Skill Building

After my Elvis pixelated portrait of Week 10 and Week 11 (yes, I like to think of him as Elvis, even if it’s someone else!), I wanted to try my hand at a second one. This time the subject of the drawing would be the German poet Matthias Claudius. The idea was to get started in the Fotorealismus technique, which would be further developed in the final part of the book. Unfortunately, I didn’t make to that part in this project. Maybe I will in a second part 😊.

Something I thought almost since the beginning of this skill building project: should I make drafts of the works? Is it okay to erase or to redo certain parts of the drawings? I’m not sure how most pen artists go about it. My decision for this project was to go straight at them, to just start drawing and try to be precise from the beginning. Maybe there’s a better way! I guess if I were to do a bigger project I would divide it in smaller sections and practice the big shapes beforehand.

What’s the best way to trace an image? Before trying the method I used in the Shakira image, I thought the only way was getting tracing paper. It turns out nowadays there are other ways! In fact, after learning this new method, I went to YouTube and found other techniques that involved the use of a smartphone and certain opacity filters. It was a nice reminder that, sometimes, all it takes to find a new way of doing something is just going to YouTube 😄.

In the second half of the week (when trying the ‘intervention’ of kids’ drawings) I was a bit skeptical about that. I thought it didn’t make much sense to be drawing like that, considering I’m not a kid anymore. Why should we do it? Well, I guess that also could be helpful to limit perfectionist tendencies. Kids just draw. They don’t ask themselves if the drawing looks good, if it’s well-balanced, and if they’re using good technique. They just draw! That’s something we can learn from 🙂.

The pixel-art project was by far one of the most entertaining drawings up to this point. It’s like drawing and painting at the same time. The good thing is that I had to use graph paper. The bad thing? I had to use graph paper 😅. I mean, I had to count squares and calculate shades of blue all the time. That was somewhat tedious, but it was also quite liberating. If I followed the patterns correctly -and if I painted them carefully- I should be able to get a good result. It was a work of patience and endurance!

As a rule of thumb, I tried to start with very light blue. Throughout this project, I never erased lines. For that reason, I needed to get it right on the first try. Or, at least, not getting wrong! The safest way to avoid messing it up was to start lightly and cover the darker squares only when I was super sure about what I was doing. That was helpful!

Before trying the pixel art projects of this week, I would have never imagined they could be so much fun. The first exercises looked a lot like the first week of the project, in early July. The idea was to get back to the basics, practice a lot of shade variations. That would be very important to create the pixelated portraits of the following week. I thought this would take a lot of time. And, indeed, it took an awful lot of time to make progress on them. But they were worth it!

I have to say that I really looked forward to this week. The pixelated portraits are not realistic portraits by any means, but they’re portraits anyway. And they look great! I guess it should be easy to generate images like this with a website or an app, to get good models for new drawings in the future. At this point, I was more concerned with getting the technique right. There was a lot of square counting and calculation. Maybe there was an easier way to go about it, but that’s how I did it!

This week was all about perspective, buildings, and architecture. Normally, I prefer to draw human figures, animals, or any sort of character, but trying my hand at buildings was nice. It was a good opportunity to work on balance, proportions, and geometric forms. I have to say, those can be much more convenient subjects to draw when we’re moving around or visit new cities. Usually, it will be easier to sit anywhere and draw an urban landscape than ask somebody to sit still for hours as a live model 🙃. I imagine how drawing fantasy-inspired themes could act as a powerful inspiration to write a story and create entirely new worlds from scratch.

In Days 63 and 64 I was supposed to use a piece of printed paper (such as a letter). Unfortunately, the ones I had at home didn’t seem suitable for this kind of work. That’s why I decided to use a filled-out exercise sheet I had completed some time ago. Anyway, it was a printed sheet of paper! The idea of that work was to encourage the students to draw on any kind of paper. We don’t need to have a blank canvas in order to start doing something on it.