Art

The obligatory cat sitting inside and thinking outside the box, ogling for mischief.
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People drawn as chess pieces?
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There’s an idea that any drawings are better than no drawings. This may result in “bad drawings.” That’s a good thing, since it demonstrates taste. Still, these doodles together feel to me like a wall of shame, because I know I could do better (so why aren’t I?).
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Mentioned on the recdiffs podcast 201 Lessons on How to Draw by Hokusai
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I had this idea of combining something I like with something I don’t. It’s a sketch drawing. I liked the texture on the smoking apparatus. Patrick looks quite wonky. I used references but didn’t copy.
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There’s a tendency in me that says that if I practice hard enough, I can draw anything I want with ease. I think I need to revise that into: if I practice often enough, I don’t mind doing what takes time and effort. Of course, subject matter matters, a lot.
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The last day of the challenge month I tried to do more than usual. If I go by what “serious” artists claim, drawing for an hour a day isn’t going to bring much improvement in skill. Their aim is every waking moment 😨 I am not that serious, TBH. Maybe that’s my problem.
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The sketches below are of the quality I wasn’t willing to share, since they aren’t finished (rendered). However, getting the shape right is important too, and rendering is overestimated most of the times. I tried to start with simple shapes and elaborate on those.
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This month’s art challenge turned out to be a disappointment. Nevertheless, here’s a dog I drew today. It turns out that every artist needs to develop their own way of sketching. Still, drawing from simple shapes is a good way to draw from memory, instead of copying a photo.
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Yesterday I was too tired to draw (or do anything else but rest). Today’s sketches seem so off-model, yet they still resemble somewhat their references. I guess they’re Frankenhorses' severed heads.
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To speed things up, I rushed through the tutorial and quickly sketched a portrait of a beautiful cat. Maybe not the best way to learn how to draw, but it is, after all, a challenge.
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I’m not doing tutorials about how to draw animals. Getting far into a drawing and then realizing your anatomy is off, is both frustrating and enlightening, an opportunity to learn something. I need to get better at simplifying what I see, so I can easily correct it early on.
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I did the bird-in-flight drawing exercise from my art instructional book. The author wrote she based it on a photo, so I guess I should do that as well. Drawing a flying bird from direct observation seems nigh on impossible.
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Although I have little experience with drawing dogs, nor with drawing a long shaggy coat, I’m somewhat pleased with the result. Maybe I should be worried. Am I losing artistic refinement?
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I’m so accustomed to seeing cats and kittens, that I had a hard time accepting the flaws. So I drew stick kittens on top of a printed photo and transfered those onto my drawing as a base. Still seeing those flaws, though 😖 so I skipped the coat markings.
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I’ve sketched dogs before, but only from a photo. To catch up, I didn’t take very much time, so the quality isn’t really there.
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I hadn’t drawn a hedgehog before, and was puzzled by this specimen’s white spines, especially how to draw them. It turns you don’t; you draw the negative space, or, in this case, what’s visible of the black base of each hair. It’s a work in progress.
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I guess I should give up on making the best drawings I can, since that slows me down. OTOH, this sketch resembles a pig, but it very messy, which isn’t making me proud. Then, if only 5% of your creative work makes you proud, you’re top of the line, I’m told.
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I saw a documentary on YT about Darkwing Duck, that was supposed to be called “Double-O-Duck”, as a spinoff of Duck Tales. That inspired me enough to stop the video and start drawing. I have these markers, so I should make use of them, shouldn’t I?
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I experienced the process of internalizing at a small scale when I sketched this Holstein-Frisian cow from a photo reference. In this process, you learn the rules, purposefully forget about them, and do everything as if it comes naturally. Alas, I haven’t drawn cows enough to draw them from memory, using construction and previsualization. I tried it, but failed miserably. So, instead, I more or less copied a photo, not by tracing, but by redrawing. Still, redrawing is a step up, skill-wise, from downright tracing.

It took a few hours, though, to forget what I read about how how to draw cows, how they show off their anatomy, easily stylized as a balloon-bellies suspended as a tent on a skeleton. But then, milk cows, as the over-bred animals they are, tend to be exaggerated versions of their prehistoric counterparts, the aurochs. They are bred to produce milk, and if having a calf wasn’t necessary to start the lactation flow, they wouldn’t even have offspring either.

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