The second week into it I just didn't feel like coloring in my drawings, so I left them as they were. This also made it impossible for me to improve on an image by using gouache. I think sometimes a mediocre drawing can still be made to look good if you color it in a certain way. No escape like that this time!
The first one is a look at my messy desk. I find it difficult to draw a scene with so many things in it and this is by no means a good drawing, but I still kind of like how it reflects my desk of that day.
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| EDM#9 - Draw your messy desk |
Drawing hands is hard, but it's a good exercise and...your model is always available! ;-)
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| EDM#10 - Draw your hand |
The next one is without a doubt the worst of the lot. This looks nothing like my sunglasses! Who would have thought drawing glasses would be so hard? To make up for the bad drawing I added some details of the glasses on the page to correct myself.
When I drew the next image something started to shift and that kind of surprised me. I no longer had the tendency to want to fill in every line, but started going for simpler lines and just getting the shapes down. This drawing of my hair dryer is not half bad. I have not idea how this shift came about. Maybe that's the thing that comes with practicing more?
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| EDM#16 - Draw a favorite tool |
You may wonder about the assignment and my take on it, but my hair dryer is really one of my favorite tools in the studio. It helps me dry things faster and that is a wonderful thing for impatient little me.
After several black and white drawings it was time for some color again and I decided to try a technique somebody told me about when I attended the sketch crawl in January. He suggested putting areas of color in first to sort of loosely shape the subject you are going to draw and then just draw the correct lines over it. Those lines will come out off kilter, but the effect can be very nice. He was right.
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| EDM#13 - Draw your phone |
My intention for this challenge was to do the EDM challenge that matched the date. So EDM#3 for the third of May and so on. But then impractical assignments started happening like "Draw a musical instrument" (I don't have a musical instrument) or just things I really didn't want to draw. So I decided it's okay to stray a little if the challenge is not to my liking or simply impossible to do.
What I also like now that I'm a little more into it, is trying out different approaches to these drawings. I had done colored in ones, black and white ones, off kilter ones and now I even added a little collage, just for the fun of it. Empty bottles are really hard to draw by the way.
The last one is my favorite so far. I just made a random colored background and then drew the picture over that. My normal pen was too thin and the drawing got 'lost' in all that color, so I went over it with a brush pen and I really like the result.
It's funny, if you do something long enough it sort of grows on you. Last week I still found these assignments to be 'homework', but now that I have started playing a little with techniques and materials it's getting to be quite fun! Who knew? ;-)
I'll keep you posted on the project as it continues. For now I'll just wish all of you a wonderful weekend!