A Drawing A Day

Since my Blick Art store experience this past Monday, I’ve been feeling inclined to DO something about the lack of drawing in my current lifestyle.

I’ve decided that the best way to not only try to get back into it but to get some good, hearty practice at it again would be to try to do a drawing a day.

I started on Tuesday night, just sketching from an example, then following it up, Wednesday night with some quick cartoony sketches.

Earlier on Wednesday evening, my wife and I visited my parents and my Dad and I dug out some of my old comic books that had been “lost” since I impulsively tried to get rid of them somewhere around 1993/1994. As I sifted through them, I found my collection of G.I. Joe, Real Ghostbusters and Ren & Stimpy comics that I’d largely collected during my B.C. days. I paged through some and found some fantastic drawings to inspire me to stretch my artistic abilities again. Let’s face it: after college, there hasn’t been anyone giving me assignments in different mediums or challenges to test my abilities. On Thursday night, for my daily drawing, I attempted a pencil sketch of an ink drawing from a panel in a G.I. Joe / Transformers brand crossover comic. I remember even when I first read these books that there had been a short string of issues where this incredible artist, whose name is Andrew Wildman, had really captured amazing detail and expression in his work.

However, I was quickly reminded of how different pencil and pen are as mediums. I don’t dabble much in pen because I love the quick and forgiving control of pencil.

Recently, I dug out some drawing Micron pens to create a new 404 Error page image at JFH – just for fun. These pens had to be a good 10 to 12 years old and the ink was definitely running out, so I ordered a new set online for future use.

Last night, I chose a G.I. Joe comic book cover drawing from 1992 and worked up a light pencil sketch first with a 6H pencil (newly bought at Blick, mind you) and then proceeded to go over that with the new ink pens of different weights.

The result has been fun; It’s to the point where I can’t wait to dabble more with pen! I tend to rush into projects out of sheer enthusiasm and am not usually fully satisfied with the outcome, so I’m going to try my darndest to take all of this slower and practice, practice, practice!

The liberty that doing ‘a drawing a day’ brings will hopefully break me of some of my perfectionist mentality. I usually drive myself to draw, re-draw and often just abandon stuff I’m not happy with. I feel like, with this new approach, I don’t need to display these sketches or enter them into any contests or have them critiqued. It’s for what these should be for — fun! (and practice!) I’ll never forget one of my art class professors telling me that every artist has about 10,000 bad drawings in them and the more we draw and practice, the more of those bad drawings we get out of the way to discover the good ones. … So here we go!