Skill Building

As a fan of dystopias and sci-fi stories, I looked forward to the futuristic projects in the Kuli Kunst book I’m using in this project. Starting on the second day of the week, I was called to use different surfaces to recreate special textures. It brought me back to my childhood when I would put a sheet of paper over a coin, and strike the paper with a pen or a pencil to recreate the surface of the coin. It was pretty much like magic! At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I could use the same technique with many other things.

For the buildings and some of the insects created this week, I used the textures from Tupperware, a set of toothpicks, and the sole of a sneaker, among other things. Finding good objects to create textures turned out to be one of the biggest challenges so far. The extra difficulty here relies upon that, ideally, the surface should be firm and solid (otherwise, the paper can be torn) 🙃.

[Read more…] about Pen Drawing in German (Week 8) – Fantastische Welten

What makes a drawing surreal? What is the difference between comics/cartoons and surreal designs? These are some of the questions I asked myself during this week. I really like the surreal style, and would definitely love to spend even more time on it in the future. I think part of the surreal vibe comes from extreme, exaggerated forms. Bigger eyes and mouths definitely help. There’s also the three-dimensional aspect. I think that is important to show that in some parts of the drawing (for example, in the last days of this week, the bubbles around the figures on top and at the bottom of the page).

In my opinion, a surreal design may loosely resemble a real-life object, animal, or form. We get inspiration out of something we can find in real life and take it in a different direction. I imagine mixing different animals and combining unrelated forms in a single design could be a very fun exercise. I’m very interested in learning more technics on how to render any design more realistic (when drawing in a realistic or surreal).

[Read more…] about Pen Drawing in German (Week 7) – Surreale Welten

This was another week when I dealt mostly with comic artwork. I enjoyed the patience challenge of working on a single drawing for many days, making slow progress towards the final result I was looking for. Drawing is a great activity to become more patient. If we want to create something nice, many times we need a lot of time. And, unless you have big chunks of time available on a single day, these are works that span many days. For this reason, we need to be patient! 😀

The best thing about this work of patience is that we can apply it to other skills, hobbies, and domains. Patience is such an important part of skill-building. Without it, many learning experiences will become out of reach. Most of us are after the results, but we don’t want to put in the time. We want to be able to play the piano, but we don’t want to practice. We want to learn a foreign language, but we don’t want to make the time to practice and study. Patience helps us to create this time and honor it, for whatever is important to us 😊 .

[Read more…] about Pen Drawing in German (Week 6) – Comic Artwork

This week I got started with comic characters, doodles, and other fun figures. The idea was to create something out of very simple shapes, like circles. The more I work on this project, the more I realize that the real difficulty here lies in coming up with original figures to draw on your own. I realized that it is not so hard to copy or imitate something made by someone else. Even drawing something based on a photograph. It’s not that I mastered that skill. Far from that! It’s something else.

My theory is that learning how to draw is pretty much learning how to see. Just as when we play a musical instrument. With music, we need to learn how to hear, how to listen to the sounds that we create (with an instrument or with our voice). When we draw, we need to pay a lot of attention to what we see. But not just while drawing. It’s important to learn how to see, before doing a drawing. I mean, in our everyday life. I think it’s all about being more mindful and pay a lot of attention to the forms, proportions, and colors we see throughout our days 👀.

[Read more…] about Pen Drawing in German (Week 5) – Comic, die ersten Schritte

This week was all about fonts and typographies. Small fonts, big fonts, some bold, others light. This is going to be useful to write more creative jar labels and take notes differently 😀. I believe there’s a big difference between creating lots of typefaces (just one letter), and doing a whole set (all letters) and using it to write something. In any case, I think the latter is the real challenge.

It would be cool to get more practice in creating my own typography and using it consistently to write something. I might even use to keep a journal in German. And maybe add some doodles here and there? That could be a great way of putting together pen drawing + German, right? I think so! Actually, I started taking some notes in German with little doodles. I expect to share some of that here soon 🙃.

[Read more…] about Pen Drawing in German (Week 4) – Typografisches

I always loved doodles and icons. I have a thing for hand-drawn icons. In fact, one of my websites uses a WordPress Theme named ‘Doodles’ 🙃. Look at the icons on this menu. I didn’t draw them myself, but it would be cool to learn how to do it. This week, I feel like I started getting at least some experience in that direction. Maybe in the future, I will create my own icon collection and website designs. Who knows!

Most of the drawing sessions this week were after 10 pm. As I don’t have a set time to do the daily practice, it will tend to vary from week to week. I think it would be a good idea to keep a fixed time to practice drawing, but in the meanwhile, I’ll keep it flexible. Three years ago I did a 6-week art project (landscapes with pastel pencils) where I practiced daily for 45 minutes, and I did my practice just before bed (around 10, 10.30, or 11 pm). Coincidentally, this week, I used that timetable.

[Read more…] about Pen Drawing in German (Week 3) – Der Mikrowahnsinn