Drawings and Sketches from this week!

Seals are way too fun to sit down and sketch out.

Miranda's least favorite enemy to fight, but my favorite to draw!

🤫🦭😴

Pokémon — the gateway to doodling on math homework.

ALSO!! Today marks a year of me drawing everyday! If you've ever wanted to give it a whirl, let me tell ya, a lot can happen in a year!

We haven't found the recipe for Ice Cream Cookie Sandwiches in Tears of the Kingdom yet!

I just think this Moblin hat in Tears of the Kingdom is swell.

Jenn suggested I do some color studies from the master, Ken Sugimori. Here's a lil Diglett study from the original Pokémon art!

Going after sketching more from life with these big hunky rocks.

Inspired by Miranda playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. She's been on a mission to hunt down any moose she sees!

🐶

My sister very kindly loaned me her Copics to play with!

After months in greyscale, it's fun to have shades and hues to work with!

Perfect opportunity to do this Satsuki study from My Neighbor Totoro! Borrowed from this beautiful Miyazaki art book.

Playing with shapes and dog faces! 🔺🐶📦

Who, me?

Another one down!!

Started off very exercise heavy. These are figure study simplifications of the torso here:

Explored a few animal charicatures:

And then finished the book out with meditative automatic drawing:

My next one is a bigger sketchbook, so I'm excited to have more room to play. :)

Something I'm still learning is to keep more play in all of my creative practices.

Maybe that's surprising to anyone looking in from what I share! But it's true — it's still a challenge to turn off the critical brain when I'm playing an instrument or drawing.

With drawing, I was just doodling and messing with shape at the start. Lately, I've caught myself leaning more towards filling all of my drawing time with exercises and course. If I'm aiming for the 50% rule, I'm really only hitting 25% play. Not entirely a bad thing, but it leaves little room for experimentation and just enjoying the act of drawing.

An experiment I'm trying out to really loosen up is automatic drawing, as demonstrated by Tim Gula here:

Watch on Youtube

The end result is beautiful, but the result isn't really the point. Its meditation for the mind, playing purely with shape, line, and values.

The irony is that, in messing around, a lot of growth happens at the same time: Line quality improves, control over shape develops, and a relaxed brain allows for those periods of focus to be more energized.

Most exciting for me, though, is that when I'm just doodling outside of any coursework, I can shrug off the pressure of it having to be impressive. There's room for experimentation and simply enjoying putting pencil to paper!

I'm trying this out with music too. Lately, I've been spending all my piano and guitar time playing out of books, leaving no time to write or improvise. So now I have a notebook for jotting down improvised chords, melodies, and mini-tunes. Not with the goal of making another album. Just for the space to enjoy sound unto itself.

At the end of the day, sound and line are purpose enough.