Art Practice - 2023, 17

I think I more or less got the hang of ink and lineart. Of course there's improvements that could be made, but at this point, technical shortcomings dominate so strongly that it would make more sense to go back to basics - relatively. There's this fairly common warmup routine that's suggested for people just getting into art: Many quick sketches of one thing. Considering my art is heavily human-centered, I think I could probably gain a lot by doing that centered on the usual issues I've run into a lot during this experiment.

As I've never quite figured out hair in a way that doesn't make me default to one of three hairstyles, and I have the habit of placing the eyes too far up the head, doing full heads seemed like a good idea. I think this structure of having to produce something is pretty beneficial to exercises of this type, seeing as doing an absurd number of heads (for a hobbyist) suddenly seems like a worthwhile endeavor. So in short: I did 100.

Not much to say about how the exercise went, honestly. I wrote a python script to help me emulate websites like these, that are designed to accommodate the method slightly. Each head got about 120 seconds, to slightly carying results. It's a good use of a sketchbook though, I think. In general, I think I mostly improved hair construction, considering I have to actively think about where to place the eyes. I'm pretty sure with time I'll get to the point where I'll do it correctly intuitively. My perspective work on faces also got marginally better, especially profiles. In hindsight the jaw protrusion should have been a no-brainer considering how human skulls look and I usually get it right there already, but sometimes it requires a closer look for things to click, I guess. So far it's not at the point where it's comfortable to be worked into larger pieces, so I'll do another set of heads with longer timers, so I can focus on the details that still need to be fixing this time.

I recently heard something about poems and center-aligning. I don't really do a lot of formatting on my writing anyways, because I'm not so familiar with fonts and typefaces as I'd like. I consider myself an amateur poet at best, so the statement "center-alignment makes your poetry look like amateurish" is not really something I feel a particularly strong need to react to, but I won't pretend to know better and just take it to heart anyways.

Mannequin

There's a figure in glass without eyes.
It cranes its left arm to the skies.
Spins slow on its toes,
and when a turn ends,
I notice the rose
in the fingers of delicate hands.