On Getting Back Into Drawing

A long time ago, I used to draw. In fact, drawing was probably my biggest hobby, especially back in school. It’s something you can do pretty damn easily, since all you need is paper and a drawing implement. However, when I started doing my 500 words a day, my desire to draw faded away. Later depression made me give up on drawing completely, and what little art I did was mostly unseen.

These days though, I am slowly getting back into drawing. While I don’t draw nearly as much as I write, it has been quite a change. Pleasant, almost. I’d actually recommend drawing as a hobby to everyone. In the mean time though, it’s been a bit of a journey for me.

Things to draw

I’m not 100% sure what actually got me back into drawing on the regular. My assumption is that I found a nice pad to draw on, and was bored. However, I also realized that, well, I have a ton of Phoviverse characters to draw. Many of these characters only ever had vague descriptions of who they were. In fact, many of them lacked any information in regards to colour as well.

But one day, I clearly started drawing again. It’s not like my 500 words a day where I HAVE to do it, but I keep a pad nearby so I can doodle occasionally. With less pressure (and less mental illnesses), I’ve been slowly drawing up many, many characters, as well as creating a bunch of new ones. It’s genuinely nice to put pencil to paper now. As a bonus, I now also have reference images for existing characters, and designs for completely new, unnamed entities as well.

Getting past the “everyone is better than me” thoughts

The hardest part of drawing is to actually be pleased with your work. It’s insanely easy to see other people’s art and go “wow my work sucks.” That trail of thought has always heavily dissuaded me. After all, my drawings are very basic, as are my colours and my shading in. But I need to not think like that, because negative thoughts do hurt creativity. And it’s occasionally made worse by the fact that my sister and my mum are both much more talented than I am.

Instead, I try to put things in another perspective. I draw characters in my own, custom style, that no one else really does. You can’t hang any of my doodles up in an art gallery, but they look nice on my blog, or when shared with friends.

Now in colour

What’s more interesting now though is that I am adding colours to my art. The majority of my older art are just simple sketches. Occasionally, I would go over some of these with my black pen, but I almost never coloured things in. I’ve always found colouring in traditional media to be irksome and tiring. Now though, my art is both traditional and digital, vector to be precise.

Turns out, when you can easily fill colours in with just a click, the least favourite part of my drawings are done more quickly, and I can move on to the more interesting bits, like special effects. As someone who easily gets dissuaded when things go wrong or take too long, the ability to circumnavigate less desirable tasks is great for me.

New techniques learned

I won’t lie though, my art isn’t exactly amazing. In fact, it’s incredibly simple, even once everything has been shaded. But I have learned a few things. Shading in particular is much easier. Instead of me using many, many layers, I found I could create a basic shading effect using the Gradient Mesh tool.

The best thing I learned is a nebula and space effect, done purely in Adobe Illustrator. While the rest of my work is still somewhat basic, I feel that the nebula effect really does take things up a notch. It’s not even that hard to do either, I just play around with blur and distortions until I find something I like. But I’m also learning other things as well, and my poses and shapes are becoming nicer.

Sure, my art isn’t utterly mind-blowing. But I’m happy with the characters I’ve drawn.

In the mean time, check out my gallery on phovos.net, my other website. It’s not updated daily like the Daily SPUF has, but it still has plenty of things to see.