Pencil again

I've still been trying to improve my facial features, as my daughter is due soon and I really want to be able to draw her well while she's still an infant.  Although I'm getting more and more pleased with eyes and mouths, I find that hair is still a big problem for me.  It's tough to figure out how to represent this mass of fibers appropriately.  As a side project, I've been doing a sketch of the burn building where we train on my fire department.  This kind of drawing is much easier, nice straight lines with easy perspective.  However, you never get better without challenging yourself, so I try not to spend too much time on the easy ones.

A foray into Charcoal

I've primarily been using graphite so far, because I find it really easy to control and it's cheap to use, but I have friends who keep pushing me to try charcoal to learn about pressure and shading.  Here's one of my first attempts, and it's rough:

I feel like everything I draw with the charcoal stick is loose, cartoony. None of the lines come out straight, everything feels smudgy.  I'm sure this is just due to lack of experience, it's tough to move from something you're comfortable with to something you aren't.  Hopefully I'll be doing a lot more with charcoal in the future, and I'll be sharing anything else I produce as it comes up.

Anyone with tips about the learning curve from graphite to charcoal, I'd love to hear about it.

Faces and Features

I've been working a lot on just faces, recently.  The reason, of course, being that this is one of the hardest things for an aspiring artist to get right.  Facial features aren't as forgiving as static objects; if anything is out of place or proportion, things just look not quite right. Here are a few of my better pieces, but I still have a long way to go:

 

  

That last one is a self-portrait based on a picture my wife took.  As you can see, you can tell each one of these is a face without a problem, but I feel like my shading is what's really deficient.  Anyone with advice on how to really make these faces come to life, I'd love to hear it in the comments.

Honing my Craft

I've started taking drawing lessons from a friend of mine, so for the last little while I haven't been doing as many "developed" drawings.  Instead, I've been doing many unfinished sketches, practicing a set of skills to help make future projects more...uh...skilled.

Anyway, the two biggest things I've been working on (and I think they really have helped) are blocking in my forms before drawing, and visually measuring in order to keep perspective.  I've included 3 of my favorites that I think turned out most true to life.  On a few of them you can still see the scaffolding or symmetry lines faintly around the main subject.  That technique of wrapping everything in a simple geometric form first has really helped me give a depth to my drawings that I didn't feel was present before.  Check it out:

I also have kept up with my free hand practice, trying to keep my lines less harsh and more fluid.  In that vein, I've included two sketches that were done "fast and loose", the second one being my first drawing where I've ever been remotely happy with a human hand representation:

Lastly, since I do so enjoy shading and refining, there's one piece here where I went ahead and developed a little more.  An axe from the fire station I work at: