Doodle 021 - Lady, Jake and a Fox

After watching yesterday's episode of Adventure Time I woke up wanting to draw Lady and Jake. I tried to get them as close to the actual show character design as I could. Then I decided to try an ink the drawing... and I remembered how badly I suck at inking haha!

Lady and Jake reference via the Adventure Time Wiki
 

No... really... I suck at inking, but that's the perfect excuse to try and ink more often, if I don't practice I'll never get any better.

Lady Rainicorn and Jake - Graphite, mechanical pencil and micron pens on plain Moleskine notebook. Aprox 30 mins. (Edit: The inking was bugging me sooo much I decided to try again or I couldn't sleep... I might have made it worse, but anyway, I tried heh...)

After that I did a very quick drawing of a small Fennec fox based on a random photo. It was too cute for me to not draw.

Fennec fox - Graphite and mechanical pencil on plain Moleskine notebook. Aprox 15 mins.

(Side note: 21 drawings... does this mean the blog is old enough to drink now? ;-p )

Doodle 003 - Opossum story time

Wow what a week... work was more than stressful, but the weekend has arrived, sound the trumpets! Strike up the band! Throw small children and cats into the air! (Just be careful catching the cats on the way down, they have a lot of pointy ends and dislike being thrown).

Today I did more quick animal drawing. I picked a random otter photo and did a quick sketch, then a random opossum photo and developed that one a bit more.

Otters are one of my favorite animals, hummingbirds being my number one favorite, followed by otters and cats. I am a swimmer and a bit of an odd silly cookie, so otters fit my personality just fine... plus they are stinking cute and sleep linking their paws together for maximum proshness.

Opossums on the other hand... sometimes can be kinda cute, but I'll always remember how freaked out I was the first time I saw one. I have always been a big city girl you see, the wildest animals I was used to were sparrows, pigeons and squirrels (my long fuzzy tailed nemesis, but I digress).

When I moved to Tallahassee from Madrid, Spain, I was expecting a big city "It is the capital of Florida after all!" I thought to myself, haha! Sucker! What I found was a forest with a small town nestled in it. The first time I ventured to throw the trash out in the middle of the night I was greeted by, what back then, I thought was an irradiated mutant animal escaped from the ruins of a leaking nuclear reactor.

The thing was ugly as get out, had a rather pointy row of crooked teeth, a very long snout opened up and was hissing at me menacingly while it swished its gigantic rat-looking tail.

I pretty much placed the trash bag slowly on the ground and backed away carefully with my hands up as if it were a mugger brandishing a knife and demanding spoiled left overs while wondering if I could outrun it or if I would need to fight it off while hoping Andrei would hear the scuffle and run to my aid armed with a big stick.

Ah yeah, good times.

Otter sketch from photo 5 minutes on plain moleskin

Opossum sketch from photo 10 minutes on plain moleskin

Doodle 001 - back to basic structures

After years spent away from drawing I realized I had lost my ability to sketch.

Basic human figures I had spent years studying had become stiff, flat and one dimensional.

This basic flaw became apparent when I decided to push the envelope and take online classes with Bobby Chiu and Stephen Silver.

My lines of action were lifeless and uninspired, my hand was way out of sorts and I had/have a major creative block.

To help me with this, I have started doodling the human figure again. Sometimes I use photos of models, other times I just start drawing whatever I can gather from memory.

To loosen myself I only spend limited amounts of time developing the sketches.

Here is today doodle. I am also throwing in some extras I have done through July.

(Click on drawings to view them at higher quality)

Today's doodle, 5 minute sketch from photo of model

5 Minute sketch from memory

Doodle from photo, 10 minutes. Emphasis on lines of action and fleshing out a body from them.

3 minute sketch from memory plus ink brush from memory

I can't remember the name of this animal, drawn last week at Animal Kingdom Lodge. 8 minutes aprox from live animal. Edit: Disney Jeff knows what animal this is "The animal from the Animal Kingdom Lodge is a scimitar-horned oryx."

Zebra, 2 minute sketch. This one kept moving around so all I could do is catch a basic structure.

Zebra butt drawn from live zebra, 10 minutes. I was lucky and it stayed put for a while. It decided to not look at me at all though.