@NowvaB:
Bark is a canine byproduct
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Tired today, getting up a tree and sawing bits off can do that.
Anyway some recent gestural stuff, not from Nicolaides, more experimental. I felt it could help to go along a more pure 'spatial thumbnailing' kind of direction
6B for this more planar/space definition stuff, plants, things that have an excuse to be excessively flowy. I have moved to 2b for Nicolaides gesture exercises, as it seems to be more helpful for making properly rigid pelvises and diaphragms. No pictures right now, but I guess I'm headed in the general direction of Bridgman -- after hitting the really basic gesture, wedging mildly-bendy triangles of volume together is doing the best job at creating solid, natural, sanely proportioned limbs. Also developing a few semi standard gestures for shoulders -- really the same basic idea of finding the places where anatomical features are tightly packed, since they are the most constrained areas -> force concentrates there, they lead the gesture, looser features tend to simply follow them.
(I can spoiler that stuff if desired. Not intended as instruction or suggestion, just journalling)
Had some media issues getting modelling exercise working how I thought it should. Test drawings minus the uninteresting ones:
Ended up using 6b pencil for mass, extra soft charcoal for modelling.
Still want a way to apply broader pigmentation (when I consider the blended appearance of the samples shown for this exercise, I think that the 'lots of threads' construction shown by 0xDB may not match the overall intent of the exercise)
Digital is honestly much superior here (layers and layer modes == no problems with your mass pigment blocking the addition of your modelling pigment)
This 6b+tissue for blur+Charcoal modelled rendering feels quite graphic (for lack of a better term). I enjoy it. Still some lack of subtlety -- I feel like I am compressing dynamic range (ie. values become nonlinear/ locally normalized) on features that are further away (we have, uhm.. black.. and slightly less black
as shown on the feet, whereas I think it would be more clear an exercise if I could make a linear depth map (a darkness of X meaning exactly a depth of X, no matter where it is in the picture).