I've been watching some videos on youtube of first year drawing student's sketchbooks. Sigh. They fill me with regret. I've written about how I spent much of my first several years of college slacking. Lots of personal growth not so much academic or artistic. My 1st year sketchbooks were seriously lacking in care and effort.  I'm pretty sure my professors were equally as frustrated with my lack of effort. That is not what this post is about. This post is about practice and sticking with something.

Previously (here) I wrote about how I got pissed off about my lack of skill in drawing noses and so I drew noses every night for a couple of weeks. It seems that I need to get frustrated with my art to work on it with any depth of effort. Most of the time, I skate through on my natural talent for color, color combination and composition than any effort. (This is the sort of shit that pissed off my art teachers in high school and my professors in college. Do you know how many times I've heard the phrase, "If you'd put forth just an ounce of effort…")

I've been drawing my sort of realistic but kind of off faces for a few weeks now, I've added a few to my art journal here and there. They all looked… The same to me. You could say that I have a style but really that style is lack of effort. I want a face so I look to my memory and draw a face that is strikingly similar to every OTHER face I've drawn in my life. Maybe the nose is a little different, maybe the eyes a little different…. But it's the same. What I needed to do was add a few more faces to my memory bank so I could draw from it a series of more faces. A series of different poses, eye shapes, lip shapes and different shading effects. So I've been going through image on flickr* and drawing, drawing like crazy, just like I did with the noses.

I'm working in one of my large jotter notebooks filled with inexpensive resume paper. 25% cotton, 24lb and with a laid texture. I'm working with 2 pencils the first is a 0.5 HB lead and the other is a 0.9 2B lead mechanical pencil.

Here you can see how I'm working with these images. First I lay in a rough  and light outline of the face and interior of the face. I start by working around the nose area, add in the eyes then lips. I then lay in the lightest area of shadow.

With the second image here you can see that I then go in and add the middle darks and darkest areas of tone. It then tighten up the details. I'm not working super light with my pencil. I consider these sketches so I'm not looking for perfection, more of a good sketch of the person's face. I'm particularly looking to capture the eyes, nose and lips well.

This was one of the first pages I worked on in my quest to add to my bank of mental image:

I hit my drawing stride somewhere in the image to the far right of the side view. I then drew the eye detail. You can see how I've become more confident just in these 4 images.

This is another page where I start out rough. I've been forcing myself to work on tough views of the face and the full side view is tough indeed. I then chose another tough view and an overhead from an angle FB self portrait. I hit my stride with her nose. 

In short you can see in just these few image how  I've been training my eye to SEE the image and training my hand to render in the  wished manner. It's been a lot of work I've been working hard on this, devoting about an hour a day to these drawings. I'm rough and out of practice but hte progression in just a few hours is heartening. I'm getting confident that I can pull from my memory a face that I can use in my art without too much trouble. Practice is what is making the difference here not some innate talent.

*because I knew I was going to show these images on  here I looked for images that were tagged with creative commons and NOT all rights reserved. I DID NOT keep track of them because for the most part, they do not look enough like the original to worry about anything. I often just picked a feature out to focus on, eyes, nose or lips. In most cases I notice that the camera washed out my lightest lights with the pencil.