Week Eight: Happy Hands and Cats

It's Friday, but I have a busy weekend, and so I decided to upload my sketches tonight. And with good reason. This has been an incredible five days. I almost couldn't do wrong. Let's take a look:

Here are the leftover hands from last week. Amazingly, all of these were done on the same day, which so happened to be the very next day after I drew my first set of hands. It's amazing because the quality is much superior.  Virtually all of these look like hands, and most look darn good.  Again, all shading is completely mine.  Awesome.  I thought hands would be harder -- then again, maybe they are when you don't have a book showing you how.  We'll see, I guess.

The two cats came from two different online tutorials, found here and here.  The second one, in my mind, is much superior, as it feels more like a cat.  Not that the first image is bad.  I decided to shade neither, because the one tutorial was just the line outline, and the other I thought was so nice I didn't want to spoil it.

The final image is my first ever created image.  That is, no stock, no reference, pure imagination.  It's a cape and tunic combo.  I told you, I really like drawing these things.  It's not bad.  It could probably look a lot better, but again, pure imagination.  The last time I drew something purely from imagination I was likely 8-years-old.  I'm pushing more and more of those artistic boundaries.

Holy crap, awesome image alert.  Drawn from an online tutorial found here.  Undoubtedly, this is my best cat yet.  It has whiskers, the eyes are well-shaded, it has more little touches of fur, the pattern on the head is nice, and the fur looks the most realistic yet.  My only regret is that I rushed a little, mostly because I was so excited at how it was turning out.  When that's your only regret, you know things are going well.

My final image is again from an online tutorial.  This is apparently tribal art.  Because I'm an artistic noobie, I've never heard of it before.  I think I like it.  This cat-like image possesses a level of dynamism thanks to the fun shapes.  Other tribal artworks seem to share this characteristic.  I didn't do this perfect, but it still looks decent.  I'll have to explore this field more in the future.


There we have it: five days of very productive art.  I'm tempted to just induct each image into the Hall of Fame.  On the flipside, this week has now set the bar very high, and I'll have to work even harder to match this output.  So be it.  Month two is almost over, and weeks like this make me think this whole challenge might just have a happy ending sooner rather than later.  See you next week!

Week Seven: Manga??

I'll be honest: I'm not a huge fan of manga-style art.  To be more specific, I really dislike manga-faces.  They seem distorted and uninteresting; take away colour and I find every face looks identical.  However, my local library has a huge selection of How To Draw Manga books, and I grabbed a few.  They had detailed instructions on drawing full-body characters, including a special section on hands, and so I grabbed them.  For one week at least, I'll be a manga artist.  Let's take a look:

First, let's laugh at the first two images.  I call the first one 'the gargantaur,' because this 'teenager' somehow ended up with the largest shoulders in the history of the world.  Seriously, I followed the instructions exactly, but I created an ogre.  It almost looks like I stopped trying on this one, and that's probably not far from the truth.  The middle image is much better, but it's such a ridiculous pose I can't take it seriously.  Who stands like this, honestly?

The final try isn't bad at all.  If we ignore the hands, this is probably my most well-proportioned and defined upper-body yet.  The flip-side is that the legs are among the worst I've done yet, but that's okay.  You'll notice that none of these three have any sort of shading: I was more focused on getting the outline than a finished project, especially for these three uninteresting poses.

Here are three much more interesting poses, and I spent probably twice as much time on any one of these than all three combined.  Collectively, the hands, faces and feet are all quite good (for me at least).  I begrudingly followed the manga-head advice with noses, but I refused to make the pointy, pentagon-style heads.  The middle character was shaded very roughly, similar to my wolf from last week, but I'm again surprised at the results (in a good way).  The 'karate girl' as the books calls it (though it's clearly kung fu) was supposed to teach my foreshortning, but I didn't make the front foot big enough.  Still quite happy with the result, though.

The big success, though, was the 'running girl.'  I love drawing capes, and I think this one turned out splendid.  I spent a long time on both the cape as well as the skirt, and both achieve that wavy, clothing look.  I'm most impressed with the hair, though.  This is easily my best attempt at hair yet; just compare it to the other two.  I really like hair, and I'm hoping I start to like drawing hair as much as I like drawing trenchcoats and capes.

Here are my hands.  Please note that the book only included the outline, not the shading or interior definition, which was somewhat disappointing.  My bottom hand (supposed to be a clenched first angled slightly up) suffers from bad shading, shading that turns it from hand to blob.  The middle fist is better.  The first hand isn't bad for a first attempt, and the final image is quite a valiant attempt at a difficult pose.


I have about six or seven different hands I want to still draw, but my manga session is now over.  I will never be known as an anime-artist.  That said, I found the manga-style steps to creating bodies involved less erasing than with the X-Men, mostly because of smarter guideline placement, and I like that.  As the three girl poses showed, I became much better with my proportions as the week went on.  When I eventually create an original character (with a cape and/or trenchcoat and long hair!), I'll probably follow the manga-build and use a realistic-style head.  I'm not near that now, though.  See you next week!