Still keeping at it. Heh -- doing this without classes or any sort of formal instruction means I keep re-inventing the wheel. This weekend I discovered colorless blenders. \o/ I mean, I knew they existed, but heretofore they'd just been this thing, way over there, that didn't mean anything to me. Then I got some.

WHEEE!

The trouble with having nothing but the internet and your own eyeballs for teachers is that you gotta kinda stumble over solutions. For example, this bizarre tendency to elongate the faces I draw. It's like I've taken a perfectly acceptable drawing (by my pretty low standards) and stretched it up and down. I'm drawing faces too long and narrow. The only reason I can come up with (besides the idea that I SEE things incorrectly, which is always possible) is that I hold my sketchpad in my left hand to draw, and I'm just...skewing my own perspective.

Then again I may just suck.

In any case it's made me finally haul out my old drafting desk and set it up again. (Relic of LONG ago, when I had a small calligraphy business on the side.) That's well and good -- but I've also noticed that it's only faces that make me do the stretchy thing. My perspective is fairly okay with animals and still lifes. Which really does point to a flaw in my portrait approach -- I've poked and prodded, trying this and that, but I really DO tend ALWAYS to do the same sort of perspective error.

I curse the day the local university stopped offering continuing-ed art courses. ::shakes fist:: FIE! How am I gonna learn without a gorram CLASS?

Answer: Slowly and most likely painfully. Also possibly embarrassingly.

::facepalm::