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.
🐰🎨

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.
🐴🎨

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.
🐱🎨

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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It turned out the art challenge that I gave myself for January 2023 wasn’t very realistic. Look at what I wanted to make:

• animal drawings that are somewhat realistic and colored with markers

I’m not very skilled at drawing animals, realistic or otherwise, nor at coloring with markers.

It turns out that the tutorials about drawing animals aren’t very helpful. The basics of drawing aren’t included in those tutorials, nor are the basics of drawing mammals (which is often meant with “animals”). Luckily, I have some art instructional books that do, but those require study and years of practice.

Am I giving up? No. But I do have to lower my expectations, a lot a lot.

So far I’ve drawn:

• sitting cat
• mouse
• rabbit
• horse

Still 30 to go. I should speed up a bit, since the month has only 25 days left.

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I’m struggling to get the 34 animal drawings done in 31 days. It’s already day 5, I’ve studied 3 animals and drawn none so far. I guess it’s the perfectionist in me trying—and succeeding—to interfere with finishing. The sketches are entertaining, though, based on photos.
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The animal after the cat was, of course, the mouse. After doing the tutorial on drawing mice, I tried to draw from photo reference, using the construction method from the tutorial. It’s becoming clear all mammals have a similar body plan: head, front, mid, hind sections, tail.
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I know what this looks like. When I construct the cat, it doesn’t look like the cat in the photo, and when I draw from the photo, it doesn’t look like a cat, but like a photo of a cat. I will move on to the next animal before I get too frustrated. I’m already a day behind. 🎨

The question was if I’m up to the art challenge of drawing animals. Only one way to find out, draw…

So this is the current state of my drawing skills, it seems. It isn’t bad, although it’s easy to see its plentiful flaws. I thought it wasn’t a good enough sketch to create a full colored drawing with markers.

Time to re-evaluate my initial art challenge, learn how to draw animals in the month of January 2023. That seems a setup for failure 😞 So, a more realistic challenge is to use a couple of months to achieve this goal. I want to be at least able to complete a few colored drawings this month. For now I have two of my own cats to draw, one of which is no longer alive (so I can’t draw him from direct observation). It’s only one of the 34 drawings to make, but I’m sticking to it. The important thing is to remember to have fun, not to be a slave to the challenge. Who knows, I might get 34 drawings done this month.

It’s already clear why so many fail at this stage. Not meeting prior expectations is tough. However, it is what it is, and things can only get better from now on. Trust the process. Practice will make better.

In November 2022 I did the micro∙blog November blogging challenge, to blog every day of the month. I completed the challenge and received my special achievement pin. Aside from writing a microblog of no more than 280 characters, I also added a drawing from my notebook.

The latter was so much fun, that I decided to continue the challenge—extend it—on my own. I called it my Microblogextended challenge. For all 31 days of December, I drew and wrote, even on Christmas and Boxing day, despite of day trips with my sister. I found the time to do it.

Here is the list:

• December 1: jest
• December 2: occupy
• December 3: is
• December 4: proportion
• December 5: seat
• December 6: autonomy
• December 7: hip
• December 8: squash
• December 9: fence
• December 10: average
• December 11: chimpanzee
• December 12: regular
• December 13: rocket
• December 14: attic
• December 15: split
• December 16: sticky
• December 17: lump
• December 18: brain
• December 19: dribble
• December 20: peasant
• December 21: hike
• December 22: nationalist
• December 23: fault
• December 24: forest
• December 25: plant
• December 26: chance
• December 27: defendant
• December 28: parade
• December 29: examination
• December 30: sand
• December 31: base

In the last week I decided I need another challenge to keep me going. This time it will be a pure art challenge, drawing animals from an art instructional book that is out of print. I got that book as a Christmas present.

I’m really proud of myself I finished this challenge, though humbled by the inconsistency in quality and art style. That needs to change.

Base

As a self-taught artist I don’t have a solid foundation in art-making. I’m aware of the art fundamentals, but never studied them thoroughly. Even so, I didn’t want to go out on a whimper, so I gave it all I got.
🎨🍂✍️