Mettula Orionsis

Ok, I'm trying to juggle a personal DW, plus my gamer DW where I'm posting and illustrating an epic fanfic, plus I'm still participating a bit on Tumblr, plus I have been visiting family and dealing with health issues, plus a few hours of walking a day for Pokemon Go, plus that little thing called REAL LIFE— and I'm not good at juggling, so one blog or another keeps getting shortchanged.

BUT!

(1) BIG THING FOR WHO FANS WHICH I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT:

who_contest, drabble and shortfic community/prompt/fanfic contest from LJ has started up again on dw, and this is great and I encourage people with any kind of writing bent to enter!

(2) Gallifrey One is less than 3 weeks away?! Wow. Almost time to pack, and my art is nowhere near finished.

(3) ART. I got in the habit at my very first con of bringing an ink portrait to be autographed instead of a photo, because I somehow felt like it expressed my appreciation better... I felt bad about actors wearing their hands out signing autographs (no, seriously, as someone with arthritis/fibro that looks like agony to me), so i wanted to make some effort at my end.

As a result, I have a whole portfolio of signed portraits of mostly classic Who actors, of which Deborah Watling is the most precious (I just wish I had been a better artist then.) The problem was, since I was self-conscious about showing the actor a BAD portrait of themselves, I got in the bad habit ofscanning my pencil sketch, overlaying it on the reference photo in Photoshop in order to find mistakes, and correcting them. I'd repeat this process until the pencil sketch was pretty damn close. at which ponit i'd ink it. But in a way that was tracing.

Faces are so so hard. Artists who make it look easy have mostly spent years and years and YEARS of practice making them look good.

So anyway. WIP, Peal Mackie. I've worked on it in two 1-hour-or-so shifts so far, and it's still not quite right.



i need to set it aside again and come back later to see what looks off. But it's all ME eyeballing it now, now, with no cheats. My only tools are a plumb line to compare edges of curves and negative space, and a stick to check proportions (some artists use a thumb for that; for me a wooden coffee stirrer is my height-by-width checker.)