Drawing diary: May

Following up on your enthusiastic response to my Soul-searching, the blogging edition post, I'll be posting the drawings I've made in May today. Yes, especially to annoy you, unsuspecting gamer reader! Okay, not really. It's more an attempt to motivate myself to draw more. After all, in order to be able to post drawings monthly, I'll actually have to draw something. This is a waterproof plan, I'm sure of it!

Drugged drawing

Ho, wait, Rav, aren't you taking the "experimenting with new things" to a whole different level? Nooo, not that kind of drugs, I'm talking about painkillers here. *looks into disappointed face* Well, they're strong painkillers, if that makes it any better.*

So this is the view I had one hour before I zoned out from the combined effort of trying to create lines on a piece of paper and following the extremely complicated gameplay of Conrad playing Pokémon Emerald on an emulator (if you hear something ringing now, that would be your sarcasm detector).

I always sketch first before I start drawing, always. Except today. 'Hey Rav', I told myself, 'you're drugged so your drawing is going to suck anyway. Just go relax on the bed and let's try to make a simple line drawing. If it isn't perfect, who cares, this will be the first time you're going to make a line drawing, so let's see how it goes.'

Well, now I know how it goes. It goes crap. Without concentration (which I was incapable of) it was impossible to make it right in one go and get the perspective right. Mixed feelings. I'm not sure what to do with the drawing: it's not nice enough to frame, but I don't hate it enough to bin it. I could send it to a friend (it has the right size and material), but who would want a card with the legs of two gamers playing Pokémon?

There's one more thing I managed to draw before I passed out. You see, I thought it would be fun to draw cool pokémon that Conrad would run into. Wrong again. Because Conrad was playing an emulator, he skipped through the boring fights where you'd wait for the text to appear, so there wasn't enough time to sketch pokémon! The only one I managed to pull off was Jigglypuff, because it's round and easy. I detest Jigglypuff. Just like its fellow round, pink, fluffy, always disgustingly cute and happy creatures (Wigglytuff, Clefairy, Chansey, I'm talking to YOU). So while there is not technically anything wrong with this drawing (apart from, you know, having no soul), this one will probably end up in the bin. Or maybe I'll burn it. Yes, that sounds better. To be continued.

Draw with Faeb week

Through the world of Twitter, I discovered there was some kind of drawing event going on with the hashtag #drawwithfaebweek. The idea was simple: draw something every day a week long. Of course I failed almost immediately, having to blog besides it as well, but I did end up becoming a big fan of Faebelina (her digital drawings are absolutely amazing) and made some drawings in the process.

One of them was the drawing to the left of Haku from the movie Spirited Away (it's one of my all-time favourite movies; do consider watching it if you haven't yet!). I used this as reference and this as background inspiration. I used a black marker, blue fineliner, watercolour pencils and digital drawing. The end result was very different from what I had in mind beforehand.

I went through a lot of horror while drawing this: my black pen started leaking ink irregularly, a white marker ended up becoming yellowish and look through when dried up (which forced me to fix that digitally) and the paper didn't react to my watercolour pencils the way I hoped (which forced me to do the background lines the way they are to cover this up).

Even though I don't particularly like the result, I did learn a few things when I made this. I might use Haku for some digital painting experiments; I already found an interesting tutorial.

Despite all this drawing misery, I made one thing I'm actually happy with: the drawing of a giggling Ashara above. I used this screenshot as reference, but decided to go with a different facial expression. I went out of my comfort zone with two things: 1) by using watercolour paint; 2) by choosing a face as subject. I experienced some moments of terror when the paper absorbed the watercolour paint way faster than I'd have hoped, but I guess those imperfections are something of the charm of the medium. I'm thinking about making a small series of this and draw other aliens with different expressions in this manner.

Somehow, I feel even more insecure about my drawing abilities than before I started this whole "draw more to get better" adventure. Then again, I've been consciously picking new methods and subjects to experiment with, constantly challenging myself, so I guess naturally not everything you try is an instant hit.

*If you need to know, I suffer from a severe case of dysmenorrhea, causing me to take medication for a week during each occurrence and spending at least one day in bed, only being able to lie on my back and study the ceiling while I try not to pass out from the pain.

Is Rav being even more of a slowpoke with answering your comments than usual? Don't despair, I'm on holiday and pre-scheduled this post in a hardcore attempt to keep my posting schedule. (For science!) I'm looking forward to your comments already and promise to reply to them all when I'm back! (Wait, what did I just say? /faint)