DRAWING LAB #4: ZOOPHILIA

 This week (ok, let's be honest, last week) my drawing exercise was to sketch at the zoo. I wasn't that excited about going by myself, so I asked River if he wanted to draw at the zoo with me. He was pretty excited about it until he realized I meant draw animals. His favorite thing to draw right now is Minecraft stuff, i.e. anything made out of squares.

While I was drawing, I was thinking about what makes a simple drawing successful. The bulky shapes (like you get from a gesture drawing) are important, but so are certain details. For example, look at this thing on the left. It's probably a gorilla. But the one on the right is definitely a gorilla. This bear was my favorite real sketch from the trip (the gorillas are fake, sorry) and a little of the same thing happened naturally, since the claws on that paw just happened to be showing.

I did have to be pretty quick with most of the animals. This is the only one that I actually got to spend a long time on, since he was distracted by the slides for quite a while and didn't even see me drawing. (And thanks for that idea, Steph.)

I asked River if he wanted to draw any animals and at first he insisted that he didn't know how, but then he decided to try some "minecraft" versions: elephant and flamingo. It's a good technique, I think. He got all the major parts blocked in. And yes, that is TNT in the corner.

I was left with one burning question after our zoo trip, which is why would a fish have nostrils? River says, "umm, water nostrils." Of course.