4 Months Into Drawing Animals

Hello,

So I’m taking some time to blog again and reflect on my animal drawing project where I’m drawing one animal every day to improve my drawing skills.

First off I would like to just say the whole project is completely about developing ideas and trying something new. My first two or three drawings of this project were based on really good drawings I’ve done in the past and I felt I didn’t want to just draw the same things in the same style for the whole year. I know I can draw birds and snakes in the styles I know already, but I really wanted to explore and expand my drawing skills.

Over these first 4 months I’ve discovered some really interesting ways of drawing animals. I have even started to incorporate other media that I wouldn’t have previously thought about using. Even colouring pencils I wasn’t too sure about that as I had been so stuck in my ways of a black and white pencil drawing. Now I feel more confident in trying different media and new things. Even if I end up putting up a really bad drawing for that day (of which I have a few) I don’t feel bad about it. It was a trial that went wrong. I could make up all the excuses under the sun why it didn’t turn out right but the best thing I could do would be to pick up on where I think it went wrong and to try and improve that aspect in the next drawing.

Some interesting styles I quite like is drawing as an extension of a ripped picture. We all remember the child books where they asked ‘Draw the other half of the picture’ and it’s a great way to improve your anatomy drawing. Unfortunately I’ve only managed one picture like this on the project so far but with another 8 months left on this project there’s plenty of time to keep trying new things. A second style I really like is what I discovered with my coloured pencil pictures. I feel the crosshatching works really well as not just for shading but for colouring as a whole. It’s definitely a style I want to keep on doing. Lastly I’m really interested in this last style I’m working on using very small and minimal lines to create a full picture in the minds of the viewer. My self proposed animal project at university flowed in this direction and at the end of it I decided to carry on with looking at animals with minimal lines and how animals can blend into their surroundings. I never had time before but as I’m dedicated to this project I have enough time for anything.

Unfortunately there are not 365 different animals I can think of to do a different one every day so there are many duplicate animals in my projects, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While I would like to explore many different animals, sometimes practicing the same animal over and over again makes you better at that animal (Practice makes perfect!). Recently I’ve felt like moving away from large animals and moving to insects instead. This could be interesting so we’ll see how things go!

- Steven

(I was provoked to write this by the following reference, take a look, it’s interesting)
References: Smashing Magazine