DRAWING LAB #8: DIRTY BIRD

I've had a crazy couple of months - maybe I'll write a post about it some day. Short version: I'm really behind on sketching and blogging.

Today I got back on the Drawing Lab train. I was supposed to make some random watercolor squiggles and then find an animal in there. While I was working on my three attempts, I kept waiting for this exercise to become my favorite like the others kept doing, but it just wasn't happening.

This was my favorite piece, though...I found a bird. And actually it did get pretty fun once it was time for charcoal, which I don't use often.

DRAWING LAB #7: MIXED MEDIA MONKEY

I'm getting a jump on my next drawing assignment. Look at me! I'm almost caught up.

This project was a monkey, drawn with four very different tools. I chose an indigo marker, two colored pens and blue watercolor. I was sketching at a coffee shop, so my weird media actually got a bit weirder when I realized I'd forgotten my paintbrush. Paint applied with a napkin turned out better than expected.

Digital imaging really doesn't do this monkey justice, though - his sky blues and pinks are actually much brighter on the page, and I'm surprisingly fond of this drawing, so much so that I decided to rework my first version into the one I'm posting.

This second version has less lines. I'm a very liney drawer; in general it's one of my strengths, but one of the big things these exercises are teaching me is that sometimes fewer lines are better.

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.

DRAWING LAB #2: BLIND GIRAFFES

It's week two of Drawing Lab! This week's assignment was to do blind contour drawings of giraffes - drawings with as few lines as possible, made while looking only at the original (never the paper). I liked this exercise because I've done a lot of blind contour drawings, but this was a fun twist on it. James liked this exercise because he got to take my comment, "doing giraffes sounds like more fun than doing people," out of context. It's so nice to be surrounded by support.

Seriously, though, giraffes do some cool poses. I love the ones where a big giraffe is leaning down to headbutt a little one, especially... that was the first thing I tried to capture, with more success than I was expecting, actually.

The last bit was superimposing a few giraffes and adding color. I'm actually not sure what happened here...suddenly my giraffes got even leggier.

DRAWING LAB #1: CATS IN BED

 I kind of hate drawing practice. Unfortunately I also hate drawing for a few hours, looking at what I've done and realizing that it's all totally wrong.

I really like this book called Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun, because they are, and they do. I'm on a mission to work through these exercises with my blog buddies at Making Stuff,  Vinegar and Glitter, and Reports From the Dance Floor.


The first exercise is to do 30 quick sketches of cats on a squishy surface like a mattress. Whee! Then we take one or two of our favorites and work them up a little more. This first little guy really surprised me. This is the exact face of a cat at the moment he leaps up and sinks his claws INTO YOUR LEG.

I feel like I know how to draw cats. I even know how their legs work and stuff, which you wouldn't guess from my sketches. But. They are tricky. They move around and do cat-like things. Good thing I have cats, because my brain totally would not have come up with these kinds of poses.

And then, I had to do another big one, because I felt bad about the evil demon cat. Cats are not all that bad, I promise.