I really like your pencil drawings, first of all the one showing James Joyce. Any chances to get hold of one of these pictures?

Digital copies are free, just takes me a while to hook up my LPT1-only-scanner. For copies in paper form or the original drawing I don't know yet what would be a reasonable price.

I was talking about copies on paper, yes! How big are the real images? The more I think about having an original "agardenchair" in my apartment the more I like this idea! :>

It's DIN-A4. Would I would need to do first, is to contact a copy-shop to get a high quality copy. I would be glad to sell a copy for about 20 Euros. It's not really for the drawing, just the effort to make good copies, etc...For the original, I don't know. Make an offer. Drawing time was about 50 hours. The paper is kind of worn out.

50 hours what the....? Ok I really have no clue about drawing. :-) 20 Euro for a hq copy sounds good. iMsg....

if your feeling generous, i need more money for travelling... want to buy some tom mix sets on CD off me? i'll draw the front cover!

i'm thinking about it ;)

If you throw in some tea bags...

Crosshatching ?

I suggest you try with roughly one direction of hatching (angle variations can be used to accomodate for some shapes and for overall discrete variation) at a local level - not necessarily the same for the whole drawing, won't work well in most cases.
That is my preferred shading technique :)

Over practice it gives results much less rigid than crosshatching. You can get really nice shading out of this with either hard pencils (ie HB criterium 0.5, maybe even 2H not too sure) or soft pencils (2B and beyond), the latter usually for a quicker impression or for larger scale drawings and the former for precision.

tle="Andrew Loomis archive">Loomis has some nice examples of this. BTW do you have them all in pdf form ? Only have two.

Good idea to use hard pencils for this instead of using softer ones and then blending (which I hate .... probably because I can't do it properly, always looks messy).

Most of the Loomis books I have in a zipped archive of many many gifs or jpgs, which I have leeched from the site.

I also have a little booklet by one "Charles LaSalle", who works magic with charcoal. So precise, so real. And apparently uses no graphing grids. Have to scan it before that one is lost in my library somewhere.

Where could one see some of your drawings?

You wouldn't want to, I tle="eew">kinda suck at tle="eek">this (and those got old pretty badly).
Should scan some more with better shading... the hands are old so you can see a tiny bit of opposite direction crosshatching.
One of these days I'll buy myself a new sketchbook and start drawing on my own, I'm getting very rusty :/

Hah, forgot tle="concept art">this sketch I made for tle="ultraball">a mod I was working on in Denmark. Doesn't have much shading though (and don't mention the rear arm :p )

Awesome pose and hands. How do you measure proportions? And how often do you use an eraser? :-) I ask this because I have yet to make 3 pencil strokes in a row at least one of which gets erased.

Do I take it correctly, that you actually are or have been studying art / design?

Thanks... When I first started the art thingie the teacher was a proportions nazi and wanted everyone to have a string with a weight to gauge them or alternatively doing the pencil trick. I never used that before but had to there (otherwise he would come kick me in the nuts when we were studying). The hands are from this period.
Switching to the design school I was in a pencil trick frenzy and the art guy got me to drop it :) The rest is from there (and I'm still studying there for a year and a half).
Usually when I'm sketching still life I start directly with the shading and am comfident enough not to erase too much especially when I don't have time. A good way to practice without an eraser is to sketch with a ball point pen, or if you're not afraid, with markers (watercolor would be even trickier).

I see, so basically a good start is very important.

http://nicozim.free.fr/portfoliold/vera2.html

"HB pencil | c.a. 30 minutes"

Who would have thought it - HB pencil. I always thought you'd have to use softer ones. And 30 minutes? Was that the total drawing time? I spend 30 minutes on the corner of one eye - am I too slow? :-)

Yeah, that's 0.5 HB criterium pencil, in a total of pretty much 30 minutes. That's my favourite shading tool though and as such, the one I've used the most since the beginning of the studies.

I tried softer ones for that scale, real pencils I mean, and they can be a pleasure to work with as well as long as I keep them sharp. I don't quite like how they have less subtlety for light grays though

(and that's one problem with scanning my stuff, I have a wide range of grays including light ones and they're not easy to maintain in scans at full size. Sized down, you just lose them :( )

30 minutes seems like a lot, but it depends on the scale of the drawing. If you're making a face on a 2x A3 sheet that might still be a little too long. But hey you make progress at your own speed :) Fast sketching helps for that.

30 minutes seems like nothing to me. I bet I can do the overall egg-shape of the head in 30 minutes though. And that's just the egg and maybe some lines for the placement of the eyes, nose and mouth.

hey chair, you ever watched harald schmidt since he's back ?

I saw the first show, saw his hair and was like shoked and havnt watched since. Is he as good as before ?

He has normal hair now and no beard, that was only for the 1st show to underline his "Elmar Gunsch" - bit about Gemütlichkeit ("Mit diesem Look grab ich sogar noch Elmar Gunsch das Publikum ab").

What I noticed is that his sidekick, Herr Andrack is boring and quite mechanical (his jokes are predictable and without vigor).His sluggish persona, which is meant as a satire, turns out to be his real personality. Not good imo.

good to know about the hair.

dunno bout andrack :(