Wokay!

I found this photo on Flickr’s explore page and realised that I hadn’t yet tried to draw an animal:

So I drew this:

What do you know, this is my best drawing yet. Cats, it turns out, are easier to draw than humans.

This is in addition to all the other ways in which cats are better than humans – they potty train themselves, they have tails that can swish from one direction to another, and, of course, they can be simultaneously alive and dead.

From Flickr’s explore page, this black and white, full-of-shadows photo jumped out at me:

And this is what I drew:

I drew the two silhouetted people on the left with the umbrellas first, and the lady in the foreground afterwards – and then realised that I had drawn the foreground figure much larger in proportion to the umbrella carrying people than she is in the photo.

That mistake apart, I’m a little pleased with myself for mostly getting her posture right with very few lines and not driving myself furious trying to reproduce exact angles or curves.

The one thing that did throw me off in this photo was getting the angles and proportions of the buildings right. About a day after I drew this, I watched ShaeferArt’s video on two point perspective, and I think having seen that first might have helped me do the buildings better.

For 3 July, I picked this photo from Flickr’s explore page:

And this is what I drew:

I have no idea how things went so wrong.

For 2 July, I decided to recreate this photo:

This was from the flickr photostream of someone named Denis Cauchoix who’s removed it since then. I’ve contacted him to see if he’s okay with me putting up his photo, and I’ll be taking it down if he says no. His photostream has some amazing animal photos, and I recommend it highly.

This is how I drew it:

This was easier compared to my catastrophe with faces the day before this; and restored my confidence. It’s still off in certain ways – I completely messed up the lock, drawing the outline, erasing it, and then forgetting to do it properly. I could have done better with the bird’s head as well, and I can’t quite grasp just how I’m off with the bicycle’s carrier. But I think this is a step up.

I decided to recreate this photo from flickr:

And this is what I made of it:

If either the photographer or the subjects ever see this, I’m apologising to them for the terrible mess I’ve made of their faces. I have such a long way to go when it comes to getting faces right. And it only becomes harder when the face is smiling.

I think the Rolling Stones logo from the day before this was so easy, it made me overconfident.

On that day, the Flickr explore page had a photo of a bar which had a Rolling Stones logo on one of its signs. I was feeling unambitious or rushed, so I decided to skip reproducing the whole photo, and only to copy the logo. This is the logo:

And this is what I made of it:

Reasonably easy, which made it a good confidence booster.

About two weeks ago, I…

Actually, scratch that. It wasn’t two weeks ago. It was years and years ago. Years and years ago, when I was a small boy, I enjoyed my school’s art classes and wanted to paint more.

There was a small problem. I was a terrible painter. I was just as terrible at drawing, and any science exam which required a diagram would have my pencils returned to me with despairing red ink. So I moved on to other things, like quizzing, writing, and computer programming. I stuck with some, and less so with others. The drawing never stuck around.

Fast forward to my first year of college, when I was introduced to engineering drawing. I liked it. I also flunked it in my first go, but that’s relevant contextual information, not the point in itself. Engineering drawing had rules. You knew what you had to do in order to get the end result. Emboldened by my new knowledge of plan, profile, and elevation views, I tried to draw comics. I was still terrible, and so after my first enthusiastic sheet, I gave up, and thought vaguely of becoming a comics writer and finding an artist. I never did anything about it.

Fast forward some more. I read lots of comics. I read lots of webcomics. I started seeing even more webcomics thanks to Instagram and imgur. And over five years, the message that those webcomics artists were putting out – that they didn’t have a blessing of talent, and that they had just worked at it for months – sank in. Posts where they showed how their drawing of the same subject had changed dramatically for the better over two years or five years or ten years really drove the message in. And I began to think that I could do it too.

I bought myself colour pencils late last year, watched the first episode in Schaefer Art’s Youtube tutorial, and then promptly got too intimidated to continue.

And then the pandemic hit. And stuck at home in lockdown, without colour pencils but with regular HB pencils and a notebook, I began to draw things again.

Right now, I don’t want to be great at drawing. I just want to stop being terrible.

I realise that as currently stated, this isn’t a specific, measurable, or timely goal. I have no idea if it’s achievable or realistic. But I think I need to start the process before I can even decide a goal.

And part of that process is going to be drawing again and again, and putting my drawing out for the world to see, and probably, to point and laugh at. You see, I’m still terrible.

But the thing about being in my late thirties is that I’ve made peace with being terrible, and even with being terrible in public. So here goes nothing. If things work out, I’ll be posting regularly on this blog again, and getting better, and I’ll have a record of my progress and improvement. If things don’t work out, well, I’ll be as bad at drawing as I was before – and maybe I’ll have chased away the few people who still read this thing. And if it does get that bad, let me know, and I’ll shift the drawings over to their own blog.

But for now, let’s begin. The exercise I follow nowadays is to go the Flickr explore page, pick something that looks like the right level of challenge, and try to reproduce it. This is the first one I did seriously, from 29 June. Here’s the original:

And here’s my reproduction:

Here’s to not quitting this time around.