Random Sketches

Part II of my ramblings on art won't be coming this week. Putting down my pure, undistilled thoughts on paper takes a lot out of me. The problem lies in how I have to weave the main ideas together in a comprehensible manner and explaining them enough as to be understandable (and I doubt I was able to do that in the last) thus I must tread much more carefully, plan how I write better rather than just going off the cuff. Formalism is integral in fine communication after all. In any case, here are some things that I've been up to lately.

An eternal bane is our law of undulation whereby we humans enter peaks and troughs of zeal, skill,
 and emotional attachment to anything we do or anyone we speak to as our faith in ourselves and our victories attained gives way to self-doubt and losses. Why do I bring up a paraphrase of Lewis' concept of the emotional business cycle here? I don't fucking know, I've been listening to the audiobook of the Screwtape Letters and I've just been loving the wit of it, its lessons, and Cleese's charisma. If it isn't obvious, I'm using Lewis' (or Screwtape's) Law of Undulation to highlight the lack of figure drawing in my posts for awhile now is because of my journey of late with said law: the drawings just haven't been up to par with how I want to draw.

My main goal in drawing at least on the technical aspect is to have dynamic and emotive figures with reasonably realistic proportions and shapes. Realism is not my goal, though I'd like to attain the skill to draw realistically enough, my goal is to cartoon and to cartoon well enough. Such is why I deeply study comics and impressionist works more than others, the abstraction from life while still retaining life-like notes and frameworks is for me the best of what I would like to achieve, anything beyond that is welcome but not required. Recently, I've taken figure drawing and capturing the essence of the figure seriously again, enough for me to be proud enough of them to show to other people. My work isn't the best, but I'm proud of what I can do with my shabby, lazy self.

I really like some of these.

Also, I took all of these within a few minutes of each other early in the morning. Why some are bright as all hell and others blue like a shadow, I do not know.

Of course, with figure drawing exercises must come the spurts of creative drawing, just letting loose and having fun so that you can maintain the imaginative aspect of art and creativity along with the refinement of one's artistic skill. For my desires (to make a webcomic), it's integral to have both if I want to do well (by my standards). Such is why I still hang around draw threads and draw random junk.