5 Men, a Horse & a Flautist

Thanks for all the encouragement!

I hear you about that horse. It was a last-minute thing to fill up the page, and the ref pic was tiny (hence I didn't go past the rough sketch). Should draw animals more -- people are hard enough, but I have zero experience with other creatures.

The old guy with the hat was the first thing I did. I screwed up the anatomy greatly so I didn't bother and went for a slight caricature. It works, if only because you can't see much of him :-)

I can't track down the Mads Mikkelsen image online, but it's from a photoshoot that I must have found on some celebrity blog I subscribe to. I have a few in my feed reader and while most of the pictures aren't great it's nice to have access to, say, 50 pics of someone on a red carpet to help build an idea of how to draw them. This is actually one of a handful of true caricatures I've done in my life. I've never attempted them much. Mikkelsen is wonderfully 'graphic' person to draw, and there's tons of great pictures of him to draw from.

The lower-right guy (bongo player) is done in an unfamiliar style. There's a bit of Mucha in there, I suppose, but I like the use of outline to define shapes of light, and will pursue it further.

The girl's head, and the flautist & the bongo player are both from a series of images from Woodstock from LIFE magazine (Here's one). They're a great source for practice images, as are the nypl digital library. FFFFound is also nice, and All Movie Photo is good for high res movie stills. Starlet Showcase is a nice blog for black and white classic refs.

I just keep a folder on my computer with random pics and cull from there now and then.

Thanks! It is indeed wonderful. Earlier I tried to use blue color pencils and found, like you, that they get too waxy to ink over, but like I said in the post I'm using blue pencil leads for a mechanical pencil. Specifically, they're 0.7 Pilot Color Eno 'Soft Blue' -- they're a bit pricey but they're very worth it, behaving exactly like normal graphite pencils.

I can't, however, use them on very smooth papers, or very thin papers like the big IKEA roll I have. This is purely down to the amount I push into the paper, I guess, so now for broad sketching on the IKEA sheets I've switched to a lovely fat 10B Camlin (they're Indian, and here are a few of their great ads: 1, 2, 3).

If you can track them down the Pilots are wonderful, because they also erase just like regular graphite. I found them online here and the price is about what I paid. As I said, they're pricey but worth it.