Primordial Ooze

One of my New Year projects is to learn how to draw. I’ve always been intensely interested in drawing but I never had the raw talent needed to produce the types of things that I wanted to draw. Well, I decided to hell with having no talent. I’m sure I can improve and I could at least try and find out how good I can get.

When I was growing up, I had a deep-rooted desire to draw but I was never really any good. To compensate, I drew simple things. I even invented my own little creatures which were insanely easy to draw. I called them Fluffs. I have no idea why I picked such a stupid name.

Anyway, Fluffs are little black spherical eye-ball guys that can fly and shoot powerful energy beams from their eyes. I typically set them in 2D battles in mountainous terrains. Below is something I drew recently to illustrate the concept. I’ll try and dig up some of my childhood renditions (they are not much different!):

A friend at work lent me a great book called Drawing with the Right Side of Your Brain. The premise of the book is that people tend to draw what they think something looks like instead of what it actually looks like. One of the classic exercises of the book is to draw something upside-down. I suppose this exercise forces you to really look at what you are illustrating rather than come up with a concept of it in your mind as your pen hits the paper.

I didn’t finish the book, but the first few chapters definitely got me thinking.

So, over the past few months, I’ve been restocking on art supplies. For the holidays, a few family members wondered what they could get me and I was quick to answer, “A drawing pad!” or “Some colored pencils!” or “Some ink pens!”

Since my kids love to draw and color, I thought I would start joining them. Today, we had a great time with Lilo and Stitch characters.

I basically searched the web for a picture of Stitch and found one with Lilo, Stitch, and experiment 221, Sparky. Here is the original image:

First, I drew Sparky and colored him in with colored pencils.

The graphite pencil and the colored pencils don’t go so good together. Or, at least I don’t know how to make them look good. In my next illustration of Stitch, I inked the outlines.

The ink definitely helps. Plus, this was my second try and I learned a few things.

One of the first things I learned, which is specific to copying artwork, is that you shouldn’t draw along one edge for too long. If you do, you are likely not going to “meet up” right with the rest of the illustration (at least if you have my problems). It seems like you need to somehow proportion everything out with rough outlines and add the detail later.

Copying artwork is pretty important to learning, I think. When drawing figures, there are a lot of basic shapes and conventions that I need to learn how to draw on my own. However, I think the only way to get there is to copy, copy, copy until I know these shapes by heart.

I hope to post more illustrations in the coming weeks.