Week 26: The Wolf's Done At Least...

For three weeks now I've been stuck on one image, trying to get 'er done.  Slowly but surely, it's coming along.  I blame ... myself for the lack of progress.  Sometimes it's perfectionism, going over the same spot 20 times when just once was enough.  Sometimes it's only putting in a few minutes because I waste time doing other trivial things instead.  Oh well.  I promised I would finish the wolf, and that I did.  Have a look.

Wow.  It actually looks really good!  Again, ignore the wavy lines.  The new darks achieved with my 2B pencil really add a whole new layer to my drawing.  If nothing else, it allows for awesome contrast.  The eye is the only white on the whole page: everything else is a shade of grey, and I used my erasure to make sure the white was as white as possible.  I think it makes a marvellous effect.

The image looks better on the page.  For one thing, there's more contrast between the top of the head and the background.  For another, the fur stands out more as fur.  The black oval section just SW of the eye looks odd here, but on the page it clearly looks like a fur pattern, not a cavity or recess in the face as it does here.

Here's the pic from last week, so we can compare the progress.

Making promises here seems to work, so I'll do it again: I promise I'll get the full picture done for next week.  Then we can move on not only from this, but soon from the perils of bad drawing paper.  

Weeks 24 & 25: Two Weeks, One Half-Finished Piece

During these two weeks I had computer problems, a huge work load and sickness to deal with.  Seriously, I had so much mucus that it dripped down my face whenever I looked down.  This made drawing an unappealing activity.  Essentially, during these two weeks I only drew this, but it's not nothing, either.  Let's take a look.

This is a Zelda: Twilight Princess wallpaper, found here.  This is a fairly ambitious project, as it should be.  I have maybe two pages left in my notebook, and I want those pages to be awesome.  I'm not going to mail it in.  True, the paper is horrible, as we can again see here: the return of the wavy lines of doom.  You'll have to take my word that it's fully black there.

I spent about one hour just shading and blending the background.  I figured to just get that out of the way, and I can erase things for white highlights as needed.  That's proved smart so far.  I then sketched the basic outline of the wolf head.  From there, I've focused on the darkest darks and am slowly filling them in with my brand new 2B mechanical pencil.  I've been looking for one forever, and I found it at a Dollarama of all places.  Considering the usual quality of Dollarama products, it's amazing.

I'd wager the wolf is more than half done.  Shade in the rest of the dark, then add the lighter sections, plus the eyes and the ear.  That should easily be done for next week.  The real question will be whether I can finish Link on the opposite side.  That will be harder, but I'll certainly try.

Week 20: The Furious Five, Three at a Time

I love watching cartoons, and by that I mean real cartoons, not the animated dramas called anime.  Children's cartoons focus on fun, and most have surprising depth.  Look no further than classic Disney, in particular from about 1973-1995.  These movies are characterized by fun, active characters in simple yet engaging plots, and almost always accompanied by a strong moral message.  Though Lion King is unquestionably my favourite, I'd like to give a shout out to Oliver & Company, a criminally underrated film.

I also love martial arts.  I've been practicing various forms for about half my life, ranging from tough tournament competitions to the daily quest of self-improvement and mastery.  It's undoubtedly the best thing I've ever done for myself, though learning to draw may become a close second.

Given these two paragraphs, it should be no surprise that I love Dreamwork's Kung Fu Panda.  It's a simple, fun frolic in the world of animation and martial arts.  When I first watched it, I actually redoubled my own training, such was the effect it had on me.  This week, I tried to draw some of the characters, starting with the Furious Five.  I hoped to do all five in one week, but ... here's the first three!

This is Master Viper.  True story: one of my sparring stances is modelled after Snake Kung Fu.  Many of my partners say it's very tough to spar against, and I've had great success with it, even if my own Kung Fu experience is rather limited.  This is probably why I'm drawn to Viper.  I'm pretty happy with this drawing: the scales on her belly look good, and the pattern around her back turned out well.  Ignore the dark cloud near her head: that's completely the scanner's fault.  For a line art of a snake, I can't do much better than this without investing double the time.  Awesome.

This is Master Crane.  True story: I studied Matsumura White Crane style for two weeks, before I left for university.  My sensei then past away before I returned, much to my shock and horror.  I've sometimes wondered if going to school was the right choice.  This doubt likely fuels my interest in Crane ... as well as his sarcastic wit.  I'm less happy with this one: it definitely looks like a bird, but it doesn't immediately looks like Crane.  I need more detail in his face, hat, eyes, feathers and talons .... in short, everywhere, but again, I was in a serious time crunch, so this will have to do for now.

This is Master Mantins.  True Story: I have no experience with mantis kung fu.  Sorry, no more personal anecdotes.  I do like praying mantises in general, though, and Mantis is a mantis.  This drawing took about an hour, making it the quickest of the three.  I managed this in part by ignored the shadows.  There's nothing glaringly wrong with this image, but I don't really like it.  Oh well.

Here's all three on the page:

 

For the record, I had two days this week where I worked more than 12 hours.  I'm used to busy schedules, but even that's a little too extreme for me.  Thank the Goddess I had drawing to fall back on: just a few minutes each day to sit at my desk and be creative, not reactive or productive.  One day I'd try to get the outline, the next day I'd go for the quick shading and details.  Not a perfect system, but when you are starved for time it's better than nothing.

Next week I should finish the rest of the Furious Five ... and hopefully more, and seven days to do two characters seems excessive.  Or maybe they'll just have seven days worth of detail and finish.  You'll just have to wait and see!  Oh, surprises!

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.

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!

Week Fourteen: 'BBoD' V, Now with Animals!

Like I promised, this week I focused on drawing animals, once again from Lee Hammond's 'Big Book of Drawing'.  The book is due back at the library on Monday, so this will be my last week with it.  Just as well, since I've pretty much exhausted her pencil-drawing section (the rest of the book deals with pencil crayons, which looks an amazing amount of fun; alas, I have no pencil crayons, and I'm not sure if the $4.99 brand sold at Wal-Mart would work for her realistic technique.  Oh well).

Also, she has about eight images of horses, four dogs, but only one cat!?  And it's not even a very good cat. That's enough to stop using the book right there.

Anyway, here's the results for the first week of July:

First we have a seal.  It looks fairly impressive, but when you break it down it's pretty easy to draw.  It's essentially a long tube, curved around the head, with an eye, nose and whiskers.  The rest is just gradient shading.  I'm really happy with the result... but is it just me, or does the facial structure faintly resemble a dog?  I keep seeing a dog out of the corner of my eye.  Weird.

Then there's the squirrel.  Here's a funny case where the scan both looks better and worse.  You'll have to take my word on this, but the tail looks really puffy and tail-like on the page.  The scan makes it more like porcupine needles.  However, it also makes the fur much better.  Like, holy crap, it looks furry.  It looks furry on the page, too, but not this good-looking.  I'll take it.  Note that I drew this squirrel in virtually one sitting, just under two hours.  I was really focused that day.

Moving on, we have this:

Pretty big step down in quality, amirite?  I spent over half an hour trying to get this falcon's (yes, it's supposed to be a falcon) head right, but it kept looking off.  I had erased and redrawn this section of paper so much I was worried I would tear a hole.  So, basically, I just roughly sketched the rest of the upper torso, roughly shaded it in and vowed to try again the next day.  And I did.  It took five days, but behold, my master of the skies.

Alternatively, this could titled, "Why You Should Use Quality Paper for Drawing."  So far, I have used a spiral-bound notebook for all my drawings.  I have about ten left over from my school days, and I figured it was a cheap and easy way to keep all my drawings together, rather than fumbling with a binder for instance. I was right, but the emphasis was really on 'cheap.'

When you look at the page, you don't see 95% of those wavy lines.  There is some distortion around the black wing tips, which sucks.  Mostly, the paper scans like crap now, and where you see the wavy streaks it is very hard to properly shade.  The page's curve seems to resist the pencil.  This is incredibly frustrating, as an otherwise fantastic drawing, covering roughly five days, was effectively ruined before it even began, all because of the paper.  Well, not ruined; it looks damn good hanging on my wall.

My notebook is nearly full, so I think I'll keep going and fill it up.  My goal was always to have a series of books that I could flip through to see my progress.  Now I'll just be sure to fork out some money and get a quality artistic sketch book.  I tried fiddling with my scanner's settings in an attempt to make the picture look better, and I came up with this:

 This is much darker but less wavy.  The dark actually looks real good, but it took a small eternity to shade my bird a darkish grey, mostly because of the paper.  Anyway, enough complaining, let's praise the drawing!

The bird looks excellent.  After my rough sketch, I was able to get the head and beak area fairly decent.  The head doesn't completely line up with the neck/body, but it's still quite good.  I'm very pleased with the body; I think this is my best use of the eraser for pulling out highlights so far.  I like both wings, though for different reasons.  The cut-off one has a nice interplay of light and dark, and I think I pulled it off very well.  The other wing I like solely because I spent three days creating it, pouring in the details, and each day it looked better and better.  The wavy lines here really spoil the shading I tried to achieve.

My shading skill continues to improve.  The tones blend closer into each other, leaving less suddenly lighter/darker areas.  The seal may be the best example so far, but the whole right wing is darn good, too.


And with that, I finish with 'The Big Book of Drawing'.  I spent five weeks going through it, and these have undoubtedly been the best five weeks of my short artistic life.  I don't know what I will draw next.  My library has another book by Hammond, mostly on drawing full human figures, but I'm still in an animal-mood.  I might just give my realism a break and work on cartoons again; I haven't done any in a while, and they have the added benefit of taking less time, in general.  Hmm, you'll just have to wait until next week to find out!

Thanks once more, BBoD!  You'll always have a special place in my artistic history!

Week Six: Lions and Tigers and X-Men, Oh My

This week started off well but then seemed to fade.  This may be due to my work schedule, which consisted of nothing early in the week followed by three completely full days where I had to draw while asleep to fill my quota.  Note to self: change work schedule.  Anyway, onto the real show:

Clearly I'm still working from art books.  I've now finished on X-Men, mostly because I've drawn all my old favourite characters.  This week we have Gambit and Magneto.  Mag (the one on the right) was interesting because I experimented with the 'colour' scheme.  Traditionally he is red and purple, but those are hard to differentiate with only pencil (and it would require a lot more work).  Instead, I kept him mostly white and shaded everything else.  Again, it's interesting.  His left arm is hilariously small, but I don't care about arms; I mostly liked his cape.  That was fun.

Gambit on the left will likely find his way into a Hall of Fame shortly.  I really nailed this one.  The proportions are the closest I've ever drawn; his head looks fairly head-like; his hands aren't too terribly mangled.  But really, it's all about the trench-coat.  I could look at that thing all day.  Wonderful shading.  Whenever I get around to creating an original character, he should wear a trench-coat.  Or a cape.  Or both!  Epic clothing is epic.

With X-Men done, I went back to drawing animals, this time from a new book, one with more interesting poses. First we have a wolf, which I really love. With the exception of the initial body and head guidelines, I didn't erase anything.  It's not perfect, but it has a certain vitality that I've rarely seen pop from my pencil before.  I also experimented with the shading, using a new style, and it really worked.  It also only took about 20min, which absolutely amazed me.

I tried the same thing with my two cats, but I couldn't recapture the magic.  The lion looks completely flat, and worse, it appears to be malnurished.  Where's the strength?  I can't decide if the mane is decent or a tangled mess.  Don't get me started on the head.  Positive: the tail tuft, and the fact that any future lion has to be better almost by definition.

The tiger is slightly better.  Again, it doesn't have that majestic strength a big cat must have, but it's less flat, so that's an improvement.  The very front and very rear legs make me sad.  The head is okay, but something irks me about it.  And the stripes!  Why does my favourite animal have such a hard thing to draw??  I did better here than my first tiger a few weeks back, but I still nearly pulled my hair out.  Also, look at the grass, my very first attempt at a background.  Doesn't it add so much? =)

It's slightly sad: I wanted to devote today, Saturday, to drawing, but my efforts were largely wanting.  I guess I'll put the pencil down and come back at it tomorrow.  It's funny: two months ago I'd likely be thrilled at any of these drawings.  Anyway, I'll likely finish up with my library books (no choice: they're due next week), and then I'll go back to still-life.  Another week in the books!

Week Three: The Value of Tutorials

Another week, another week of improvement.  Let's get right down to it.

The first four images are again from Draw 50 Animals.  All four have varying degrees of success.  All three images with legs, I'm not happy with the legs.  They are thin and, well, look wrong, lacking the muscular power a big cat should have.  The two lions are the best of the bunch.  I'm now done with that book; it's helpful, but I don't think I can learn what I really want to learn from it.

Here's Simba from the cover of the TLK: OST CD (wow, that's a lot of capitals!).  It turned out wonderful!  The size, the proportions, the overall shape, it all looks good.  The mane was ridiculously tough to draw, but it didn't look too bad at the end.  I originally intended to shade in the rock he stands on, but after 2+ hours of shading Simba himself, I didn't have it in me.  As I get better, hopefully I can cut that time in half.

I didn't know what to draw, and I had limited time, so I just sketched my scissors.  I misjudged my proportions (surprise) and it got cut off by the page, but I was happy with it.

Looking around online, I found this tutorial by FinalProdigy, a skilled pencil artist.  I followed his steps and produced a fairly mean eye.  I didn't have different grades of pencil, so my shading shows less degree in tonal value, but I still couldn't be more thrilled.  At the time I thought it amazing.  Now, I can see that the overall shape is slightly weird (the SW corner juts in), but that can easily be fixed next time.

Die-hard videogame fans will recognize the middle image of Bahamut from FFX.  Again, I followed FinalProdigy's tutorial here.  Our two images are remarkable similar, given the skill gap between us.  His shading is superior, but it's clearly the same image; I'm not sure if this is testament to my improving skill or the quality of his tutorial.  My only sour spot is the chin area: I must have erased it 15 times and still didn't end up happy with it.  Regardless, a success.

Lastly we have my first attempt at a face, from the children's book (ha!) Amazing Faces.  As a kid, I always tried to draw people and failed.  Now, 20 years later, I still failed.  The scan mercifully hides most of it.  It's supposed to be a young girl, for the record.  I've made some wonderful strides these past weeks, but this was a stark reminder of how far I still need to go.


A huge thank you to FinalProdigy and everyone else out there who post art tutorials online, free for any patzer like me to come and use.  It's helped enormously.  If I ever become good enough where I can return the favour, I will.

Week Two: Signs of Improvement

First the bad news: I hurt my neck while training at karate and am only semi-mobile.  It's not bad, just irritating, irritating enough to cut into my drawing time.  The good news is that before this happened, I spent about an hour each day drawing or sketching, and you can see the results.  I also found a ridiculously old book in my personal collection, How to Draw 50 Animals.  If you spent any time at all in public school browsing art books, you've probably seen this one.  I spent half of my week drawing still life, and the other half drawing various animals.  Let's take a look:

First we have my chess board. Drawing this taught me the importance of using rulers! I didn't pay too much (read: any) attention to perspective, which kind of shows. I'm just glad it looks normal and fairly solid, all things considered. I became very interested in trying to depict the fine wood grain. In the big drawing I settled for some shading and a few suggestive lines. Later, I drew the bigger squares that hover just above the board. Here I really tried to capture the feel and direction of the grain. The scan mostly hides the light-coloured square, but the dark square came out decently.

Here are the stock images I used to draw my two lions.  First off, The Lion King is an awesome movie.  That just needs to be said.  Simba came out decent, very decent.  I'm quite impressed with the mane.  You can see that his face is tilted more in my version, something that I seem to do a lot.  Nala came out ... less decently, which is odd because the picture is comparatively simpler.  If you only look at half her face, it looks okay, regardless of which half you look at.  Unfortuantely, they don't combine into a whole.  I'm going to redo this one someday, as this is my favourite pic of her and I need to do it justice.

Then there's my sandal.  Holy crap.  Look at that thing!  It really looks like a sandal!  How the hell did I draw that?  Well, with two hours and a lot of erasing.  I bought a kneaded eraser, and it allows me to control the highlighting so much better.  My shading really did wonders.  The only sore spot is the back heel portion.  I have lots of trouble with curved structures.  I've drawn about 90 spoons in my rough sketch book, trying to capture that concave look, but so far without satisfaction.  Oh well, it's still the best thing I've ever drawn!

Underneath it we have my badger-cat.  It's supposed to be a cat, but without whiskers it's a badger.  I'll take it.  I followed the guide posted here, so it's not like I just pulled this out of my hat.  Though my badger doesn't look exactly (or even mostly) like her cat, I still call it success, mostly because I can use these steps in my future cat work.  Which, let me tell you, will be a lot.  I really like cats.

Here we have various sketches from the book.  There's even a website here that you can visit which details my first drawing, the bird at the top.  I remember as a kid I hated these types of books.  First they get you to draw a whole bunch of weird circles and rectangles, then you are supposed to erase most of them and then an animal just pops out.  Also, whenever I watched my talented friends draw, they never erased anything.  If they wanted to draw an X-Men, they didn't draw a snow-man blob first: they just drew Wolverine or whoever.  The whole idea seemed like a scam to me, a ruse.

I now realize that the circles and such are just proportion guides, a shortcut that you can later dispense with once you are skilled enough.  These are my early results.  On the one hand, these are better than 90% of the things I've ever drew before.  On the other hand, they seem bland and simple compared to my badger, shoe or even the chessboard.  I much prefer shading as opposed to line drawing.  Then again, I should learn to walk before I run, right?

Not much to say about this.  My dog looks sad, much sadder than the book's finished result, but then I'm not a dog person, and perhaps this shone through.  My cat looks, in my humblest opinion, more cat-like than his cat, with more of that cat-attitude.  Maybe I'm just trying to brag.


Okay, week two in the books.  Hopefully my neck heals swiftly and I can sit in front of my desk for more than 10minutes without getting agonizing cramps.  I might take a stroll to the library and see if they have any advanced 'learn to draw' books.  See you next week!

Week One: Baby Steps

Here we go, my first week of drawings.  In a few months we can all look back at these and laugh, I'm sure.  That said, it went much better than I thought.  I was expecting mutant blobs.  Instead, I got, well, whatever you call these.

First we have dolphins.  I didn't know what to draw, and I only had a blue pen, so I figured I should do something naturally blue.  I had a little dolphin figurine which I sketched.  This figurine is actually broken in half, so I couldn't see how to draw the tail: I disguised this with the waves.  All in all, a success.  You can tell they are dolphins, which is more than I thought.

Next we have my stool.  I use it as a stand for my still-life stuff, so I might as well draw it as well.  It looks flimsy, almost made of jello.  The perspective is also way wrong.  Definitely my worst result, but again, at least you can roughly tell it's a stool.

Then we have bananas.  This is my favourite picture of the week.  It took me about two minutes to sketch the outline, and I didn't know what to do after that.  I then spent 20min adding the little shading details and whatnot.  It worked.  Without lie, they may be the best things I've ever drawn, ever.

The image on the left is supposed to be a katana in its case.  Instead, it looks like a nerf sword.  I was so impressed with my shading of the banana that I tried the same thing here.  It looked decent, and so I used the same cross-hatching over the entire sword.  This, unfortunately, looks bland and spoils the effect.  Oh well, live and learn.

The second image is a water bottle.  If you know the Nestle Pure Life brand of water, you know their bottles are pretty funky looking.  I was pretty satisfied with this result.

The big image is, or was, my cat.  He died several years ago, and I only have one photograph of him.  If we compare the two images, I did a decent job with the form, though the head is a little too round and the mouth is a little too high. I couldn't really see the cat anatomy, which shows up in the drawing.  My first attemps at fur also largely failed.  I'll prolly try this one again.  (note: you can see my stool in the background, for those who care)

The image to the side is the katana unsheathed. The proportions are better, but it still looks off, more of a knife than sword.  I'm sure there's a good reason I drew it point facing down, but I can't recall off the top of my head.

The final image on the bottom is my new pencil. My artistic friend recommended the mechanical kinds, as they never need sharpening, refills are inexpensive and they always have the same size (as opposed to the constant shrinkage of normal pencils).  It made sense to me, and here it is.  Doesn't it look lovely?

I'll admit, I had a lot more fun doing this than I thought possible. I waited a week before investing any money in this project, mostly because I figured I'd give it up after the second day, but no. Of course, $5.00 for two pencils plus lead refills is hardly breaking the bank. Anyway, one week down, fifty-one to go.