I’ve been doing a little better with at least sketching, breaks here and there of course… especially on weekends, so I thought I would post my most recent finished piece. I also realized there were some sketches I did not share.
The first one is an Alternate Universe (AU) pencil study of an older King Thorin. My husband requested a painting of him down the line, so I thought I would figure a few things out and give him a pencil study closeup until I could get around to it. 🙂 Cutting and pasting some of the text from two in-progress updates and the final update:
My husband, a life-long fan (well, at least since childhood) of Thorin, asked me to eventually paint an aged/battle-weary Thorin on the throne for him someday. Since I am trying to keep sketching, I thought I would play around with his look for the eventual full-length throne room painting. I wanted to keep his decoration simpler, but a little bit of a cross between him, his father, and Thror. I also looked at some Battle of the Five Armies photos and saw a nasty gash on his forehead through his eyebrow. Sadly it doesn’t show up, thanks to the crown, but maybe in a colored painting it will be a little more visible… it kept looking more like Thror (in the beginning blue pencil sketch), so I pulled back a little (on the aging). Maybe again, color will be of a little more help showing weariness around the eyes instead of a monotone piece.
No idea when I eventually do the painting, as I’d like it to be rather big and a little complex with the background and figures, and I don’t even know if my paints are dried out or not.
I also won’t normally be doing AU art, nor taking requests… but since my sweet hubby not only is the one who got me into this whole fandom, but is beyond excited that I keep drawing dwarves, I figure I can do him a favor.
Drawn on 11×14 drawing paper, using blue pencil for initial sketch, then 2H, 4H, and 4B pencils. Along with some electric eraser for some quick texture on the fur pelt. I started taking a little too much time on this, and decided to push on and finish it despite having my eyesight go out (yet again, *sighs*) a little too quickly. So as usual, hopefully I didn’t forget something. I would have liked to have gone back and darkened some of the other sections, but I think it will just have to be like this for now.
To see the fullsized view, click the link below to go to dA (and here is the blue pencil sketch, and here is where I started lightly blocking in the pencils):
View AU King Thorin Pencil study here.
Some of the other sketches I worked on….
This was quickly drawn on a small piece of paper (Thorin is just over 4 and a half inches tall from head to toe on this drawing). Blue pencils first, then my drafting pencil. I purposely tried not to add much detail, or go back and fix things too much. I was trying to scrawl this down as quickly as I could as a warmup/speed exercise (I didn’t bother to time myself).
I’m wanting to get back into quick, low-detailed sketches again to work through ideas and to just keep drawing. And most will probably be small sized, since I plan to put them in a small, bound sketchbook. I used to work like this, drawing quick guidelines first at a smaller size, then enlarging the sketch to whatever size I needed and working any fixes and details in later while transferring to the final paper. It helped cut down on messy lines to erase later.
View quick sketch here.
A section of a very quick sketch I did using black pencil (first lines in blue pencil) on drawing paper for a friend (view here).
A female dwarf, Thorin’s sister (view here):
I’m still feeling really out of it and shaky, so I thought I’d work on some sketches. I already messed up on this one… I started drawing to the Bristol in blue pencil, and ended up digging too hard into the paper (so hard to see the lines right now, and I need to buy new pencils). And… despite thinking I was careful, she’s off-center. Oops! Oh well… I will need to transfer her to another sheet of Bristol to ink. I also changed her costume slightly. The version I had drawn didn’t work so well for this pose — too much covering details. I also chose to do the light jawline beard that many of the female dwaves designed for The Hobbit movie had. I had wanted to do a little more, but again… I didn’t want everything all jumbled together right in the middle of the drawing, making it hard to see. As for what she’s doing… I decided to imagine that Thrain’s war hammer was all they found when he went missing, and they brought it back to her. She is leaning against it, crying. Drawn on 11×14 Bristol, sketched in blue pencil first, then with my drafting pencil. Scanned and adjusted to make the lines a little darker.
And although I keep focusing on Thorin, I intend to work on some of the other dwarves in the Company (Dwalin sketch here):
I decided to work on a quick sketch/study of Dwalin for a friend as a change of pace. It’s very light – I used 2H and 2B pencils (along with the first lines in my usual blue pencil) on 8.5”x11” printer paper. I tried not to think too much about details of costume, since I think I’ve been getting a little burned out on squinting at tons of photos lately. I mainly wanted to get a feel for Dwalin’s face and the main details that really stand out to me (like the shape and flow of the pelt on his costume). I looked at a photo of Dwalin standing in Bilbo’s pantry, and sketched quickly.
Sorry for those of you who view blogs on iDevices — I know these thumbnail links don’t show up, but they are handy to use and also include a text link. Thanks for looking!
