DRAW A FOX! episode 0.4 - 2010-01-22 - "She had to lie there all day."

[Tvorsk]

Fuzzies tell me to draw
Poking me about it from time to time
So, well... I did my best
This is what I drawn, ohh now my paw hurts...

I can't sketch
I can't draw
But I had to do it, had to DRAW A FOX
I can't scan
I can't ink
I just scribbled this - so what do you think?

Episode 0.0 - 2010-01-18 - "Who let him near a pencil?!"
Episode 0.1 - 2010-01-19 - "Poor little cub..."
Episode 0.2 - 2010-01-20 - "Black always looks good."
Episode 0.3 - 2010-01-21 - "Foraging... for a sketchpad?"
Episode 0.4 - 2010-01-22 - "She had to lie there all day."

[Tvorsk]

So, well, yeah... here goes my first. Not traced, completely freehand, but I was looking at this photo for reference.
Final effect... well, you can see... I totally screwed up proportions, it looks like some rodent.

Reference photo originally from Ross Mitchell's gallery.
10x10cm, generic mechanical pencil, 0.5mm HB. Let's say that I erased so much I had to restart from scratch three times because paper was too scarred to be drawn on anymore.
You can laugh now.

EDIT: In addition to the regular size you can get at by clicking the thumbnail, here's the original photo. I'm quite surprised myself, but it seems there's some detail that is lost in the sized-down ones.

[KaiAdin]

Yes! Newfox DREW A FOX!

And it looks fine Tvor, looks like a fox to me! But now that youve started... you can't stop! Draw! Draw MORE!

[Geary]

I liked how the ears came out 

[Virmir]

Not bad at all!  Copying from real life is the best way to get started, they say.  Keep it up.

[KaiAdin]

Oh hey.. I just noticed the Larger sized piccy! Cool!

Yea, I'm always amazed at seeing the fine pencil/brush lines of  a drawing at 100% (or in the case of real media, when its scanned at high resolution)

Ive noticed... I started by trying to copy from Cartoons/animated movies, and hence my style ended up toonish, perhaps if Tvorsk keeps drawing he'll end up with a realistic style since he's being influenced by real Pictures?

[Tvorsk]

... why I had to draw him so ugly? (ref pic)

You know, I started sketching from the nose and muzzle. They looked way too narrow then. So, I made them wider, scribbled the rest... and... well... I guess it wasn't too narow before.
And yeah, I should have erased the boundary line between the "front" and sides, and make it distinct only by fuzz... but hey, one thing at a time, ok?

Also, I played somewhat with filtering the picture... to make the strokes more standing apart and stuff...

Larger ones: (Original) (High-contrast) (Sharpened)
And as a bonus: A Seal!
Reference photo originally from ctadventures2005's Flickr gallery.

[KaiAdin]

Oh interesting! I was thinking though, maybe you should have broken from reality here and made the eyes somewhat bigger, even though they're meant to be nearly closed, they just seem a tad too small. But other wise its pretty cool!

[Alias]

I think you should have just gone with dark lines for the eyes, if they're that close to shut.  You've gotta remember to simplify when drawing from life or a photo; if you draw everything you see, it just gets messy half the time.

[Tvorsk]

I admit that I cheated... while I did not trace, I did put the paper against the screen a few times to compare silhouettes. Black fox had enough contrast to be just barely visible through the thick paper.

It's amazing how weird an unfinished drawing looks - yesterday, I made the nose way too wide because it seemed way too narrow when standing alone on the paper, today everything seemed too large, but I was comparing against the picture and thus aware of the fact that, to the contrary, it had to be made even larger.

Sorry for two pics, but no matter how many times I tried, I always had some part clipped...

Please check out more than just thumbnails... these don't look very good.


Larger versions: (First) (Second)
Reference photo originally from Ross Mitchell's gallery.

If I may say that myself... I believe this sketch is way better than previous ones.

[Geary]

Awesome work Tvorsk! You're improving very quickly!

[Virmir]

Already complimented you privately, but yeah, getting better.

[Tvorsk]

I'd like to thank you all for your kind words and support.

Yesterday our Benevolent Lord (ATTENTION!) Virmir (At ease!) suggested that I should try a full body drawing this time. So I tried... I worked long and hard... blast, you wouldn't believe how my arm and paw ache... and this is the semi-final result of my efforts.

(Larger one here)

Reference photo originally from The Sitting Fox blog.

Why "semi"? Well, it's not even shaded. Still, it was exhausting and long work. (And I believe that anyone having the slightest bit of drawing skill would do it in less than 20 minutes.)

(12:43:04) Tvorsk: Well, by "painful" I meant more the "mental" pain - drawing some fragment 30 times, trying to make it at lest remotely resemble the reference pic.
(12:44:33) Tvorsk: Tho, frankly, my wrist and elbow "remind me of their existence", so to speak.
(12:45:21) Tvorsk: And you know how after 2-3 redrawings that specific location on paper becomes hard to draw on...
(12:48:23) Tvorsk: Near the end my hands were sweaty and shaking... *sigh*

Now... what was my largest problem? Well, our sketchy friend is 2.7cm (just over an inch) tall, and 7.75cm (just over 3 inches) long. Working with pencil and eraser on such small (is it?) scale is very hard - at least to me. I'm planning to go to a mall today, maybe I'll find a nice A5-sized sketchpad that I could afford without selling my tail to pawn shop... but I'm definitely going to avoid "long" drawings until I'll have something larger than a 10x10cm square to draw on.

I was quite happy of the yesterday's "poor fox's light box" of a black fox silhouette being barely but just enough visible through the paper and allowing me to compare my outlines with the original. Of course, I still managed to make a ton of mistakes - some of them could be avoided the paper would have to be perfectly aligned each time, and, as you guess, it wasn't. Rest were just my own faults. Still with me? How nice of you. Tell me on the chat that you had read this part and you'll get a cookie. So anyway, today's photo wasn't so contrasty. Because of that, I spent quite a bit of time (about a hour, I think? I'm sloooowww...) mouse-tracing the fox's outline with a fine white pen in SAI. I believe I already said that the stabilizer and freely editable vector lines are the best thing since tea bags and sliced bread? Well, in any case I said it now. The white line trick worked quite nicely, tho holding the drawing card and a paper towel (Yes, my hands were THAT sweaty when I was re-drawing the head repeatedly) against a soft, fragile, vertical LCD screen wasn't very comfortable.

* Tvorsk sighs.

Sorry for that wall o'text, but I wanted to throw it all out. Thanks for bearing with me, I feel better now.

Oh, also, I credited sources of the ref pics in all preceding posts - check the links out, there's more cool fox photos in there!

[KaiAdin]

Oh wow! you did a lot of stuff for todays drawing Tvorsk! Coools

Also Yea, getting a sketch pad with proper drawing cartridge would be awesome, but would probably put an end to your "Poor Fox's light box" trick!

Aww dont worry about it being small, its probably cause you're stuck on small paper, I bet if you got something bigger you can make yourself draw bigger!

[Tvorsk]

Yip! This one took a loooong time... I started later than usual, got distracted at some point, spent a hour or so trying to guess/recognize just how the model's paws are positioned... then brother came back, so I had to strike a deal - I let him play games on my machine (which's the best one we have, no matter how mediocre it's in real) for 3h, then he gives me two hours of privacy so I could try to finish it (not that I told him the reason - that's what I try to avoid in the first place).
...
...
... Whoa, that was all a single sentence?!
So anyway, here it comes. Sorry for the quality and shinyness, I did shoot all previous photos in good sunlight, but this one had to be made under a cold-LED lamp. I tried other light sources, effects were even worse.

(Larger)

Reference photo originally from The Sitting Fox blog.

On the technical side of things, I again used the "poor fox's light box" for comparing my strokes to the original, and actually traced the angle at top right, because no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it to look right by freehand. The paws look extremely thin... and they probably are... but, well... you see how shiny from all the erase/redraw cycles that area is. I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually something around the 50th try to make it at least marginally tolerable. And they're actually darkened with the pencil, it's just the light reflection making them look light. The muzzle, frankly, doesn't look very fox-like...  but I think it's quite similiar to the original, which also was wide when looked at from this angle. And the pencil-line pseudoshading... well, you probably guessed already that I tried to show the direction of the fur in every area.

So, anyway... I wish it'd be better, as it's probably my last one for a while. (I might be wrong about it. I want to be wrong about it.) Winter and weekend means that I won't have the room for myself for any amount of time, and the next week I'm having courses for most of each day.