Just some expression practice

Just working on conveying some emotions. Will do a few more, they're fast to do. And I might give this guy a hairstyle and a leather jacket or something. Actually, wait, reader participation time: provide photographic examples of hairstyles (and facial hair styles) and clothes for this guy in the comments and I'll draw the ones I think fit him best! Move besides the obvious!

I need to do a lot more anatomy work before I embark on any other new projects, because frankly, I have a lot of holes in my technique. The saner choice would be to instead settle on a stylized approach that hides my faults better than the erratic style-switching methods I usually employ (on the ZX comic most of all) but I don't think that compromise is forthcoming. My psyche wants to fight!


I work so much with strict black and white inking that using a full grayscale range feels like cheating now, heh. That must sound crazy for actual illustrators who are used to employing a full value and hue range to convey their objects, but I've dedicated so much mental processing in a highly specialized sub-set of the drawing craft that is "how to convey stuff using only little opaque black lines" that I'm afraid I've damaged the part of my brain that revels in lack of restrictions and open creativity. I'm sure fiddling around with pixels and 16-color palettes didn't help either.

At least it's funny when I step outside of my inky inky idiom and draw something like this and then people tell me they're surprised and how it doesn't look like my art. I guess that's a polite way of saying "I didn't know you could draw anything else than your usual black and whte robots!".

A large part of how slowly I become better is that I don't particularly enjoy the process of drawing. I enjoy the conceptualization and I enjoy the end result. The middle period where I have to get my chops up and put in all the work to arrive at a palatable result is not enjoyable (though as I've said before, inking is fun when you're done with the artistic choices and all that's left is filling in the spaces). I'm comfortable in the knowledge that I am not alone in this attitude but less with the inevitable reality that I'll never be as great a draftsman as I could be because of it. But that's fine, I keep reminding myself. Nobody ever is what they imagine they'd be, because our imaginations stem from this fantastic survival mechanism that is the presupposition of never-ending willpower. When we make plans or theorize on our future course of action, we tend to calculate with our own actor being in best-possible shape and full of desire to succeed, we never take into account our past history of faults and repeated behavioral patterns, our well... personality. "Man I'm going to draw *every day* for *three hours* for the next *four weeks*, you bet!". Ah, well, it's better to overestimate than underestimate and sell that as a "realistic" excuse to do nothing!

Seriously though, I need to go frolic on a beach somewhere for a couple of weeks. Plans are being made.