Drawing diary: August

August has been a very busy month for me. Unfortunately, this means I don't have much to show you drawing wise. On the upside, it also means you won't have to dig through so much text for a change. If you find yourself thinking "more pictures, less talking, Rav", this post is for you!

I basically did two things this month:

Project "try to draw a decent face" continues

I've written about my struggle to draw people before, and I decided to try to improve the only way I know: by drawing more. While doodling, I ended up with the girl with the braid in the top right that I really liked. I tried to repeat the result, but without much luck. The other girls don't do it for me: they miss something of the spontaneity of the first, is my best guess. They are very stylized and don't feel like "me".

Help, my blog post needs an illustration

I don't like the sketch above (it's a lot smaller in reality, by the way!), but it was necessary step to transform a vague idea into something tangible to work with. I'm posting it because it's something I would be interested in: to see the process behind an image. Drawings don't just "are there" all of a sudden: they are the result of a continuous exchange between thought, physical movement and material. What I want to achieve is only one of those three inputs, so the final drawing always ends up being different than imagined beforehand.

Luckily I am pretty happy with the final result:

I used this drawing for my post Studying and keeping a blogging schedule. It depicts me and the things that are on my mind. If you look carefully, you'll see that everything is connected, and indeed this was one of my post's main points. It's pretty obvious, perhaps, but blogging doesn't happen in a vacuum. There are a lot of things going on 'behind the scenes' and I wanted to show how blogging fits in with my life, as well as giving an update regarding my (back then) low post frequency.

At first I regretted my choice of paper for the illustration, as it isn't very smooth and that makes the yellow not dissolve as well into white as I would have liked. What I do like, though, is how the paper's fibres show on places where I used darker tones of coloured pencils, for instance on the hair and face. It gives a bit of character to the drawing, and I can imagine the effect could look great on drawings with larger surfaces like it.

I'd like to say I'll try to draw more in September, but I think it's unlikely, as I'm working towards a very important deadline. However, I tell myself that as long as I draw something each month, I will improve eventually.