daily drawings

A penguin on an ice floe, thinking of fish.

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Here’s my finished bear sketch, which I don’t care for. The color is weird because I didn’t use reference, so I just winged it and the grass is odd because I was experimenting with shadows/textures. Also, the bear is magically standing on top of the grass instead of in it. I probably should have fixed that, but it was getting late.

I also wasn’t sure how to shade the bear, so it is mostly flat, but with some texture. Kind of a mess. But I did it!

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I’m not sure how many of these I’ll do. The Making Art Everyday prompts for February are animals, which is fine. I’ll draw a penguin. But the parameters have shifted from just doing something every day to something more tutorial-like, which is not what I want. I am not making these sketches to learn, per se, I’m doing them to build a habit for drawing every day. Any learning that may happen alongside them is incidental–I plan on continuing my actual learning in structured lessons elsewhere.

Here’s how this week’s prompts work:

This week is all about teaching yourself how to draw something from memory. The idea here is to study an animal, identify its unique characteristics, break it down into simple shapes, then develop your own method for drawing that animal. It’s a process that can take time, so I’ve split each prompt across two days.

This is WAY too specific for a daily prompt and splitting it over two days makes it…not daily.

So I cheated and did a bear sketch from reference. It turned out decent.

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I went with a hot dog because I wanted to draw a hot dog, but it looks strange and I’m not sure I’d want to eat it.

I also forgot to put on the toppings.

But I got some experience using the smudge tool and various brushes to create blends.

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I went with tortilla chips. This was done without reference. I was going to add a bowl of salsa or something but decided to keep it simple.

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Chocolate milk, because why not?

I spent a long time trying to get the perspective of the carton right and realized after that I had ignored everything I’ve learned about horizon lines and all that jazz. It doesn’t look too dopey, at least.

I’m not sure why I added gum gum people, but I think they add a certain something.

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I chose pizza even though I’ve already done pizza. I was originally going to do a pizza sitting in a shaft of light on a stone pedestal, then realized that’s way beyond my current skill level, so I just did it against a glowy background instead.

I was going to make the pepperoni more 3Dish but couldn’t get it to look right.

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Once again, a food topic where I don’t really have a favorite, so I went with grilled cheese, because a good grilled cheese sandwich is indeed yummy.

I went with chalk brushes for this one. It turned out decent, I think.

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SO TIRED OF DRAWING FOOD.

I chose pancakes, though I could have included a lot of things here. Technically these should be blueberry pancakes but I didn’t feel like adding the blueberries.

I also used a texture brush for the funky background and turned some sloppy line work into an intentionally arty white outline. Yeah.

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Finally, a prompt that isn’t a single item of food. But I still was uninspired, so went with a minimalist Inktober-ish approach.

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I didn’t want to draw a bowl of soup, so I made a can of tomato soup instead.

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