Art Practice - 2023, 04

There's some images that are just a little too much effort to render in earnest, if your goal is to be finished in a reasonable time frame and your skills are too basic. Plant Mage conjures a pretty large number of those. The secondary prompt I chose here also put a restraint on the angles that I could reasonably use without rendering it pointless. I think the aesthetic charm of a balcony is the very limited space that one can use, so in theory using one sensibly requires planning, which might be one of the reasons I haven't ever really made use of one, even if one was available.

My figure studies came out on this one. I enjoyed structuring the pose, although there's still hints of all the minutiae of detailed effects work here. I'm pretty sure I won't fill out all of that, because drawing that many leaves isn't going to be fun for very long, and I'm not sure I'd benefit much from it either.

A single pass of ink is more or less everything I needed to get the gist across, I think. Scenes like these might need more than two gradients of color. Maybe I should diversify? The face proportions kinda ran away from me this time. I still have the habit of placing eyes too high on the head, more or less where the brow should be. It's an error of construction, I think, due to something I may or may not have misread when I first learned constructing faces. Otherwise this could have used more shading, but that would have swallowed the plants, so not this time. I think I could think about doing more dynamic gesture drawings. Who knows, if I do end up diversifying, I might do some weeks with just a single type of drawings I want to practice that week.

A single tip of green

springs from soil and rain.

Remaining to be seen

if it is tree or grain,

a gardener places care

to keep it growing strong

until it's grown to share

it's fruit for decades long.