Book Sketching Day 8 - Sky Doll 3

For anyone wondering what that cardboard is behind the drawing -its just some old illustration board, i am using to prop up the drawing paper as I draw at my desk. I started using it this week, after my drawing table became unusable due to the huge volume of con books piled on it.

Today went alright, but still a long way to go. The first two steps were about 10 minutes each and the last step about 40 minutes.

Sky Doll is a really well drawn book - copying from it in 1 hour, doesn't do it justice, but ultimately that's OK. I am doing this in the name of practice. Put another way, if you wanted to learn to play golf or tennis, you would be best to try and play against someone who is much better than you. That way you get challenged and can improve. Picking a weak player, wouldn't really help you. I feel the same way about the books I am copying from. I am choosing hard material because I want to improve. No point copying from work that is too easy.

One observation I want to make about Sky Doll is the way Barbucci and Canepa draw the eyes. In the front view, the eyes for the girl (sky doll) are huge, but in the side view they often like to draw the pupils right against the edge of the eye - like small slivers. This softens the look and and makes it a bit harder to read. Personally, it's something that I am having trouble with and will try to pay more attention to in the next couple of days as I finish drawing from this book. In animation school we were often told to draw characters 3/4 view -but on this page, Sky Doll appears quite a few times as a side view, which leads to the eyes being done in this way.

Another thing I need to pay more attention to is the way the eyes curve. In other words, how the curve of the eyes are drawn (top/bottom). In the 2nd stage I have been roughing the eyes in without much attention to this detail and I think it has hurt me in the final stage. Hopefully tomorrow I can focus on this and improve in this area.

In the details/design stage, I tried using my old brush marker - but it didn't last long, so I switched to pencil. If I get time, I hope to find the rest of my brush markers - or at least one that works. ha ha. I like using it, not as an inking tool, but instead of using a pencil because I like the quality of the line a bit more and find it easier to use.