Drawings, Gestures, Designs, and Sketches

These are examples of illustrations and gestures that, together, represent my native drawing style. Different projects motivate me to pursue different subjects for my sketches. Often I just need to learn to draw something before I can try to sculpt it or design a composition around it. Other times I merely want to explore my options or improve my abilities. Many of these sketches could have been set aside long before they're current iterations but, because I had time, I chose to push them further.

I am not an illustrator at heart. I don't quite connect my imagination to paper quite the way I am able to do when concepting in 3D. Learning to understand my drawing preferences relieves the burden of expectation from my sketching, allowing me to draw without worrying about exactly what I'm going to draw. The included gestures have been chosen out of hundreds because they, unlike pretty much all the rest, captured something of what I was seeing. In many cases I can tell which collection of references or which instructional videos I had been watching prior to each sketch as if these fleeting styles had been inspired straight into my brain. Drawing exercises my eye as well as my hand. When I've finished researching and experimenting, when I sit down to design the composition of a project, I hope to be comfortable and confident enough to trust myself to compose an interesting piece.

Being a digital artist, I often extract color palettes from sketches I find online and use them to create inks and papers in Photoshop to represent my sketchbooks. A handful of carefully neutralized paper textures mimic the feel of any number of different papers. I often prefer using sloppy sketches in lighter colors to correct with my eye the proportions that my hands seem to stubbornly ignore before detailing and shading in darker colors. My favorite so far has been a cream, yellow, brown, dark burgundy set. I've included the basics of my sketchbook in case anyone wants to try them out.