Hiraku's Father

Hiraku's father is really hard for me to draw right now and I'm not sure why other than maybe I'm tired or I just haven't drawn realistic portraits in a long time. I sketched these out to get some practice with the construction process, focusing on building and sculpting the large masses and capturing "the feel" of the character as opposed to focusing on finished fully rendered drawings. I like the version of him with glasses. I think I'll use that in the book.

I increased the resolution on a 10x15" page to 300dpi to work on more details on page 3 but my computer slows down a lot. After making several brush strokes, there is a big delay before they actually show up on the screen. The advantages of drawing on the computer is that I don't have to hunch over my drawing on a typical drawing table and I can erase and re-work all I want in any one area and not have to worry about my paper getting messy and or torn. The downside is that the current computer is slow and buying a new one feels like wasteful spending. What I will probably do is cut each panel out of the page and work on it separately and paste it back into the final page at the end. That is what I did for Hiraku's house on page 2 only so far.

I have a tendency to draw stiff figures so I had to conciously force myself to use gesture and stretch and squash to make the pose more fluid and natural in the bottom drawing of Hiraku's father. Must focus on gesture always.