Alright, had some time working on this today. I decided to make some changes to her outfit and hair. Since I liked the big hair much better than the mohawk, I simply used that hair do instead. The changes I made to the outfit are to better represent the dancers ability to entertain. The original outfit looked a bit too much like a warrior queen, not a performer. I also tried out some different poses for her, but ended up using the first one since I want to display her whole outfit, and if she is mid-air dancing it’s very hard to get a good look at the outfit. Next step will be to render, and that I totally suck at, have no idea how to make it look good : D

I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather these past days, like I’m never getting rid of this frikking cold. I’m sure it will go away eventually, but it just seems to linger forever. Anyways, I spent some time on trains, ferries and buses the other week, and got some time to think about this art thing. Creating and drawing has always been part of what I do an who I am, so it’s not like I’m ONLY creating because I have some fixated idea that I need to lever up and acquire skills. That part, the learning part, is just a natural consequence of me feeling the need to get better at doing what I like and love; draw and paint. So there’s that.

I’ve just been thinking about HOW to get better at achieving my goal; to create better art. So just quick notes before I go to bed;

1. I need to constantly challenge myself. If it’s easy then I’m walking down the same path over and over again, and this way I won’t get anywhere new and exciting.

2. I want to paint 80% studies and 20% from imagination. Doing stuff only from imagination makes me draw the same stuff over and over again, and as stated this is not the way forward.

3. I need “bosses” to defeat and clear challenges where I can measure my success and maybe see a progress. This is why I have decided to participate in the challenges over at CA. It’s a great way of pretending to have a deadline, someone else decides the topic and to create a full piece I need to tackle a lot of issues at the same time: perspective, color, anatomy etc.

All this was realized while playing the excellent game Duet on my iPhone over the past two weeks. I started out like a real noob cake sucking soooo hard, and bit by bit I learned to play what I at first believed was an impossible game. NOW: sleeptime!

Just some stuff from today, trying to keep it simple and draw from imagination for fun.

The batch of croquis from this week. I felt kinda rusty and was fighting this super cold at the same time, but I think I’m making some progress? I wish our models would hold a pose for longer than the maximum of 5 minutes. The teacher is refusing to let us draw a pose for longer than five, and I kinda get her point since it’s a “croquis” class, and the word literally means “sketch”, not study. But I think it would be awesome to get to study the body for a longer time than that. To really take your time and see how the muscles connect and identify the bones. Now I’m just kinda rushing to get anything at all down on paper before the model shifts her pose, hehe.

Besides from the croquis I’ve hit some kind of mental wall when it comes to drawing and painting. I guess sometimes you just lose confidence you are ever gonna learn something. For me I think it’s this perspective thing. I just don’t get it, it seems like rocket science…But as always I guess it’s just about one step at a time. Rome wasn’t built on a day. Sometimes when I feel like I’m chasing my own tail, never getting anywhere with this drawing business I just think about my step mum’s father who holds the 7th dan of the black belt in karate (!). He has been training karate for most of his life, it has taken him more than 50 years to get where he is today. Also, THIS awesome small comic kinda sums up many of my thoughts on this topic.