Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

This one was circa 1990. I had bought a small booklet on drawing figures and heads and I was working through it, drawing the figures and elements shown in the book. Hey, I was able to find it online. The book was "Drawing the Head and Figure" by Jack Hamm from 1982. I liked it, it was straightforward and easy to follow. It had some simple guidance and rules as well. I still am pretty poor about drawing realistic figures, but that's a matter of me and not spending enough time working on it.

Anyway, I was looking through one of my old folders of drawings from that era and a number of them looked kind of descent. They were drawn with a cheap mechanical pencil on cheap printer paper. I tried to scan it in but my scanner didn't pick up the pencil shading very well. So I took a picture of it with my digital camera and then pulled it into photoshop and played with the brightness and contrast to make the parts visible. Different settings worked better for different parts of the picture while blowing out or graying out other parts, so I used 4 separate adjustment layers to let me adjust each region separately. I'm sure there are better ways to do this, but I didn't feel like spending too much time on it.

Some of the clothing and figures in the book looked fairly "classic" in the sense of a kind of 1950s look to them (suit and dresses and such) but humans still look like humans, and proportions, perspective, and foreshortening still hold true. That said, the guy in the suit looked a lot like a 1950s era Clark Kent. And that got me thinking about what he was looking at or who he was spying on. So I had to add a speech balloon. If the text is too hard to read, the full resolution image is here.