Thanks bruv. The bottom one was the first one I drew during my detox stay, going by the dates on the pages. I don’t remember much of the timeline while I was there tbh.
I almost don’t use preliminary graphite sketches at all btw, but I think I used some for parts of the perspective exercises. The perspective is kinda wonky in most of them because of that, but I got some cool results anyways. I’ve obviously used a ruler for the longer straight lines, and to kinda “find the angles“ too between different parts, so they sort of line up.
Regarding the shading, not much is really “shaded” in these per se, apart from the stippling (the small dots) in the 1st one, and on the “building“ in the 3rd. The 5th one has some too, but more on that later.
The 2nd is the one I’m most happy with. I started with a very dry brush (very little ink in the brush on the brush pen) to create a semi-random pattern (like you can see on the right side in the 3rd one, even though I didn’t get very far with it afterwards, might try to continue on it later on), then I tried to “see” what kinds of shapes I could find. My brain apparently switched to pareidolia mode, and I started adding more lines and shades where I thought it’d “make sense”, to define/accentuate the faces and forms I began to see in it, based off of the angles and shading that that was already present in the pattern. It was a pretty cool process mentally. Much more an exercise in visualising stuff, than actually putting down lines on the page.
I initially got way too much ink onto the page in the 5th one, but I started to try to smear it out and just went with it. I guess you could say that some of the shapes on the side of the “head“ are shaded, but I didn’t decide on a clear position of the (imagined) light source, so it’s pretty inconsistent. I just tried to define the forms in whatever angle they appeared to me.
The 4th one was really a mindfuck to work out. It contains at least one “error”, but it was a good exercise to practice freehand perspective. I didn’t use a ruler that much for it, I just started at the top of the page and worked downwards.
