Doodle 072 - Shapes and animals

Not that long ago (maybe about 6 months or so) I finished a couple of master classes taught by Alex Woo (a story artist for Pixar) and Stephen Silver (character designer, he created Kim Possible, for example) via schoolism.com. At the time I was still not drawing much... if at all, so in an effort to get back into the groove I decided to take a gesture drawing and a character design class.

Hindsight, I wasn't really ready to get back in the game, I was forcing myself to do it hoping it would, somehow, restart my passion for drawing. I found the classes wonderful, but soon I became rather stressed because well... Alex Woo and Stephen Silver were grading my exercises, and I really have a lot of respect for both of them, plus my work was still very stiff, rusty and my heart was still pretty conflicted about allowing myself to draw at all.

All in all, I found myself thinking: "OMG, OMG, OMG what am I doing?! This doesn't even look passable, oh I am sooo bad!" more often than not, but both Alex and Stephen were wonderful and steered my frantic and rather mediocre looking efforts to draw every lesson with patience and expertise. I learned so very much from them, and eventually the idea that I HAD to re-start this project started to germinate in my mind until I finally got the guts to do it.

Anyway, I bring all this up, because one of the exercises that Stephen taught us, was to use shapes as bases to create characters, this makes the characters easy to recognize, memorable and gives them interest... I am probably not explaining it very well, so here is what I tried today:

Shape exercise with animals - blue mechanical pencil on plain Moleskine notebook. Aprox 1 hour.

The above is what I ended up with, I still need to work a lot on making what I draw consistently interesting and unique, in a sense, I have to find my own style, something that will set me apart and makes me comfortable, I can tell I have sort of a style, but it needs more practice and polishing.

Owl detail - blue mechanical pencil on plain Moleskine notebook.

Pigeon - blue mechanical pencil on plain Moleskine notebook.

Cat and shaggy dog - blue mechanical pencil on plain Moleskine notebook.

Now, someone tell me they find that cat above familiar too, because I think I have seen it before and I can't quite put my finger on it... I don't know.

Bird and cat - blue mechanical pencil on plain Moleskine notebook.

Another day down, gotta keep trying my best. Never give up, never surrender!