Egged!

Egg is a common shape. It can be found anywhere. Here are five shapes inspired from an egg.

This is a rough sketch; was completed merely in 10-15 mins. I loved it this way, so didn’t go on to make it look real and add proper shades. I could have worked a bit on the face, but I didn’t want to use the eraser. I hate it. Clearly I was restless when I was sketching it. The more I completed the more restless I grew. Oh and the whole sketch was completed without a single touch of the eraser.

Faces

Last week I was too busy in office...but the week before I drew some figures from some random photos from facebook.

As a pending of on lateral thinking I did some sketches too.


And my 3 weeks long project...

The Balcony People

It took me two hours in the post processing. It could have been more. I don’t remember. I loved the warmth of the original, but I had in my mind to give it a blue tint right from the start. It was shot in Manali. It is a cool place and I wanted that to be shown in the photo.

I was standing in the balcony of my room in our resort when they all appeared to say hi from their respective balconies. I didn’t have time to compose or else I would have lost the expressions. The camera was titled. Clearly I was in a hurry. It took me some time to fix that.

I blurred out some of the parts to give depth. I wanted to experiment with some bokeh. So I created a light haze from the top right. Then I went on to add some bokeh. It was my first time and I was not good with that. The results I got were nowhere near satisfactory. So I reduced the opacity to up to 40% so that they do not attract much attention.

I am a huge level freak. I like to play around with the levels in Photoshop. But this time I restrained myself. I didn’t want to lose any detail. There isn't much contrast in the picture and I preserved the details of the hair as far as I could. The shot could have been sharper. Wish I had used Manual mode!

Human Anatomy

The line drawings are a good and easy way to speed up sketching abilities. The motive should always be to think less and do more while doing them. The lines drawn should be deep and confident. No room for an eraser.

The pulp drawings help study different human forms and gives a basic idea of postures and shapes. Details are eliminated so that one can focus completely upon one thing at a time i.e. shape dynamics and postures.

 

The human face is ideally divided into three equal boxes. Then it becomes very easy to draw an un-crooked  face.

The size of the face changes with age. Hence four lines have been drawn to make room for all, keeping the nose line intact.

Views

Few examples of different views of an object.

Questions might be like the following:

1.       Draw any two stationary items/objects with all the three views, e.g. stapler, sharpener, cutter, paper punch etc.

2.       Draw household objects in 3D with side view, top view and bottom view, e.g. chair, sofa, bicycle, cup, bisleri bottle

A Week's Effort

Finished City of Djinns finally. Took almost a month to finish a  350 page book. I must say that anybody with even the slightest interest in the history of  Delhi must read this book. It's beautifully illustrated with lots of information. It takes us deep into the heart of the illustrious heritage of India.

Did a few sketches over the past week. Here are those

I was going for a fast rough sketch when I started with the above sketch. It had been a long time since I had drawn a full figure. It was completed in roughly 20-25 mins. I was having real problems with the curves.

This was done immediately after the previous one. this was completed even faster than the previous one. These two sketches have rough repeated pencil lines. I like it this way when I prefer a fast sketch with less details.

With this one I got a bit serious and took some time with the shading. This was done the next day. By this time I was pretty confident with figures. Though I didn't shade the face properly making it look kind of flat.

This was easier comparatively. I must say that long hands give me trouble sometimes. I don't understand how to place them properly. All the problems which arose were with the hands.This was also includes rough pencil work, but its much more organized unlike the 1st and 2nd sketch. The tyle of shading reflects my state of mind

Lateral Thinking

They call it Dilli ki Sardi for a reason ‘coz Delhi ki garmi is almost life taking. Walked for about 4-5kms in search of The Discovery of India in Daryaganj, but discovered nothing.

Anyway, today’s theme is lateral thinking. It's the creative thinking for creative persons.
Examples:
a.    Draw a sofa inspired from a number, say ‘0’.
b.    Design 5 products combing a banana and an orange or grapes in 3D having some purpose.
c.    5 distinct uses of discarded CDs.
d.    Cut a bisleri bottle into 3 parts. Draw the uses of each part independently keeping the material and the size same.



Tips for solving Lateral thinking problems:
1.    Draw different shapes of ‘0’. At least five. This clears the idea of different views and shapes. Or else the mind if stuck with only one view.
2.    Draw the commons and move to the uncommon. For e.g., the common use of the top portion of a bottle is as a funnel. One uncommon use might be in a chandelier.
3.    Try to give functional use to the designs. A banana phone.
4.    Get away from the conventional things and think uncommon. That will set one apart from the rest. A banana earring vs. a banana backpack.

Things Fall Apart

A week's effort covered in roughly 3 days. Some patchy work. Unsteady hands, and rough lines. That's how I define the sketches below. But it was a start.

P.S. When the photos were taken, the camera wasn't exactly vertical, so in some cases the perspective maybe be out.

Manual Mode

All my life I have shot photographs in Program mode. I mostly relied upon Photoshop to do the work for me. Today everything changed. I have been studying a bit about exposures for the past couple of days. Today I got a chance to apply them.

This is a totally unedited photo. Despite any Photoshop tweaks, I really like this photograph. It was shot in manual mode. I kept the maximum aperture my camera allowed at 55.9 mm focal length. f/3.5. The light metering was evaluative because I needed a good overall exposure. The white balance was auto which resulted the greenish bars. Mistake! It was pretty sunny and I had set the ISO level to 100. I exposed the sensor for 1/50^th of a second. The bus passing behind the boy gave motion to the picture and also established good DOF (depth of field). I also loved the subtle illumination caused by the sun rays falling upon the boy and the bars.

The only problem was with the car parked beside which was totally blown off. But that was the compromise I was ready to make to illuminate the rest of the scene.

A lazy Saturday

Generally I like summer days as long as I don't have to go into the sun. I get a lot of time and do my stuffs. Today I started of my CEED preparation with drawing exploded view of  some objects and ended with a sketch of a photograph that I found in Facebook.