Week 16: Going Tribal

I was busy this week. As I mentioned last post, I put my realism practice on hold for the time being, at least until I get better paper. Instead, I returned to tribal art. I made my first tribal image about two months ago, and I really enjoyed the dynamism the random shapes seemed to convey. This week I focused exclusively on this style of art, with fairly decent results, I think. Let's take a look.

At the top we have two attempts at a howling wolf, taken from this tutorial.  I drew the first one completely to the suggested instructions, and it turned out fairly sad.  I knew I could do better, so that very day I went back and tried again, this time ignoring the step-by-step.  The result was much improved, so much that I completely ignored the instructions for every other tutorial, all sketching freehand.  

The middle image is a rather strange cat, something that could be a highschool sports logo.  I'm not a huge fan of this image, either mine or the original I copied, but it was a quick drawing on a day I had little time, so I'll take it.

The final image is a full bodied wolf, an incredible image.  I'm quite proud of this one, because the source was a sped-up video, and I could only reasonable freeze the final frames and try from there.  The result is excellent.  I could improve the ear area, and I could size my drawings so they don't always leak off the page, but this remains my favourite drawing this week.

Here's a dragon.  You'll notice the bad paper here again, as my shading looks awful.  Good choice to not try to do realism drawings!  I quite like this drawing, even if it perhaps the simplest.  The head is quite detailed, and the wings are strong and vibrant.  Also, I didn't like the way he positioned the tail, so I created my own interpretation, a sort of stegosaurus-spiked version.  Not bad, but nothing special.  I'll take it.

Here's a better dragon.  Oh yes, this one worked out well.  This was the first image that took more than one day to complete; the many little wisps of curly line demanded too much patience for me to finish.  With the exception of the claw, which looks sad, I nailed this one.  Perhaps the white spaces inside the dark body could be bigger, but again, I'll take it.

Getting more and more complicated, we now have a leopard or some other medium-sized cat.  On the one hand, I made the body too fat.  On the other hand, I really like the face, with the suggestion of whiskers.  The interplay of shapes within the body was also fun and worked well, or would have had the body not been too large.  Probably my weakest attempt this week.

Finally, I drew a tribal horse.  Funny: as I was drawing this, I thought it sucked.  When I finished it, my thoughts did not improve.  But as I look at it now, it seems quite good.  The mane got cut off by the page again, but not by much, and not enough to really spoil the effect.  The one ear looks almost like a horn, but I have no problem with a unicorn instead.

I used an unprecedented five pages this week.  I only have 14 or so pages remaining in my notebook, and then I can trade it in for some decent art paper, a real sketch book.  For this reason I'll likely continue with line and figure drawing, ignoring shading for now.  I think line drawing is a big weakness currently: a number of my realistic drawings looked horrible without the hours of shading I invested.  If I can get my starting line art to be stronger, it will improve everything.  As for tribal art?  I like it, a lot, but I think I'll wait until I get some more experience before I invent my own.  Who knows what next week's theme will be, but I'm sure it will be fun!