the day of the feet!

1st and 2nd: photo: i chose the first because i thought it was tricky. and it really was, but it helped me understand how to think the foot better. I guess my way of undertanding it is thinking about the dorsal part and how it connects to the 1st metatarsal bone in either the tibia or fibula side. And then relate it to those 2 bones. once i find that part (same for the hand) i can understand the placing of the foot and draw it. From the palm side it harder, as i don´t have these guidelines, so i try to use the basic shape of the palm, and then try to connect it to the metatarsal again and up to the fibula/tibia. I also have some general landmarks of were and how these key parts are placed: thumb side metatarsal bone is halfway from tip to toe, attachment of the fibula is more or less at 1/4 lenght of the foot, wich corresponds to the middle of the tibia. all of these is from side view, also the dorsal part of te metatarsal bones starts more or less at 1/2 of the lenghts of the feet. These are just landmarks that help me get the things more or less right to start with. Then i can tweak as needed.

3rd:mind: i wanted to stick to the feet. At the beginning i intended to draw a page of feet in different positions and perspectives, but i remembered that the excercize was to to immaginative stuff, and i had this idea of doing a feet character, like a cartoon character. as i blocked in i started to see this sort of uhm..strange thing, snakelike, with in origin 5 heads, then i neglected the character to get a good composition and some background and foreground, and then i started wrapping, and then fix composition again, and colors, and then i had a crappy creature in a half decent picture =) i should think more of a better workflow next time. Composition first!!! then the focal point =) and then the bg if there is time =) again it was fun, but i´m a bit disappointed, i had some nice ideas for the mini-totoros (xD) but ended up neglecting most of the painting to fix composition. paint, paint over, repaint, repaint over and so on, wasting of a lot of time =) (did i mention that i forgot to upres it? loool this is the original size =p)

4th: mind/ref: ok it was late and i needed to sleep (then i´m spnding 40minutes to write here =p ) i started from a photo, a really cool, wich made me thing of some tentacle monsters, coming from the foot. Then i saw that the dorso of the foot was a perfect shell, and the foot became a 5 headed gastropod. Each head should be different. Uhm...when i was studying creatures last week, i found that there was a giant creature made of more other creatures, like a colony. I wanted to create something similar but with different heads...uhm..the sketch is small and hard to se anything, i wanted to do it small to keep me from spending lots of time, as i wanted to sleep...but while doing it i thought i was a stupid choise, and i still do think so=)


aha, ok the first day of my new plan went quite good. I drew a lot, i feel like i learnt a bunch on the feet. I´m now quite confident in drawing them.

There are some thhings working well and some thins not working wel in my plan.

what is working is that i´m focused and when i´m focused i learn. I feel like i´m thinking about what i´m doing, what i´m drawing, what i´m studying and i lfeel like i learn. I´m more positive as i have everything more or less under control, and even if something doesn´t go as planned i can still modify the plan, but the plan remains, it´s just different, so i still have control over the day. I´m very productive, really a lot, compared to yesterday for example or any other day. Even if i didn´t nail the whole plan, due to real life, or some technical inconviniences, still when i set down to draw, or to paint, i was painting only. I wasn´t taking pauses to chat on msn (except on those "work" related) and i wasn´t surfing on internet (except for searching reference or clarification on the subect i was studying)
Even if i wasn´t 100% focused all the time i was drawing, (maybe thinking about something else), still as soon as i noticed i wasn loosing focus i got back on track. I´m starting to listen to my inner voice, telling me to stick to the stuff i should be doing, untill i´m done. and yes it feels good =)

what didn´t work i think is that the time is really, really low to do other things. Say that i want to meet friends or play drums, or simply take some time to do a chow or comment on someone´s sketchbook, most of the free time i have is during lunch break or dinner break. hehe of course right now its a busy end on winter, and lots of work will get ot of the way after december, but still it feels pretty tight =) especially if real life kicks in and i have to like take a plane togo home (tomorrow) or got some christmas dinner and stuff =p
There would be no problem in simply delay the deadlines, but i decided deadlines mostly to get a good skill progression quite fast, in order to repeat the process if necessary. (ie. study anatomy, then creatures, then idw, and then back from anatomy). This is because it´s impossible to learn everything i study all at once, and by restudying the same subject after a certain period of time will get me a different and deeper understanding of it, since i have more knowledge to build upon.
Another thing that doesn+´t work yet, is that i think i need to set some time to actually review all i learnt after each study. Otherwise a good part of it will go wasted, or remain subconscious. At least it feels like this now.
And i need to be more focused during the act of studying, understand how things are and store it.
Today i understood my deepest failure in life drawing. I wasn´t doing life drawing to learn, i was doing it to draw a nice model, even though i told to my-self that it was not so. I wasn´t really drawing what was there. I think that subconsciously while drawing and thus not looking at the model, i was actually drawing from the mind, as i couldn´t see the model. Sometimes i would stop and analyze how things really were but most of the times not. And then i found my self looking at the model and then at the paper, and wondering how can i have the leg straight if the model´s leg is bent =) or something like that.

anyway i neeeeed sleep =)