This is my drawing for the January Scrawlrbox challenge “nature’s eye”. You can see the materials I got and my review of them here.
Eagle Owl Drawing
pencil
Scrawlrbox #16 Review
January’s box is my third and completes my 3 month subscription. I loved every box so I’ll definitely get more in future. This month the featured artist is Gemma Stylz and the challenge theme was “Nature’s Eye”. The art print is beautiful up on the shelf above my desk.
The iRat
For an art theme of energy, I present the iRat. A rat grimly struggles to drag his battery-powered mate onto the charging pad for a re-charge.
You could read all sorts into this – maybe I was trying to say something about Apple device battery issues, or predicting some grim society where even the rats need a virtual buddy. Truth is, I just had this image pop into my head with a rat dragging his mate by the tail, started laughing and doodled it.
This is a tiny A6 sketch using watercolour pencils and ink on some card. The colours came out softer than I’d have liked, but they still work.
Squirrels
Two more drawings from my sketch book. The first was a close up of a squirrel eating. Around here the squirrels seem to divide their time between eating food, burying food, performing acrobatics to acquire food and playing daredevil with other squirrels and cats. Probably trying to guard their food! I wish these were red squirrels but I find it hard to dislike grey squirrels in London, they are such entertaining little creatures. Especially when they perform acrobatics above our garden at full speed.
Sketching Sally the fidget monster!
After a bit of cartoon practice, I decided to get some speed sketching practice with little Sally as my model.
I’m sure whenever she notices I’m looking at her, she gets the fidgets! It took a few aborted poses before I got the second sketch. Even then, she still moved her head and paws mid way through.
Horse sketches
I haven’t skipped a single day of my sketch book challenge since I started.
happy dance
A few more scans for you 🙂
Both quality and quantity are increasing already, and making myself draw EVERY day whether I feel like it or not, I’m having to find a way of working in any mood or situation. Which was another of my goals. I learned that being in a really grouchy mood makes for very tense, ugly work when I’m horribly critical of myself. But after a few hours of ugly cartoon faces and a dreadful horsey, I just got to that “oh, what the hell” point and like magic a sketch flew onto the paper one bold line after another. I look at that page with the horrible horse and the free one beside it and they don’t even look like the same person drew them. But that day was a valuable lesson for me. Here’s the scan so you see what I mean.
I’m doing cartoon practice and also more realistic work. I’ve always been a bit too meticulous and I love relaxing while I do very careful texturing in pencil. You get into a rhythm and that becomes like a meditation for me. So I have used my sketchbooks to draw quickly and choose random poses (currently horses) to challenge myself on the accuracy side too.