An exercise in stubborness

There's a lot of red tape surrounding just sitting down and drawing an image verses using another image as a base for the artwork you make. I have always had a bit of an issue with just doing an illustration as opposed to using ref images (read: I am the most neurotic person alive). So I sat down and did a little exercise of my own.

This is an image I did last night after reading some of Robot 5.


I guess in theory its not bad, the coloring at least. the anatomy however... nh'yeg. It looks like her face is sliding all over the damn place. it still comes off like a very generic, plastic person. So, I was like "fine, you big terd (because apparently that's my nickname for myself? lawl), find a ref image and copy it." So i did. Sadly, it came out like this:



Its sad because it looks good. I actually like this a lot. I wish I could put it up on DA but I don't feel like it merits that. I just looked at a magazine cover* and copied it, its not like outside of flexing my drawing muscle I came up with anything new. Yes, its in a new medium - drawing instead of photograph - but just because its not in the same format its not like it still didnt take a team to assemble that photograph, and here I am piggybacking off of it by just drawing it my own way. I mean, in a retrospect after the last two hours or so, I think doing that sort of thing is good for color theory and practicing anatomy, but if you copy a picture from a book/magazine instead of drawing it from real life, it still seems like its somehow forgery.

heres the steps, just for shits and giggles. My drawing-ADHD makes me color different almost every time i sit down, but I like the 'working color over the whole image' approach on this one. It let me gauge contrast on colors a lot better and helped me reuse colors in my palette for pulling across different spots in the image.



*- Missbehave, one of my many periodical guilty pleasures.