This week I got started with comic characters, doodles, and other fun figures. The idea was to create something out of very simple shapes, like circles. The more I work on this project, the more I realize that the real difficulty here lies in coming up with original figures to draw on your own. I realized that it is not so hard to copy or imitate something made by someone else. Even drawing something based on a photograph. It’s not that I mastered that skill. Far from that! It’s something else.
My theory is that learning how to draw is pretty much learning how to see. Just as when we play a musical instrument. With music, we need to learn how to hear, how to listen to the sounds that we create (with an instrument or with our voice). When we draw, we need to pay a lot of attention to what we see. But not just while drawing. It’s important to learn how to see, before doing a drawing. I mean, in our everyday life. I think it’s all about being more mindful and pay a lot of attention to the forms, proportions, and colors we see throughout our days 👀.
On Days 31 and 31 I completed the D initial with the skull and the roses. It sounds creepy, but it looks cool! Days 32 and 33 were devoted to these small, emoji-like figures. They are incredibly expressive. I think that the key is in the eyes and the eyebrows. Just a couple of small changes there make a huge difference in the mood conveyed by the character. Half of the Day 33 and the whole Day 34 were dedicated to creating human cartoon figures. Some of the body proportions here were exaggerated to create a comic effect. In my opinion, that tends to work very well.
Between Days 34 and 36 I worked on animal cartoons. Loved these drawings! I would like to get back in the future to cats. I especially like drawing these big eyes and the mix of comic-like figures and realistic features. During the last day (Day 36) I also started the Four Characters drawing (which would keep me busy for almost a whole week 😅).
Week 5 Drawings
Below you can find the daily drawings. Each day, I’m practicing for an hour. Sometimes, I fill one or two pages. But there are days when I work on more detailed stuff, and maybe it’s just half a page 🙃. As soon as I reach the one-hour mark, I put the pen down and take the photo of the day. Click on the thumbs to see the larger pictures:
Diary in German + Drawings (Week 5)
For the month of August, I decided to try something new. Instead of creating Anki cards from the e-book I’m using to learn pen drawing, I thought of writing short diary entries in German with a couple drawings. The questions were totally random (I got them from https://capitalizemytitle.com/zufalliger-themengenerator-zufallige-konversationsthemen/). After writing these entries, I asked for help from two native speakers of German, who pointed out mistakes and offered additional improvements to my text (thanks Birgit and Helmut! 😃).
In this section, you will find a photo of the question/answer of the week with some drawings.
That’s all for now! 😊
