Well, inspired is a great word. Let’s say that I used the three-drawings tutorial to create a sloppy copy of the original (which was already a loose sketch).
I did nothing with line value, really. Getting the shapes somewhat right is already hard enough.
Today I decided to make some loose sketches of animals, just to keep the fun level up. Drawing from construction is useful, but not as much fun (yet) as drawing from observation (or memory).
I started with sketching one of my cats, resting, but aware of my presence. The drawing is done with a carpenter’s pencil and darkened after scanning.
This horse was drawn from imagination, not with a particular photo or drawing in front of me. I used an ordinary B pencil, and darkened the sketch after scanning.
These two dogs are the same dog I drew from the cover of Ken Hultgren’s book The Art of Drawing Animals, with B pencil, darkened after scanning.
All were fun drawing experiences, and that is important if you want to keep doing it. Because if it isn’t fun, why bother doing it over and over again?
That is all.
In roughly 50 minutes I made three sketches, based on illustrations in the book The Art of Drawing Animals by Ken Hultgren. I started with the skeleton of a horse, constructed using the instructions in the book. It was done in carpenter’s pencil.
Not particularly impressed by the result, I tried some sketches of a tired horse.
That didn’t really jazz, so I tried some other animals.
It was somewhat better, but not by much. This technique of drawing by construction is just too new for me. I have to take the time to get comfortable with it. Until now, I’ve more drawn from observation.
That is all.
Inspired by the Preston Blair cartoon drawings of yesterday, I decided to draw some dogs from reference photos. Because the first cartoon in Preston Blair’s book was some kind of mutt, I decided to look for “scruffy dog” on Flickr, using zFlick as my search application.
Here is the first sketch, which I found quite fun to do, although the dog would fall over if he’d really would stand like that.
Taking that into account, I drew another scruffy dog.
I even shot a time-lapse movie of it while I was drawing it. The movie was made with my Canon ixus digital camera on a tripod (zoomed in on my sketchpad), using Apple iMovie as my movie editor and MPEG Streamclip to convert the Quicktime movie into H.264 for YouTube.
I dread making those time-lapse recordings, because they eat a lot of time out of your day, which I’d rather spend drawing. I wanted to show you how I’m drawing, though, so I guess that is why I did it.
That is all.
You can get ideas from anywhere. I saw this Golden Retriever on a magazine cover and decided to use it for my next drawing. Here’s what I drew on a writing pad. I used a red colored pencil for the under-drawing and a black rollerball pen for the refined drawing.
After retouch and coloring this was the result in about 70 minutes.
Mind you that I have completely changed the original color of the dog, and also used the RGB noise filter extensively, to give the illustration “more bite”.
That is all.
