Al Fresco Art Club Challenge -- How to Draw a "Pretty Girl"

Today’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to draw without self-judgement and without planning. On the way to the studio, which is the kitchen, I pulled Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm off the shelf and randomly opened it to page 46, where he shows how to draw a pretty girl. His style is definitely corny, which is perfect okay with me because I love corny. I drew this on my iPade.

I spent the rest of the day installing software on my newly upgraded pc. And tonight I’m going to watch the a movie of Persuasion, which was Jane Austen’s final novel.

Page 11, Drifting Into The Night

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Page 11 is a monochrome image showing the kids adrift far at sea. My reference for drawing water and reflections was, once again, Jack Hamm’s Drawing Scenery: landscapes and seascapes. I used a very bristly brush to paint the light onto the sea.

Al Fresco Art Challenge -- Just Draw, Dammit!

I was feeling lackluster at today’s meeting of the Al Fresco Art Club. I couldn’t think of anything to draw, sketch, or paint. On a whim, I pulled my first art instruction books out of the bookcase: Jack Hamm’s How to Draw Animals and Drawing Scenery: landscapes and seascapes. These books restore my peace of mind — all of the examples that Jack Hamm gives are gratifyingly instructive and doable. I found some exercises for drawing mountains that looked like fun and started drawing. Just like that, Art was fun again. Thanks Jack, wherever you are!

Resources

Jack Hamm: How to Draw Animals and Drawing Scenery: landscapes and seascapes

Al Fresco Art Club, Jan 31, 2021 -- Work On A Weakness

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Today’s Art Club Challenge was to acknowledge a weakness, look it fearlessly in the eye, and start working on improving. My weakness, this week, is drawing rocks. I rummaged through my instructional art books and found my dog-eared copy of Jack Hamm’s Drawing Scenery: landscapes and seascapes. The book covers basics drawing skills and gives hundreds of step by step examples. Jack Hamm’s books deliver the goods.

Al Fresco Art Club Challenge, Aug 23, 2020: Noses

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Reference: Jack Hamm, Drawing the Head and Figure

Today’s Alfresco Art Club Challenge was held indoors. It’s wildfire time in Southern Oregon and it’s so smokey outside that it’s harmful to the lungs of all living creatures. Beside the challenge of dealing with foul vapors, we had an artistic challenge: sketch a body part, such as hands, feet, eyes, and so on. I chose noses. My reference for this exercise was one of my standbys: Jack Hamm’s Drawing the Head and Figure. Jack Hamm worked at Warner Brothers on such masterpieces as Bugs Bunny and later was a teacher at Baylor University.

Al Fresco Art Day, Feb 9, 2020 -- Drawing Expressions

Drawing facial expressions was today’s challenge. I managed to attempt fear and hunger. I use the word attempt advisedly, because I managed only four sketches in an hour. I spent most of the time trying to figure out the proportions on the baby jaguar’s ears. Baby jaguars are definitely cute. I love the soft features, especially the snub nose, droopy jowls, and softly rounded ears. One thing I’ve learned over the last year is that drawing animals is hard…really hard. My main resource for drawing animals is Jack Hamm’s How to Draw Animals. Some illustrators diss Jack for being “old-fashioned” or “corny”, but there’s a lot of good stuff in his books.

Here are my sketches for the club challenge. I practiced inking with Clip Studio Paint just for fun.

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Working on the Story

I’m in the first stage of creating my second children’s picture book: I’m writing the story. As I’m writing, I’m doing some sketches as notes to future myself so that I’ll be able to remember the image I had in mind when I wrote the words.

Along with many animal drawings, I’ll be drawing some tropical landscapes and Mayan temples. I’ll be introducing a reptile, a jaguar, and a Caracara Eagle, keeping everyone as cute as a button.

Today I sketched examples from Jack Hamm’s Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes. I dozed off halfway through the session and lay my head on the kitchen table for a snore.

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Writing the Story for My Next Children's Picture Book

Today I gathered together the sketchbooks, pencils, and pens that I’m going to use for my next children’s picture book. It’s a simple kit: an 11x14 sketchbook for practicing drawing my characters and 8.5x11 Bristol board for the inking. I’ll create the storyboard in the big sketchbook — I like to draw big when I’m brainstorming.

I’ll be sketching with pencil and use my light pad for inking on the Bristol board with Rotring Tikky fine liners. For the color, I’ll do that digitally. I’m going to stick with my Frankentoon Crayon color palette.

There a lot of good reasons for just doing everything on the iPad, but I’m convinced that my traditional media drawings look more interesting. They look like a human made them.

The hardest part of creating a book, and the most important part, is writing the story itself. I’ve learned that just sitting down and getting started requires ignoring all of the reasons my mind is giving me to procrastinate, but once I’ve put a few lines on the blank sketchbook, I can feel the momentum shift. I know that I’m moving forward, an inch at a time, and that I will continue to move forward until the book is published. It’s really cool to be on the road again.

I’m aiming for about 40 pages, the same as the last book. Instead of using the square 8x8-inch format I used in my first book, I’m going to go with an A5 size. A5 proportions will work well for both the portrait layout print version and landscape layout ePub version. I learned with my first book that having a single image size saves time. Engraved in my mind is this truth: “Choose one size to fit all formats…and stick with it!” A5 it is.

For today’s sketches I returned to Jack Hamm’s Drawing the Head and Figure and drew some heads. His style is dated and corny, but he’s an amazing comic artist. I know that I can learn a lot from going through his books and copying his work. I’ll have to draw each of these faces dozens of times to become fluent at drawing heads. Learning a new skill requires repetition, which takes time. Fortunately, I’ve learned to be patient when I’m learning new stuff.

I sketched these faces with a flat carpenter’s pencil. I’ll draw them all again tomorrow.

Replacing CMYK Images with sRGB Images

Today I fixed the only error in my ePub export: “Missing <li> element for <ol>”. In plain language, InDesign exported an empty table of contents that should have had a list of items in “<li>” tags. InDesign isn’t handling an arcane ePub 3 requirement correctly. The error occurs when there’s no explicit table of contents. It’s not a big deal, but it took hours of searching to find the workaround. The fix is to give the TOC a name, even though there’s no TOC. In the Export ePub panel, replace the default TOC name of “None” with “File name.”

I spent the rest of the day removing two unnecessary background images. I tidied up the half-title page and made it look more like the title page, and I replaced the print version’s CMYK images with the eBook’s sRGB images — I’ll be working on that project tomorrow.

For my daily sketch I copied some Jack Hamm cartoon characters. I sketched these figures with a pencil and then inked them. I use a Rotring Tikky 0.1mm for the lines and a Copic brush pen for the black areas. The Tikky’s are awesome.