I haven't gotten any further on my cat painting. However, I am trying to sketch every day for at least 10 minutes, so I am still acting. Here are some of my recent doodles. Thanks for asking. I like to share! I'm afraid I'm a little too hungry and tired to go into an honest answer of "how I am," but if I recover, I'll respond to myself later with stuff. This winter was a hard one. It was not pretty psychologically. I did write a short piece trying to capture it just the other day but honestly, it's too grimy and dark for me to even want to share. The bright side is that spring is coming and my attitude is pulling through. Plus, sobriety is actually pretty great. Can anyone get all three of 'em? I feel like the 1st is the least-good.
You should draw Bernie. I bet he'd be fun to sketch.
The last 2 are staged portraits of presidents, whereas the first I sketched off a screen grab while I was binge-watching a certain series...so what you perceive makes a certain amount of sense. It interests me how "flat" presidential portraits were in the 90s and before, btw. Like, sure there was smoothing-over and professional make up and so on, but Photoshop and the like, I guess the growth of our photography culture (thanks, smart phones) has definitely made an impact on style and "good photography" since then. Compare a google of Clinton and Obama photos. One of the most popular Obama images is his troll grin. Clinton, you get these flat, washed-out, posed, formal officious images. It's really, really interesting. The first one was also more difficult to sketch because it was from a "dark" series and usually, in film and media, if something is dark there's a big deal made of what angles people are shot at and such so as to visually display the darkness - which basically means a shit ton of shadows are thrown around everywhere. Or people's faces are deliberately half illuminated, half shadow (as with my sketch). As an amateur sketch-er, I run the risk of obliterating a lot of my work if I go too ham with the shadow.
Kevin Spacey, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton? Nice work btw. I agree with ecib's assessment.