Week 19: Back to Basics

I've decided to really focus on line art for the rest of this month.  There's a couple of reasons.  One, when I do my realistic stuff, about 20% of my time is sketching the outline and the rest is varying degrees of shading techniques.  That's not an ideal ratio.  I feel like my outlines are often weak, and I need the good shading to 'salvage' the drawing.  Finally, I only have 10 pages left of my notebook, and I can fill it up faster if I don't focus on expertly shading every little thing.  That's the goal, at least.

First things first, my second birthday card:

This is based off my sister's favourite game, Robot Unicorn Attack.  If you've played it, it's probably your favourite, too.  If not, go play it here.  See you in a couple hours.

I drew this in two and a half sittings.  As is, it looks okay, but I wanted to do so much more.  I simply ran out of time.  In fact, I didn't even turn it into a full card; I just wrote a happy birthday message in the top corner and called it a birthday poster.  She loved it, by the way.

The drawing is good enough.  I was happy to give it away.  The one butterfly-sprite thing looks quite good.  Considering I rushed, the dark, even shading of the unicorn is quite impressive, even if the transition to the lighter colour looks artificial.  The circle I drew completely free hand, and it looks very round.  Awesome.  Finally, we have the lettering.  About 70% of the letters looks okay, but several are off in some way or another.  I realized too late I should have used a ruler to make it all level, or even some guidelines.  Oh well.  Considering I'm trying to copy a computer font in block letters, I'll take it.

This is a simple line drawing of Amaterasu, a character from the super-awesome game Okami.  I actually copied the design from somewhere online, but I forgot to record where.  Opps.  If I find it again, I'll be sure to properly cite the source.

So ... it's a howling wolf.  Not the first time I've drawn something like this.  Not bad.  The head/snout area is off in some way, and considering that's the most important part, that negatively affects the whole.  This only took ten minutes, so as a quick and simple drawing, that's a good sign.  A few months ago it would have taken me three times as long to create a worse image.  Progress.

Here we have my sunglasses.  They are a dark pair, with dark lenses, drawn in a dark room.  Again, a fairly fast sketch, as I wasn't in a great drawing mood that day.  I tried shade in the non-lens part quickly but still conveying the shadows and contours.  Again, not bad.  I didn't realize how complex this project would be, because there are a lot of weird little angles, most of which I glossed over.  Also, the reflection in the lens would have taken a solid week to try and draw.  So I didn't.  Note to self: when I get really good, try to do a piece conveying reflections in someone's glasses.  It has the potential to be awesome.

Finally we have this failure.  It's an unfinished rose.  It sucks.  The centre few petals are okay-ish, but I had such negative thoughts about this one almost from the first stroke.  I tried and tried and tried to get the bigger, surrounding petals, but nothing worked.  In the end I just abandoned it.  I'm not a big flower guy, anyway.


I suppose there's no point in hiding it: this wasn't a great week, and this is about ten days now of me feeling utter hostility towards drawing.  It takes an effort of will to sit down and actually put pencil to paper.  To be honest, though, I expected this.  When most people try something new, such as a commitment to get into shape, they quite after two weeks.  If they survive that, the next hurdle is just after month three.  For some reason, the enthusiasm just seems to plummet around then.  I've seen it time and time again.  If you fight through this plateau, the rest is smooth sailing ... until the next plateau.

That's why I'm going to keep it simple and do some line drawing.  I'll beat this by sheer quantity if I have to.  I'll just draw my favourite characters from my favourite movies or games, I think, something fun.  Let's see how it works next week.