It’s been a long time since I drew something entirely for myself. Not for clients or Today’s Doodle or even just for practice. Those are all things I should also be doing more of, often the best learning experiences come from setting yourself the goal of creating something finished. So a couple of days ago I set out with no agenda, and this is the result.
Now, there are a lot of problems with this, and also a lot of solutions. You may see neither of these things, but if you’re a fellow illustrator you probably have some idea what I’m talking about. The problems are issues with composition, line quality, anatomy, shading, that I have to work on. The solutions are goals that I set myself as the drawing started to form in my head. Pretty early on I knew I wanted to tackle patterns, a subject I have very little experience creating or incorporating into drawings. This is why there’s too many patterns in this. Could I figure out how to draw some, make them repeatable & interesting, make them work when placed next to each other, make them work on non-flat surfaces like clothing…
I did okay with the patterns. I learnt a lot about them you can’t quite figure out from tutorials and whatnot. Ultimately it’s your own hand that has to do the work, that has its own quirks of how to do things, and you need to learn that only by doing.
I should do more of these.
V
