Speed Drawing: Takin Skull

Hi everyone!

Today´s time-lapse: a Takin skull, one of my favorite horned animal skulls. Let´s get right with it!

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It´s one of the early paintings of the series and I had not perfected my different ink concentrations yet. You can see I go way too dark too early on the horns then recuperate it as go; but it ends up looking ok. If I had to redo this today I would start much lighter and slowly build it up. That technique provides more control on the tones; and gradients built from superposed ink layers of gradually increasing tones in my opinion look better.

Here is a picture of the final piece.

You can find framed prints of this piece on my website, and limited edition NFTs(10) on my Makersplace store. Contact me if you are interested in the original.

Tip of the day:

I was going to write a tip about the 3 types of lines and how to pull them with accuracy; but I think I am going to leave that for another post and talk about something that I find more important.

Mindfulness & controlling your thoughts as you draw.

In order to do the best drawings I have found that I need to think about nothing; I need to be 100% in the moment. I have to concentrate fully on what I am doing without judging myself, thinking what I am gonna do next, or let my mind wander. I was thinking about that this morning as I was drawing, got lost into that train of thought, and it made me mess up a line. The irony...

I am very aware of my train of thought when I draw and constantly have to kill emerging thoughts to focus back on my drawing. It´s something I became aware of while playing pool. I noticed that if I had full confidence in my posture, on the shot I was about to take, and if my mind was blank, I would rarely miss a shot. On the other hand even if the shot I was about to take was easy but if I had an ounce of self doubt, there was a high probability I would fuck up.

I started applying this method to drawing a while ago with great results. I think the first thing you need to do in order to improve, is to stop judging yourself as you create. Any negative thought about your drawing will turn it into shit. I am pretty sure this applies to everything in life. Just wait to be done creating to be critical about yourself.

Then when you manage to stop judging yourself, try to kill any thoughts that come to your mind as you create. I know it sounds like some weird Jedi shit but it works; just try it, you will notice great improvements in your drawing.

Book recommendation:

"Skulls: An Exploration of Alan Dudley´s Curious Collection", by Simon Winchester. My favorite book on animal skulls, that guy has an amazing collection and the lighting of the pictures taken by Simon Winchester is just spot on. It has just the right amount of shadows to perfectly define volumes. A great reference if you wanna draw animal skulls.

Here is a gif of some random pages.