Aug 5th - Funny Animals Day
I should legally be allowed to deck anyone who uses AI for stock photos. Anyway!
I guess today turned out to be "weird little guys that make me giggle" day. Every picture but the tiger, landscape, and quoll made me laugh out loud. I have a very stupid sense of humor as you can see.
Either way, it's good practice for animals I REALLY don't draw often, and translating skills and anatomy I learned from other animals. The cormorant chicks, for example, helped me learn a bit about cormorant posture and the anatomy under those feathers. Same for the featherless chicken. Bugs and arthropods are always fun to practice, plus I at least put on the guise of trying to memorize fish fin anatomy.
I'm trying to be a more positive person, but it's really hard. The AI desert photos really set me off today. I eventually just gave up on the search I was doing and made a completely separate search. I still learned from it, but a bit less, since I've seen the picture before. Ah well.
More on the "i have been condemned to tiger world" note: when I mess up the proportions of an animal up enough that looking between the reference image and the drawing gives me uncanny valley feelings a bit, I try to draw at least a full page of that animal. Might be today! Might be tomorrow! Nobody knows. Not even me. Either way, it'll be a bonus blog post or maybe even an essay talking about my referencing and study process.
Aug 4th - Funky Animals Day
Hey hey! Second post!
Today is funky animals day, I guess. I decided to challenge myself with some unusual animals. Reptiles are always really odd. Most mammals have organic softness, with a few angular bits here and there. Lizards are almost the opposite- angular shapes with bits of organic softness. Komodo dragons are even weirder, since they don't have many visual similarities with other reptiles. They have longer snouts, different eyes, and a LOT of loose skin that falls like cloth. Ostriches are also interesting- they have the funky neck shapes of herons/cranes, almost horselike legs, and a stance not shared by many birds. The quoll is a marsupial- and one that's black, making it harder to pick the shapes out. Plus of course the ever present challenge of horses, cats, and landscapes.
Aug 3rd - First Post!
A blog post... before the blog section is even ready?!?! Inconcievable.
Today's drawing/s are these studies. I'm getting back into the swing of things and am doing my best to just follow what I'm interested in for now.
My studies process is... downloading and curating as many animal photographs from pinterest as possible and that's not a joke. I tend to get a bit bored and feel boxed in with too few, so ... yeah! I find it's even inoculated me a bit against ai since I know what to look for with animal movement and anatomy (if you exclude ai on pinterest in your settings).
Some of these sketches seem simplistic but I'm just practicing proportion in a broad sense. Hand-eye coordination and proportion are really difficult skills to master, and even mild errors in proportion can make a drawing look uncanny valley.
I'll try to update this blog daily, but no promises. I have a bad habit of getting excited about a project and being really on top of it for a few days before getting distracted... c'est la vie.
