Daily practice, 25 min
© 2025 Mallou
Values are a mess as usual, and I have no idea what I was trying to convey with the stroke direction.
I switch up my morning routine occasionally, so this was on a day I decided to draw dogs for 90 minutes, which was really fun but also really frustrating at times.
Having never really drawn a dog before, I had trouble understanding the eyelid anatomy on short notice. Leaving them barely defined like this really doesn't work with the poppy illustration style I was going for with this one, I think.
Otherwise, it's my usual pattern as of late: reasonably happy with the line work, kind of loving the foreshortening (more the photographer's accomplishment than mine, really lovely setup), frustrated by the wishy-washy value hierarchy.
Jonhopkinsart
Hi Mallou, really great job on the overall form of the dog. I think you'd benefit from taking some time to consider the forms you are rendering on these longer studies. Using a 'wrapping' technique for the lines as though you are wrapping your lines around each form to describe it once you have the overall structure established will help to give more 3 dimentionality to your work, the current lines you used are flattening the drawing out currently (not all of them but the majority) each of your marks is an opportunity for you to describe the anatomy and form to the viewer. Hope this helps! You also did an amazing job using confident strokes! Keep it up!
Mallou
Thank you so much for your feedback! You mean the (mostly) vertical and horizontal hatch marks, right? To be honest, I'm just not very confident in my ability to get form-following hatching right on the first try, so I tend to default to parallel hatching and then pretend that it's a stylistic choice :). Thank you for the reminder, I really should take the time to get comfortable with it.
