Yay! Another blog post! As promised, I have done more practice drawing and I’m ready to share some of the results with you all. Again, I’m working my way through Craft-a-Doodle by Jenny Doh. There is a list of 75 exercises and drawing prompts in this book, gathered from 18 artists. No two artists draw exactly alike, but everyone is focusing on the doodle style of drawing, which I enjoy. Why, you may ask? I’ve always loved to doodle. Doodles are fun little drawings of little or no consequence that I can do any time, on any handy scrap of paper. And because they’re of little or no consequence (i.e. I’m not making art to sell), I don’t feel a lot of pressure when I scribble away at them. I don’t need to carefully pencil my doodles, I can just go straight to ink (always my favorite part of drawing comics). I can use any colors without worrying about the overall color scheme of an entire comic strip. I don’t have to worry about scripting anything, and I don’t even have to think about whether what I’m drawing makes any sense. So doodling is a judgement-free zome for me!!!
Or at least it should be. The one thing I find my self struggling with as I go through these exercises is to not use the undo button. Again, I’m drawing these using Paper 53 on my iPad. Paper is a pretty basic drawing app with some decent natural media style tools, but they’re not the most precise tools, and I have no control over the size of the brush tips, the opacity of the color I lay down, or much of anything else. I can zoom in to work on something, but not as far as I’m used to doing in a drawing app. So, I’m using some pretty basic tools with very limited control, and I am making a lot of mistakes as I draw, which I hate. And what happens every time I make a mistake? I hit the undo button, which goes entirely against what I’m trying to accomplish with my practice drawing.
I don’t want to be perfect when I draw. I want to be good, and I want to get faster, which means learning to deal with mistakes and accept them as they happen, instead of bogging down the whole drawing process by constantly undoing my work in an attempt to make it perfect. I’m having to fight with myself not to hit the undo button, and even then, sometimes I can’t live with the line I’ve just drawn or the color I just put down, and instead of just making it work, or accepting it and moving on, I undo and undo and undo and undo…
Ugh. It’s infuriating. But one habit I need to break is hitting that undo button, so that’s why I’m doing this drawing practice.
Okay, enough yakking. Time for a couple of pics. The exercises I worked on this week had me making sprays of flowers and drawing more elaborate stylized flowers. I love drawing flowers, so I enjoyed this week. Here are two of the drawings I produced.
BeeYOUtiful Roses
Fancy Flower
I did take a little time with the second one to pick out the colors I wanted to use. I’m fussy about colors and I wanted colors for this that would contrast well but still work together. I like the final product. It reminds me of 1970s kitchen wall paper for some reason. That or Pennsylvania Dutch decor.
After playing around with flowers on the iPad, I decided to try drawing on ACTUAL PAPER with ACTUAL PENS AND MARKERS. Here’s how that turned out!
It”s a greeting card!
I have so much more control over actual paper and pen, and I had no problems not undoing anything I did on this card because THERE WASN’T ANY UNDO BUTTON!!!
Anyway, that’s this week’s drawing practice. I hope you like it. If you’re curious about the book Craft-a-Doodle, you can get it here.
