What makes a drawing surreal? What is the difference between comics/cartoons and surreal designs? These are some of the questions I asked myself during this week. I really like the surreal style, and would definitely love to spend even more time on it in the future. I think part of the surreal vibe comes from extreme, exaggerated forms. Bigger eyes and mouths definitely help. There’s also the three-dimensional aspect. I think that is important to show that in some parts of the drawing (for example, in the last days of this week, the bubbles around the figures on top and at the bottom of the page).
In my opinion, a surreal design may loosely resemble a real-life object, animal, or form. We get inspiration out of something we can find in real life and take it in a different direction. I imagine mixing different animals and combining unrelated forms in a single design could be a very fun exercise. I’m very interested in learning more technics on how to render any design more realistic (when drawing in a realistic or surreal).
On Days 44 and 45, I finished one of the comic drawings and tried creating a short story with very simple doodles in German. As I mentioned in the Week 5 article, I wanted to add more German to the project. I felt like just using a pen drawing ebook in German wasn’t enough for a ‘Pen Drawing in German’ project 😁. Now that I have started putting together articles in German paired with a few drawings, I feel that’s going more in the direction I wanted since the beginning.
From Day 45 to 47 I worked on surreal fruit and veggie forms. As I mentioned in the first comic drawing article, I have found here as well that the eyes and eyebrows convey most of the mood and the feeling of a character. Even with very small eyes and a couple of lines, is possible to give a lot of expression to these comic figures. Between Days 47 and 50, I worked on a bigger, full-page design with multiple characters. I would even need one more extra day to finish that one.
Week 7 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 7)
That’s all for now! 😊
