as a major change in how I draw now, as things that seemed okay then arent now. It's a wonder how we keep learning. Years from now, these selfsame changes might not be improvements and would need to be improved themselves...

CH Poncho Done

I needed to get this out while LCM was just recently finished.

CH Poncho 4

I got so caught up in the face I wondered if I would even bother with the clothing. But I started cleaning it up a bit and might leave it this simple to contract the heavily rendered face.

CH poncho 3

 

Too much alcohol delays the posting process. But while I was having drinks with my friend Ray, we discussed our drawing skills and I brought up the fact that I didn't know how to draw some facial features properly, and how I thought that maybe some of the features on this black man's face were not as authentic. So I tried retooling it a bit.

CH Poncho 2

I love how this turned out. This cross hatch brush—that I have no idea from whence it came, but it's the perfect Stavrinos-y shading brush— made all teh difference in how I rendered this. Now I want to go back and change stuff over using this brush!

CH Poncho

Today was the second day of the London Men's Fashion Week, and I wasn't impressed much with the offerings. I did like the idea of the jacket/poncho put forth by Casely Hayford.

Big Coat Saunter 2

Trying out a style/technique idea Ive been developing/envisioning. Wondering if this can be a signature look for me. It's been something I've been doing over the years but never had a large enough body of work in it to call (or maybe prove) it a personal style yet. Although I have done it as recently as the Blonde Swan pieces of a few days ago.

Yellow Ear 3

It's been almost a year since I first drew this, so I kinda need to finish before the new shows happen again.

More Back 2

Been juggling a few drawings at the same time, going back and forth with things I;d like to finish. I'm still on the fence how to finish these pants.

Big Coat Saunter

I'm going into my Drawing References photos and using them as starting points for study and practice. I started out with an editorial I loved online, but merged it with the runway walk of another shot, using the contraposto of one and the silhouette of the other. Now I just need to know how to paint it!

More Back

I'm still obsessed with drawing large, flowy pants, and a view from behind offers the same sweeping drama as a woman in a gown making a big exit.

Sunny & Bright

I was wondering what my first new drawing of the New Year should be, and I started out by working with some picture references of poses I had wanted to study. I decided to work on my 3/4 view, upward-lifted facial angle. But the pics were of guys with serious model-y expressions, so I drew in a smile (I was quite proud of myself because I extrapolated the right details to draw the smiling mouth without a reference) which changed the whole drawing. Suddenly I went from doing a fashion-y drawing to more of a Bruce Weber type pin up guy. Dunno if I'll finish him beyond these rough pencils but we shall see. For now he's bright and sunny, he's smiling, he's looking up towards the future, and he's getting nekkid. Sounds like the makings of a Happy New Year to me!

10 Years of Drawing

On January 1, 2007, I resolved to draw every day.

It began as a reaction to the realization that— almost 10 years after my mom's death— I was still depressed and had seemingly stopped drawing, something that had always given me joy, something which I felt was a really intrinsic part of myself. So I started this blog, Project 365 (subtitled Draw The Line, because I'm Filipino and love a terrible pun) with the mandate to draw something—anything, good or bad—and post it here as proof that I did. And I have.

It hasn't always been easy to do. Sometimes I would be late in posting. Or if I missed a day I would do make-up sketches to ensure I uploaded at least one drawing for each day even if it was a bit late. Some days I would draw a lot (usually when I attended drawing salons) and post multiple sketches, but those didn't count for the next day. Come the morrow, even if I didn't feel like it, I had to draw something new, be it a doodle, a terrible sketch, or even something I did just to satisfy the blog's requirement of a daily drawing (you might find entries for a "2 minute fish" or some such conceit among the thousands of sketches on this blog). But the blog was an excuse to maintain the discipline to draw everyday, and it worked.

And it's certainly been good for me. I've learned a lot more about my own abilities. Practice doesn't make perfect, but it certainly does help you improve. The daily practice has been amazing for amping up my skill set, and for letting me know that the more I draw, the more I have to learn. Lord knows I cringe at some of the things I've drawn over the years, but hopefully that means I'm improving.

I didn't require myself to post a finished drawing but just whatever I drew that day, so sketch updates counted. Which is a good thing, because there were days I found myself agonizing over a pose or face, constantly retooling  day after day, and posting those updates. For those who followed my blog though, they might have been treated to the same face updated over multiple days with a new nose each time.

And it didn't matter who saw it (and frankly, I have barely any followers here, because really, who goes to blogspot anymore?) but I was very happy when people appreciated what I put out here. But it was never about finding a huge audience anyway. The audience was me. The blog was just a way to tell myself to have some discipline and draw. every. day.

My first drawing was done on January 1, 2007 (even if I posted it on the 2nd), just a ballpoint doodle done on some random sheet. Ten years later, I have over 3450 entries here. It's quite amazing to think about. I hope to continue doing so for 10 or more years to come.