Quick car sketch with basic reflections

One of the things I want to try and do from this point forward is to try and include basic reflections and shadows into all of my sketches – no matter how quick and spontaneous they are. I’m pretty sure that it will help me understand surfaces and forms better, which is pretty much my biggest weakness right now. I don’t know what it is, but my brain gets really confused whenever I start drawing a car with complex surfaces…and I quickly lose track of what the forms and curves are actually doing. That just irritates me, and prevents me from drawing more. I need to fix that…

Another advantage to adding reflections to my car sketches is that it will help me to refine my technique a bit. I usually saved this type of detail only for full-color renderings, but if I do it every time, it will (hopefully) become second nature to me. Right now I feel like I’ve got the basics covered, but there is just so much more I need to learn about light and how it affects shadows and reflections on automotive surfaces.

In other news, I’m really staring to like SketchBook Pro 5. It’s not a whole lot different than v4, but it seems a bit more polished. There is one thing that I desperately want to see fixed in v6 though: the layers menu! Is it just me, or is there no way to resize the layers palette in SketchBook Pro? That’s frustrating enough, but to make matters worse, it’s a pretty painful process to scroll through that window – at least compared to Photoshop.