I’m back and doing Lisa Bardot’s Making Art Everyday prompts, at least for the very first day. We’ll see how it goes.
January’s theme is FOOD, and the first prompt is:
ORANGE
I followed along with the tutorial Lisa made, though I added some color to my leaves. It was surprisingly quick to do this. I like quick!
#makingarteveryday #makingarteveryday2022 Tools used: - iPad Pro 12.9" - Procreate - Apple Pencil Making Art Everyday 2022 prompts
I have no idea what the malls were like today. With snow on the ground, the high temperature of the day being -6C and the Omicron variant of COVID-19 doing a variation of Oprah’s “You get a car and you get a car and you get a car!” with the entire general population, it seems unlikely the stores were packed.
But people do love a good bargain.
I went for a walk but otherwise stayed inside, warm and content to avoid crowds, plague and things.
I did a quick drawing to celebrate Boxing Day, though. In hindsight, I wished I had put flaps on the box. I mean, I still could, but maybe I should just move onto bigger, better boxes.
I’m also thinking about restarting some art lessons, to better ground myself in the basics. I’m a bit rusty.
I started out Inktober right on time…then failed to do the next 11 prompts.
This was not intentional.
I may start doing prompts again tomorrow. Yes, that’s it. Tomorrow.
To the future!
When I look back at the art I did as a kid, I’ll sometimes draw (ho ho) inspiration from it, thinking, “That was pretty good.” As I developed my mad sketching skills, I did a copious amount of copying, which is a pretty good way to learn how to draw.
Speaking of copying (such a clever segue), here’s a sketch I did based on the Newsweek cover story from June 18, 1979, “Hollywood’s scary summer”:
The story cataloged the horror movies of summer 1979, with Alien featuring prominently, and an included shot of the alien (which was a spoiler at the time, I suppose) formed the basis of my sketch, done on a 5×7″ sketchpad using a 2B pencil:
I pulled this sketch into Affinity Photo and played around with the exposure, brightness and a few other settings. The end result is an interesting example of how you can change the feel of a drawing without actually altering the drawing itself (ie. no erasing, drawing over existing lines or adding new elements).
The modified version pops more, and I like the more dramatic look to the glowing mist. I think the 14-year-old version of me would have approved. The not-14 year old version of me is still not crazy about how the ribs look.
I guess I am doing this again, at least for one prompt.
Technically this isn’t all ink because I used a glow effect brush in Procreate. I am a cheater. The rest was studio pen or dry ink, though.
Also, I’m shoehorning Gum Gum People into every prompt, so that should be fun.
Crystal:
Inktober 2021 starts mere hours from now, 31 days of prompts that are meant to be done in ink or ink-like media. I have participated the last two years, but strangely am still uncertain whether I want to take part again this year.
Part of my ambivalence is the first few prompts are rather uninspiring to me. Another part is feeling I should be devoting more time to structured learning on my drawing instead of doing a bunch of goofy prompts, which can help, but are maybe a better way to “cut loose” than to hone my skills.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow!
Here’s the list for 2021:
I redid the legs multiple times. I always make them too long. I need to bone up (ho ho) on GGP anatomy more.
This was relatively quick, but I intend to draw more Gum Gum People over the next while.
I didn’t plan on stopping and I’ll be blunt: Going back to work is a big part of why I stopped. Not because it took away time to draw (because I can always find the time, and have in the past) but just being back in a joyless job sucked the drive out of me. Not just for drawing, either, but for writing–even just posting silly things to this blog. My creativity has been replaced by playing so much Diablo 3 that my right wrist hurts. My level 70 wizard is totes powerful, though (his name is Spellsworth).
When I haven’t been playing Diablo 3, I would find myself sitting and staring at the screen. Then go to bed. I mean at night, not at one in the afternoon or something. I still have some standards.
But another part of my drawing ennui was the general direction of the Making Art Everyday prompts. A month of plants was not great. Really, it got kind of boring by the end, and then it was followed by other stuff I was even less interested in. I mean, Week 20 is making patterns. I don’t want to spend a week drawing patterns. I’m not even sure I want to spend a day drawing patterns. Running with a theme for an entire month is maybe not the best way to do the prompts. Or more accurately, it’s not the best way for me. I prefer Inktober’s approach of doing something different every time, often with the prompt not being a thing (like as plant), but a mood or expression or something else (to be fair, Making Art Everyday did have some of these for the month-long People Skills prompts). But I realize that the MAE prompts are as much meant to be tutorials and that doing so through themes might make sense there. Maybe it’s just not for me.
Anyway, I still haven’t decided what to do yet. I might return to MAE, I might try the weekly Inktober prompts, I might try coming up with my own prompts. I don’t know.
I’m playing less Diablo 3, though. My right wrist is thanking me.
This was requested as an emoji in Discord. A Gum Gum Person “dancing” like David Byrne in the video for “Road to Nowhere”:
Reference from the video:
And why not check out the video while you’re at it? It’s a good song.
Because I got tired of drawing plants and flowers.
Now we get really basic–this is basically a filled outline of a fan palm. I hate all flowers and plants now. I may work on my own stuff for a while or something.
#makingarteveryday
This one was done quick(ish) and is kind of sloppy, but I’m trying to catch up, I don’t have time for subtlety or nuance. 😛
#makingarteveryday