30 Day Drawing Challenge 2016 (Overview)

Well, it took me about 2 days to finish later than my expected 30th of June, but everything worked out, I think. Overall, I do feel proud of the work I have produced within that time and I definitely feel like my drawing has improved and surpassed all my expectations, when starting this drawing challenge in the beginning of June. 

It felt, to me, a very intuitive process. Although exhausting and frustrating at times, I managed to pull through the tough times and put all that energy into illustrating 30 different characters. To get to the finalized character itself, involved a lot of drawing behind the scenes, purely just to get the feel and look of an individual character right, bringing it to life.

I said in the beginning I would do half the challenge digitally- while the other half traditionally. That idea changed slightly halfway as I thought combing both traditional and digital after day 15 would be better, to keep that consistency going. I couldn't have done it without the use of a scanner- which I am now a proud owner of! My birthday also passed last month, so I am now offically an adult at 21 years of age! (ha, yeah right).

Anyway cutting to the chase, here are some things that I would have improved upon if I had done the 30 Day Drawing Challenge differently:

• Vary the poses a bit more (choose more energetic ones perhaps?)

• Make use of the space more accordingly to the character- do not just place things in the middle, but this was understandable in this circumstance as I wanted the spotlight to be on the character and not necessarily everything around it.

• Play around more with the scale of the character- looking back, some looked like they were drawn similarly in scale on the page/ Photoshop file.

• Do more observational/location drawing to help influence the background or character- this way I think the work will feel a lot more personal.

• HANDS, HANDS HANDS!

...and that's pretty much all I can muster up right now; I'm sure there'll be plenty more improvements I can think of later down the line. But highlighted above are the important ones I feel. Even though I feel like I have improved massively, and I feel slightly more confident personally, I still have quite a few weaknesses that I need to work on. I hope to keep growing, pushing forward as an illustrator.

Also, another important thing to note: working digitally was definitely outside of my comfort zone, and I feel like my practice has improved for the better because of it. A lot of my old work seemed so predictable before, where I kept using the same materials. Now having learnt how to use Photoshop to draw and paint, I can take advantage of it and use it to inform my practice further.  

Apologies if this all sounds a bit of a ramble! But it's important for me to write this all out, for me to look back for future reference. 

That's it for now, I will be blogging something exciting soon.