Morning Warm Up

To warm up for work this morning I spent about an hour doing hand studies.  I tried to focus on using line weight to describe the light and dark areas, so parts of the had that are in light have a thinner line than the ones in shadow, which helps hint at where the light source is.

Even though I've spent a lot of time studying human anatomy, I still haven't fully grasped (pun?) the structure of the hand.  Practice sessions like this go a long way towards understanding building that knowledge.

Bette and Dot

I'm a huge American Horror Story fan, so I've started up some fanart of Bet and Dot. It's good portrait practice and I'm all over a chance to draw conjoined twins.

Value Study

 

I'v read in about a million different sources that you should do a value study before diving into a painting with color. Historically, values tend to be my greatest weakness. I've spent 12 hours working on an image just to stand back and realize everything's a dark grey, aside from a puddle of white near the bottom that draws your attention away from the focus. Basically  I'm trying to get my shit together.

I'm super jazzed about how this is turning out so far. I'm toying with the idea of using it on a business card once it's done, even though my hair is going to grow out  a lot faster than I can hand out cards. I don't actually have a business, and I'd have to leave my apartment to hand out business cards (very unlikely), but I've been told that I should have them, and I do like the idea of having a bunch of wallet sized cards with my face and contact info on them. Maybe I could use them to hit on people?