Book Sketching Day 6 : Sky Doll

First off apologies - but a few of the photos I took turned out blurry - the first few (gesture images) were so blurry I didn't even bother to include them.

So - after a week off, it felt great to be back Book Sketching. This time, the subject was Sky Doll. It's going to take some time to get used to the style, but I really enjoyed it. I especially liked drawing the fat lady. ha ha.

I spent about 20 minutes blocking out the page with gestures and basic forms before hitting the details.

As I look back at what I did, I noticed quite a few mistakes that really bothered me. For example, in the first panel - the guy in the middle - his jaw (left side/right side) is not balanced. The same type of problem is repeated in several other areas of the page.

I think it's happening because - as I go to add the details, I am working over the underlying forms - rather than continuing the process of building the forms/volumes. It's as if I was sloppily highlighting text from a book, rather than writing the words out myself.

Another example of this is panel 3 - Sky Doll's arm - the under part. The line I put down was not really trying to build the form. It was more of a rough start, but then I moved on. Next time around, I will try to keep this in mind, and work to solidify the forms a bit more in the final stage.

On the other hand, I managed to fix other mistakes in the final stage - like the close up in panel 5. It's not perfect, but if you compare the final image to the blue pencil version, you can see the changes. For panel 4 (dancer) I went beyond the panel in order to try and figure out the forms of her legs better.

Overall the 1 hour limit - doesn't seem to be enough, but it's only been 6 days, so I am hoping to get faster in order to do a more complete job and hopefully with some more accuracy. On the other hand, it's exciting to race to the finish each time. It Feels like I am on a game show, as the clock counts down.

If you are still on the sidelines, give it a shot and see how much fun it can be for yourself.

During the first week, I jumped a lot from book to book, but what this meant was that I never really got comfortable with any one style. By style, I am referring both to the details as well as the forms the artist used. So far, all the books I used were cartoony, but the shapes of the characters were quite different from one another. Everything from head shapes, eye shapes, mouth shapes, etc..

If things go as planned, I would like to continue with Sky Doll for the rest of the week to see how much improvement I can achieve when I stick to one subject/style over 5 nights.