One of the drawing prompts I did way back for Making Art Everyday was CHEF. I used a Gum Gum Person because of course I did, but I never liked the final result, and at least one guy in my gaming group said the apron looked like a dress.
Tonight I came across that sketch and redid it from the original. The only things that didn’t change were the colours.
First, the new version:
And a before/after comparison:
I was totally into dinosaurs as a kid, and Godzilla was a dinosaur. Or close enough. I watched all the Japanese Godzilla movies from the 1950s on the Tacoma station KSTW (channel 11). They aired as part of their Sunday noon SCI-FI THEATER. It was all the sci-fi schlock I could handle–and then some! So many terrible, yet amazing movies.
I drew a lot of dinosaurs, and in my 14-year-old mind, Godzilla would have absolutely been a tyrannosaurus rex if he had been a REAL dinosaur. So I drew him as such in 1978.
Below is a traced copy of the sketch. I tried to keep the line work as close to the original and I think I came pretty close, using the Narinder Pencil in Procreate, with an HB Pencil for the shading.
Why do this when I still have the original sketch? This was both an experiment and a nostalgic trip back to my hippie-haired youth. The nostalgia part is obvious, the experiment was to see how easily my hand could follow the lines I drew 45 (!) years ago, and, really, just to see what it felt like.
It felt weird. It felt weird not because it was dead simple to trace (it’s a pretty straightforward sketch), but because as I traced over it, the lines felt like mine, right down to giving Godzilla puny little arms that were still pretty ripped. And giving him a funny-looking snout that would probably work as the front end of a car.
And I still draw rocks pretty much the same way in 2023.
Anyway, it was an interesting way to reacquaint myself with some of my oldest surviving artwork.
And the original scan (this is not a great scan, I’ll probably redo it at some point):
I wonder if I should do a modern take on this…as an experiment.
Bonus: I tried to imagine how I might have coloured it back in the age of disco, and this is what I came up with. I think it’s pretty close:
It’s not what you think!
With caption:
And without:
Drawn using: iPad Pro Procreate, using 6B Pencil and Dry Ink brushes Text added using Pixelmator Photo
You should probably be able to figure it out.
This shot was dark, slightly blurry and had a branch partly blocking the birb, so I fixed some of these things and here it is.
I’ve now got it in my head that I want to do one or more cartoon with geese, because they intrigue me and horrify me in equal parts.
My first step was to do a bird drawing of a Canada goose, but in a more deliberate cartoon style. This is my initial attempt, which I’ll refine as I go along. I’m using the most obvious joke here, they’ll probably get weirder or more obscure if I do more.
This is based on a photo of a goose going berserk (as they do) at Reifel on April 22. Most of these photos turn out blurry because the goose is whipping its head around (as they do).
Birb:
I started this bird art thing with a chickadee, but it was very simple line art (I sort of want to do some more in that specific style). Here’s another chickadee, in my now-established style.
I abandoned this sketch tonight because the reference photo was too dark and the Anna’s hummingbird was coming out way too murky.
I’ll find a better-lit photo and do another hummingbird someday, but this is interesting in a “what could have been” sort of way.
I wanted to draw something simple and quick, and an orange is just a circle that’s…orange.
So here it is.
(This is also me getting back to the “draw something every day thing” where I’m less concerned with quality and more concerned with building good habits and a vast collection of hand-drawn fruit.)
I finally got off my lazy butt and collected all of my bird drawings in a single gallery, which I will update going forward.
Here’s a quick summary of the process:
The line part usually take a few minutes, the colouring can sometimes take an hour or more, depending on the complexity. I have trended toward getting more complex with the drawings, but will still try to throw some simpler ones in.
There are also a few drawings that don’t follow the above formula, like the cobra chicken, killdeer and squirrel, which is not actually a bird.
The gallery:
