Practice Sketches of the Last 7 Months

Mostly I’ve just been doodling at random over the past seven months.  I did however spend a little bit of time trying to develop my skills and drawing strategies in certain areas.  Primarily I was targeting heads and faces.  It seems like those have been my main focus for the past three years or so but I still feel pretty lost when it comes to drawing them consistently or following any of the proportion guidelines I’ve read. 

So here are some of my practice sketches for the drawing of heads:

Then I also did a little bit (not much) of work on figure drawing and full body proportions.  This was actually brought on by a friend of mine taking an interest in fashion drawing and a conversation I had with her about the differences in actual body proportions, artistic proportions and then fashion proportions for the human figure.

“But what about hand drawing?!” you ask.  “Surely you didn’t go a whole seven months without a hand day?”

Well no! Of course not… Apparently in the past seven months I had exactly one hand day … So here is that one solitary sketch in all of its glory:

Finally, I did a little bit of shading practice.  Actually, in the interest of full disclosure, I drew the above hand for shading practice too but the shaded versions were really rough and quite bad.  The spheres I tried to shade below are still pretty rough but not quite as bad.  This was I think about my third attempt at shading strategies such as crosshatching in my entire life so it’s not quite there yet.  This skill definitely doesn’t come naturally to me.

So there you have it.  A grand total of five sketches representing the majority of my skill development efforts over the past seven months.