This first drawing was a way to stretch my wings a bit (if you'll forgive the pun) by drawing a close-up of a hawk's head. Of course, drawing a bird meant drawing feathers, which is not only a pretty relaxing activity but also excellent practice in drawing repeated, similar shapes. The difficult part is keeping the feathers similar in shape, while still including their natural variations so they don't look artificial. There's very little shading in the feathers, which is another step outside of my comfort area. The great part is that the angles of the feathers show the contour of the bird, rendering shading (again forgive the pun) virtually unnecessary.
The tree that is below is the result of the visual artist's equivalent of writer's block. I can't really complain though, since I ended up with a really detailed illustration of a ficus tree. The leaves look better in person, but you can see I employed a similar method to that of the hawk's feathers. The leaves are similar to each other, but show a degree of variation as well. The difference being that I wanted the feathers to show the contours of the hawk's head. If the leaves were all similarly angled, the tree would look more like a topiary than a naturally growing ficus. I should also point out that this particular ficus is an evil ficus. You really have to watch out for them, since they look just like any other ficus.
One Sunday morning I had the bright idea to ask several kids in my church's youth group to throw out some ideas for strange things to draw. One of them, Nash R., really delivered. While I'm not sure I'd spontaneously choose to draw a Japanese spider crab, in retrospect I'm glad I did. Keeping the legs in proportion to each other was a huge pain, but as with any trial, it paid me with experience. I couldn't have asked for a much better result for this decapod. If you've never heard of these things, I suggest reading up on them. You can't get a much more intimidating crustacean than a 12 foot, 40 pound crab.
In case the fact hasn't become obvious yet, I greatly prefer drawing organic shapes (e.g. animals) to drawing more angular objects with set proportions (e.g. buildings or automobiles). This is an exception to that rule. This was another requested drawing, and in this case it was one of my students who made the request unsolicited. He wanted me to draw a robot dog. Now, those who know me also know that I'm a bit of a pushover when it comes to polite requests from kids (or adults for that matter), so after only a very slight hesitation I agreed. Thus was born (constructed?) the robotic dog. In case he ever happens to stumble across this particular blog post, I'd like to say to him "Thank you, Ethan S. for pushing me outside of my artistic comfort zone. I really like the way this little pup turned out, and would likely have never tried it without your tenacious coaxing."
That about does it for this episode. Tune in next post, same bat-time, same bat-channel.
-AH!
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