Since I might have some new eyeballs
today from Deviantart or Twitter, let me begin today's entry by
refreshing everyone on what the hell it is exactly that I'm doing
here.
When I was tween/teen I used to make
paper dolls. I was interested in fashion and in my artistic family
there was a niche open for someone who could execute good figure
drawings (sorry Dad!). So I made, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds
of these drawings and drew them families complete with parents,
siblings, love interests/spouses, and children. There were
story-lines and arcs and events. It was fun as shit, I'm not gonna
lie.
When I hit eighteen I had, not so much
lost interest, but decided it was an embarrassing hobby so I put all
of my favorites in a plastic paged binder and tossed the rest. In
retrospect, that was dumb. While about three hundred remain I'm sad
that at least the other three hundred plus went into the trash for no
good reason.
As an adult I now realize that so much
of what creative people do in their process of creation is a form of
play. Making characters, forming back-stories, and creating
scenarios: aren't those things that writers do? Don't fashion
designers draw pretty clothes all the time? What about actors,
pretending to be other people, to speak in another person's voice?
We, as adults, tell ourselves that it's
different from playing like we did as a child because . . . ? Our
purpose is different? We have a knowledge and intelligence behind it?
Sure, maybe. All I know for sure is that it's just as fun to sit down
and draw a character drawing now as it was then , some twelve years
ago. So this project is simply about revisiting those drawings,
remembering why they were special to me, talking about the creative
process, and remaking them with a new set of skills.
It's also about learning how to draw
hands finally. Lots and lots of hands.
Art tips: I culled a lot of this design
from the original (which is kind of a first in this series) because
the original was one of my favorite characters. I loved the colors I
drew her with and I loved her hair. Little did I know that when I hit
my thirties super saturated colored hair would become trendy. I'm
living in a fantasy world of my own creation!
Also, I tried to model this after some
research I did on the Ethiopian fashion scene. I also tried to
capture a kind of natural hair look I also found while researching
Ethiopia. The hair is . . . not great. I think I made the hairline
too low. I had a more successful one-off experiment with drawing a
hairstyle like this a few weeks ago and I will post it soon to see
what everybody thinks.
Finally . . . it is incredibly
frustrating to feel like drawing feet was something I really excelled
at and took pride in and now that I have realized that what I was
drawing before is physically unlikely (because people don't stand
with their feet perfectly splayed out to the side) every foot I draw
looks shitty. It's super discouraging. At least with hands I know
that's something I was never good at and so I am now trying to
address that gap in my knowledge. But feet . . . that is tough for
me.
Request a print or ACEO card of this image in my shop.