I gave myself a challenge while watching TV the other night – to sketch facial features as fast as possible, capturing the essence of the feature, usually with less than 10 seconds to study the reference on the screen. The noses were the most difficult to capture quickly, because I felt I needed more time to study the particular shapes and shadows that described the feature. The eyes were a bit easier; I mentally described the shape and unique features first, then began to sketch them. More practice!

One of the aspects of sketching hands that I find most challenging is correctly depicting the graceful, subtle curve of the line joining the hand, wrist and forearm. Just a slight curve or dip of a line can describe so much!

Following expert advice for improving my sketching: practice, practice, practice!

Today I needed a bit of a break from sketching challenging body proportions... Just a wee break, then I'm back to it!

Over the weekend I worked a bit more on sketching hands, focusing particularly on gesture and graceful lines and shapes. I'm happy with most of this sketch, but I drew and erased and re-drew the thumb so many times that I'm sure the paper's almost worn through! Proportions are still a challenge...

I really enjoyed drawing the old hands on Wednesday, and since then, I've been thinking about the fascinating characteristics of older skin. That lead me to today's foray into the expressive lines and wrinkles on an older face:

I've been spending the last few days sketching hands – anything I can use as reference. I came across a photo of an old woman's hand, and thought I'd try out sketching it. Like old faces, old hands are much more challenging, and in my opinion, much more interesting to draw than those of young people!

On to the next stage of hand-sketching practice - perspective. Argh!! The sketch on the bottom left took four tries before it looked like something other than a blob. Clearly, that means I need much, much more practice!

More work on our swamp for part of this week. Last time I showed you some swarming bugs, this time I'm going to show you a simple but effective reflection for our swamp water.

Water is the most complex feature to render in a 3D game. Fortunately for me, 2D water is a lot easier to create. Our swamp does not need a complex water graphic, as you are not really going to see much of it as it will be covered in swamp reeds and foliage.

So here's how it works. First, the scene, complete with some programmer graphics in the background and for fun, the bird from Jen's October 3, 2014 post as our main character:

We take the scene rendered up to this point, flip it vertically and draw it at the height where the water meets our character:

Because the water looks like an almost perfect relection, it actually looks more like ice. I've written a shader to blur the image, and we filter the reflection through it to get a better result:

Next, we tell our shader to render the graphic in a more appropriate hue:

Cover the whole thing with foliage, and the result is pretty good:

This might look good enough for our swamp, however, just like our bugs we will continue tweaking until it is exactly as we would like.

After plenty of practice sketching and painting other areas of the human figure, it's time to get down to the tricky business of sketching hands - no small feat, and difficult for many artists to master. I'm starting with breaking down the very complex structure of the hand into simple shapes to describe angle and gesture: