Art

When I spend considerably more time on a drawing, a few things happen. First I see how horribly off my initial sketch was, because it doesn’t all fit together, nor is there any resemblence. Then I see minimal improvement on what I drew before. Maybe this is how it goes, badly?
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Doodling all these ducks made me realize that these resemble ducks more than for example bears or crabs. Drawing duck-like shapes with intent is perhaps the best to aim for ATM. Making them do something interesting may be still too hard.
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Seeing the flaws 👎 in what’s been drawn is easy; finding ways to prevent 👷 them (read: correct them in your mind before committing to paper), not so much. Here I tried simple shapes (boxes, triangles, ovals) and relative sizes. Still full of mistakes, yet a step up 📈
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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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