I bought my first new sketchpad in over a year, and christened it before my next lifedrawing workshop with a big 12 by 12 inch Ninja Turtle. I doodled it in because it was fun to draw, I wanted to mess around with linework and practice my shading, and I needed to get something onto the first page to get over the intimidation of seeing a big blank book when I got to class. Facing a huge white page is hard. Those first few marks in a book really set the tone for what follows.

The turtle is a study from one of the old books that had a really crisp inky graphic feel that I liked. If I seem to be drawing a lot of TMNT stuff lately it’s because I enjoy the inkwork they did in the old books – even though their drawing skills were pretty rudimentary and often lacked proper proportions. I’ve done a few of my own cleanups in this pose of Raphael doing a lunge – but I’m seeing a lot of anatomical issues and inconsistent shading in having tried to follow the original too closely.

I think I’ve satisfied my anthropomorphised turtle-drawing needs for a while. Most of the rest of the book is going to have my life drawings on them, but I might draw in the occasional dinosaur or man-eating plant.