Jack Sparrow

Ahhh. And here we are at last, Jack Sparrow. I got to see the Pirates of the Caribbean for the first time just before I started on this one. I think I got within the range similarity where yes, there are a few things not just like the original, but yeah, this is close enough to look like Johnny Depp in his costume. 

His nose was an absolute headache at the time. I spent about a third of eternity staring at his face trying to decide what made it look so different from the photo (I printed a photo of him and taped it on the back of the page before in my sketch book to draw from. It really made the whole thing much more convenient because I didn't have to pull out my lap top every time I wanted to draw. Without that I would only work on it at home because it was so much trouble.) And then after a third of eternity of staring and occasionally messing with small details it dawned on me! His nose is about a millimeter short! I then began redrawing his nose and realized that that was really not an issue, but the angular nature of his nostrils was really corrected in a way that showed he isn't facing you directly but turned slightly to his right.

There was a small scar on his right cheek but I didn't like it, so as the sole dictator of my pencil marks, I omitted it.

Flora

This character is from a Web Comic called Two Kinds by Tom Fischbach. The colors on the scan came out quite poorly and I ended up spending quite a while trying different things to make the colored pencil look right. In the end I came out with these two pictures. On one I just enhanced the colors (left). The other has the colored regions smudged in to a semi homogenous region, so that the colors would be more even (right).

Who'd'of known a Tigress in a green sweat shirt could be so cute?
I guess Tom Fischabach did.

Man in Shadows

It looks like this guy is wearing sun glasses, but he's not. Since his eyes are in such dark shadow the edges of his face shouldn't be visible. Ah well. It's an interesting sketch.

Fierce Horse

This is a from draw 50 book as well. I feel like I copied quite exactly, but my sharp lines do poor justice to his flowing main. It looks better in the book even though there's nothing explicitly missing.

Famous Public Figure

My dear readers,

I drew this person following a step by step book, Draw 50- Famous Faces, written by Lee J. Ames. Draw 50 is a series of drawing books in which there are 50 different example drawings, each with it's own simple steps. I think these "Draw 50" line of books are very well done and fun to copy. Please comment on what Famous Public figure you think I drew. (Hopefully this question will not be too hard or too easy.)

Sincerely,

Andrew G. Walters

Lion

The blotches of color left of the Lion are simply drops of paint that soaked through the previous page.

Lions are very majestic and kingly creatures. I think that we think that about lions just because of what they symbolize in stories but never the less, it was really cool to sketch this one.

I was carful to fuss with the proportions as much as I could to make sure that the construction lines were as accurate as possible. In these kinds of sketches mistakes are harder to correct because of all the sharp individual lines that you can smudge with an eraser.

Also before this sketch I never noticed that all lions have bright yellow, almost white marks under their eyes. I never noticed that before and it was quite a surprise.

Flowers

The name of this game is restocked permanent marker. One day I was emptying my sister's trash can. In her can I found a permeant marker that had ran dry. I had an idea. I pried the marker open on one end with pliers, and then I (carefully, slowly and preferably over a sink if you try yourself) poured ink down into the tube of felt inside. Later I wrote down my "to do" list on a piece of paper. Soon after I had began using the marker, droplets began forming on the edges of the tip, and slowly but surly sliding down to the end. Suddenly I had quite an overabundance of ink. So to use all this up, I began doodling. Two of the things I doodled were lilies. They looked quite nice, so I decided to draw some nice big flowers to post on my blog. The restocked marker has the annoying attribute that that droplet of ink I mentioned earlier, can settle on the tip of the tip two thirds of the way through a line you would rather not ruin. You can see this in the big blobs of ink that don't look like they should be there, in the drawing on the right. As a hole I think that the restocked marker is rather unhelpfully unreliable in comparison to just buying a new marker. But it's spasms of extreme inkiness are helpful if you are very mindful of when you will dish a teaspoon of ink instead of a gray smudge. You could probably get the same effect if you used a paint brush.

Mountains

To give mountains proper depth when you are painting you must account for the enormous amount of air in between you and them. Even on clear days, looking through 30km of air can look like 10m of smog. It's the same principle, but smog is a lot more concentrated. It is fun to paint all your mountains like a crisp photo out of a National Geographic magazine, however to make your mountains look real, the mountains furthest away from the viewer's eye need to be lighter and bluer(hazier). If your mountains are all relatively close to the viewer then, as you might expect, this is won't matter very much, but it is still good to know.