Week 37 Sketches!

Last week I gave myself a little challenge to do a character sheet for Nani Pelekai from Lilo and Stitch! I also downloaded tons of artwork from Pinterest to study from! (attached below)

My current goal is to get down gestural drawing faster, and draw faces faster. I feel like I have unlocked a huge new level of anatomy understanding from my course, but want to brush up on my speed and faces to make sure those skills don't lag behind. I feel like if all it took was 4 hours of lecture to understand the human body in a new way, I must be able to do the same with faces. The only way to do that, is to simply do things drastically differently than I have currently been doing them. 

Something I learned from my class is how valuable it is to just get into the drawing without being afraid of messing things up. This is a huge problem for me as I always try my best to prevent mistakes from showing up later, because they always seem to do so. I have always felt that I make alot of careless mistakes - much more than the average person so its a tough hit to the ego when I see it crop up in my artwork. Its incredibly frustrating to me to see so many mistakes throughout the process so I feel like I have developed some negative coping mechanisms to get through them. This is also related to why I don't draw traditionally - If I see 30 mistakes before I finish, theres not much I can do to fix them. F*ck that. Digital it is. So my plan now is to simply raise the volume of drawings that I do to match the quality of something like on that page and believe that I will improve just as much, if not faster, than slowly and fearfully approaching each drawing. 

I'm sure many of you can relate to feeling like you aren't improving, or you cant stop making the same mistakes. It can be paralyzing for sure but my best advice is to keep going and not give up. Thats the only thing I can tell you worked for me. There was never any one simple trick to get over it in a day. 

If you are interested in the references I am using to practice these things with, I have included the pure ref file below! Its a free app available on both Windows and Mac so anyone should be able to use it!