As in anything you do consistently, you occasionally make little alterations and refinements to the way you do it, and gradually, accumulatively, you get better. So it is with sketching, I find I will make a mark, or a way of dealing with something that works well, and I use it again until it becomes part of the whole.
This is often just stylistic things, the real changes - how you really see things, how you interpret everything around you - happen magnificently rarely. This isn't one of those posts.
But what does happen, is all the little tricks and quirks you have added come together and you do a drawing that seems to you to be a new step forward. A sign post that you are on vaguely the right path.
Or at least some kind of path, rather than thrashing in the brambles.
Yesterday gave me just such a sketch.
You'll need to click on it and enlarge it as it gets a bit lost as it sits here.
Usually I sketch and turn the page, move on to the next one, and only really go back and look at what I drew at the end of the day. This one stopped me, and made me think, you know, I like that.
The guy was intent on doing something with his i-phone ( nothing new there then ) and I took the opportunity to focus on his hands, trying to see the shapes and structure of them, as his thumbs jabbed and swiped.
What do I think makes this a signpost sketch ? The way I now treat hair. The hands. Loving hands, but they are BUGGERS to draw. The lack of wrong lines. ( only one and I shaded it in to loose it ).
The overallnessness of it.
I don't really know.
Okay, trumpet blown, back slapped. Going back to the day job.
