Speed-drawing costumes in five minutes is considerably harder than drawing nudes, but even knowing that it was still a soul-crushing, frustrating experience. I managed to get two or three decent drawings out of the night, but I’m out of practice (again) and most of my drawings sucked badly. I recognise that I’ll only see improvement through practice,  but this one was tough. Meh. Pep talks welcome at this point.

Here’s one of the better images, with a splash of colour courtesy of photoshop to distract you from all my screwups.

I got to witness a really cool Model T Ford meetup at Monkey Joe’s, there were about 10 of them lined up facing Carling in the parking lot, and a bunch of old guys comparing wooden wheel diameters. Beautiful paint jobs and excellent restoration work on all of them. I hope it’s a recurring event, I’d love to get some detail shots of all the chrome and custom metalwork.

Then I saw someone dressed up in a monkey suit outside of Mark’s Work Wearhouse dancing around and trying to get people to come into the store – not really picture-worthy but odd enough that I wished Natasha could have seen it. (It turns out she saw him too on the bus ride home.)

So I’ve learned my lesson – I’m going to fuse my camera to my arm somehow. Meanwhile, here’s a 7-minute sketch of the dancing monkey guy… EXACTLY as it happened. In black and white for maximum artistic effect.

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.

Doing figure studies was totally invigorating, though, and I regret not getting back to it sooner. The model was new at it and moved around quite a lot, but she had a drawable shape and chose interesting positions. I was completely out of shape and could have practiced a little more before class. My first few poses were a complete write-off, but by the end of the evening I was drawing things with resonable proportions again.

I promised I wouldn’t be too hard on myself, knowing full well I’d be rusty, but I need LOTS of studies before I’m anywhere near the level I used to be at. My linework is really bad. My shading is inconsistent. I made up new anatomy a few times. Lots of room to improve! Practice practice practice!

The intention is that his chest area’s actually a 3-way symmetry, with the back arm sprouting at a 120 degree angle from the other two arms. It sortof looks like he’s got an arm coming out of his neck, but in my genius I hadn’t thought to add the 3rd arm until he was nearly complete.

Notice that he’s not in any kind of exciting perspective or anything – not very challenging. In this case drawing him flat was mostly for modeling purposes, but I have to admit that I’m a little intimidated by some plans I have for some more dynamic/organic poses. The only thing that makes you better is practice, and I’m seeing a huge jump in technique over the quality of my drawings from a few years ago. So maybe I can do it!

It’s not a “New Year’s Resolution”, officially, but now that we’re set up in the apartment and I have a bunch of free time over the Christmas holidays I’m getting back into the swing of drawing every day. With the move and everything, I haven’t really spent a lot of time concentrating on being an artist. It’s nice to get back to it, but I’m feeling a bit out of shape. I draw all the time at work, but it’s usually technical doodles, storyboards, little layout boxes and logo thumbnails, so generally I do a lot of sketchy amorphous blobs covered in technical notes, nothing really “finished”.

The real challenge is finding the patience to keep at a little drawing for an hour or two, while stuff is going on all around me. I don’t get a lot of downtime where I can sit and work, and what time I do get is often frittered away surfing. Bad habit! I’m hoping to take some courses at the Ottawa School of Art this upcoming semester, so I can delineate that time as “art time”.

Here’s a little doodle guy to show you that I’ve started, anyhow. Astutely nerdy people may recognize him from the “Ninja Turtle” comic universe, a suit of survival armour for some little buggy alien that caught my eye when I was a teenager. I always thought he’d make a cool action figure. There’s lots of things going wrong with the picture (mostly due to impatience), but I figure if I post it and look back on it in a few months, hopefully I’ll show some improvement!