Self-Improvement: Sketches (Part Two)

I’ve now been involved with the Jesters Royale, an improv comedy team based out of the Empress Theatre in Magna – which, for the most part, has been a lot of fun. The team is full of great people, and (if I may be so bold, blunt, and boastful) we’re pretty funny, too. And that’s probably why I got so disappointed last night when we had to cut our workshop short. I’ve been in a pretty sour mood ever since.

Thank goodness for my sketchpad! I’m feeling a bit better now.

Thought I’d take a minute and share a few more sketches with you:

Pretty good, huh?

So one section of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the book I’ve been working out of, asks the reader to try sketching a landscape that they might have drawn in their childhood. I don’t remember much about what I actually drew. I’m pretty sure I drew the pointed roofs like that, even though my house didn’t have one. I also remember drawing corner suns, which probably means something on some Freudian level, but, frankly, screw Freud.

(Don’t read too much into that)

And here we have an exercise called a contour drawing. I drew my hand without actually looking at the paper I was drawing on. The idea is that I could better interpret the shape of my hand if I didn’t actually look at it.

I kind of see the point. If you cross your eyes a bit, the lines kinda come together and look like… a giraffe. With wings. And big, googly cartoon eyes. Which I should probably draw someday.

Well, when I actually LOOK at my hand, it looks something like a hand. Turns out it’s a pretty good technique, which is why I went on to draw… my computer mouse. For some reason.

If you look closely, you can probably tell that I tried to actually write the word on the side of my mouse, and I totally failed. I’m sure that’s indicative of the fact that I really hadn’t let my right brain take over, and I was still trying to copy the SYMBOLS of letters my left-brain is familiar with rather than duplicate exactly what I was seeing. I’m also sure that Batman’s parents were shot on their way out of the movie theater after a showing of Zorro – like that matters to you. So let’s just forget about what I’m sure about and move on.

…to more comic book characters. I decided to try the upside-down drawing thing again, this time with a character called the Immortal Iron Fist. And, you know, it’s fun to copy other pictures that look good, but I don’t feel that makes me any better an artist. So here, I finally decided to draw a couple of things by myself, without any real visual aids. I didn't get very far.

I realized I don’t know much about facial features, so a lot of the faces I wound up copying from other sources. A lot of the artwork comes from different comic artists, including Tim Sale, whose mouths always look like weird little lines (as you can see from the Boris Karloff-esque face in the lower left up there).

Sharp-eyed readers may notice that there’s a face on the right side of the page that looks a little TOO good to be mine. Well, it’s not. I copied it from Manelle Oliphant’s design for the poster for the Empress Theatre’s production of Little Shop of Horrors. Manelle’s got a good sense for how a face should look… and I don’t, so I tried copying her.

I AM kind of proud of that weird-looking hunchback guy with the pimp-cane, though. I mean, it’s not exactly FANTASTIC artwork there, but that’s MY weird-looking hunchback guy with a pimp-cane, and there aren’t many people who can say that they’ve got a weird-looking hunchback guy with a pimp-cane.

So, yeah, I’m seeing some progress, but I know I’ve got a long way to go. It’s a fantastic experience, though, learning to draw, and I’m glad I’ve started.