April Drawing in October and Eyes

Yes, the title is right. It seems to be a recurring activity: community events that take place in one month will sometimes have an encore event later in the months, usually about six months away. So the April Drawing community is having an encore going on right now. This has been pretty successful for me; I've only missed one day so far. Here is a sampling of drawings I've done so far this month, not counting the ones I did that related to the PT exchange image that I discussed last entry.

Firstly, I have started doing something that I haven't really been doing lately, which is drawing from reference. A number of my pictures this month have been relatively brief studies from magazine pictures or ads. Hopefully, things will get better as I do more from them. Working on drawing clothes a bit more, how they hang on the body.

Next is a pic of my steampunk fairy tale character, mostly post events that I had playing in my head for Dragon*Con 2009, as well as a couple of challenges I decided to act on. The first is to draw an anthro or furry, something I rarely ever do. That one turned out okay, in my opinion. It's a sorta self-portrait as a caracal. The second challenge was to draw it only with pencils; no erasing anything. She's supposed to be a Victorian woman sitting. I think it's very eh.

Lastly, a series of eye studies, copied from instructional material by Bridgman, Leveille, Peck, and Barrett. I was simply in the mood to draw eyes after I saw that my attempt at a siren design was rather pitiful.

eyes and pastoral

First, some eye studies based on Kosuke Fujishima.


A pastoral scene with that faun-nymph pair from a while back.

further eye studies

Another page of eye studies. This page is after Yukiru Sugisaki's DNAngel.

Eye studies day 2 and crap

Continuing the eye studies/copies from artists I enjoy. This time, they're from CLAMP's xxxHolic.


A quick and poorly drawn page of stuff. Need to get to drawing figures and faces. Bleh.

fauns, nymphs, and eyes

This is actually a rather older sketch, done at the beginning of the month. I was in part inspired by the work of this one artist, Arnold Bocklin, namely his fauns/satyrs and nymphs. I hope to embellish these two.



I've noticed that my eyes are all starting to look alike and losing some of their expressiveness. Okay, all parts of my faces start to look alike, and poorly so. I'm working on improving it, and part of that is doing studies. Studies can include doing copies of artists you admire, so long as it's to learn how the artist did it. Right now, I'm doing eyes (I like doing eyes). Below are studies from a Bargue plate, Joseph Sheppard, and Sailor Moon studies from Naoko Takeuchi. Expect more over the next few days, moving back to real eyes.