More Woodland Park Zoo sketches!

I celebrated my 27th birthday yesterday, so, naturally, I toted my one-year-adultier butt to the zoo. After visiting San Diego Zoo  for my birthday last year, I decided I might start a tradition!

I ended up having fantastic luck with the animals this trip - the weather was fairly gray and cool, which seemed to encourage the animals to be out and about more. In preparation for Inktober, I decided to forgo the pen while I can and go with pencil, while still trying not to waste time erasing.

Tiger pile! These three were technically still considered cubs, snoozing in a big lump together. Dangerously cute.

Wallaroos! So adorable. The beginning of the raptor show here as well

I haven't yet had a chance to see the raptor show at Woodland Park, so I was excited to get the opportunity today. Turkey vulture, pharaoh owl, and a falcon I unfortunately missed the name of.  

The orangutans were very willing to pose for me today; the gorillas too: "draw me like one of your French girls"

More birds - I really need to start writing down the names as I draw them. The one in the middle right had fantastic weird flaps on  its face

The Komodo Dragon was surprisingly mobile, came right up to the glass to say "sup"

Adorable meerkats, an owl and a lazy-ass two toed sloth

Red lemurs and flamingos, and a random swan

Overall it was a really fun day and I consider the trip a success - strongly considering an annual membership even though I don't qualify for the student prices anymore. If nothing else it will force me to get my butt back there more to get my money's worth!

This week I also was able to keep up with my resolution to fit in some fundamentals practice during my workdays. Living in Olympia, there is a frustrating lack of accessible life drawing. I wonder if I just haven't been looking in the right places, or if there just aren't enough artists around that don't already have student access to figure drawing through Evergreen or SPSCC to warrant other sessions being available.

In any case, I've been making do with the SketchDaily life drawing tool online, and it's certainly better than nothing. I've been taking Scott Eaton's Anatomy for Artist's course online (I'll write a review post on this at some point), and trying to reinforce the lessons with life sketching in between lectures, in addition to the course assignments. I've found this to be extremely helpful, and even adhering to the very low bar I set for myself of 20 minute a day has really helped to hammer the lessons home.

I do intend to get back to a place where I can attend true life drawing sessions with a model, but in the meantime this is a decent alternative. So, there's truly no excuse to not be practicing, even if you don't have access to life drawing sessions!

That will do it for September this year - incoming next week is the start of Inktober, which I intend to follow with more dedication than I did last year. I hope someone's found today's ramble somewhat useful, and that you'll join me next time for the crazy fun that is Inktober!

Happy sketching!

Dusting off the blog: PAX Prime doodles and a new resolve!

Phew! Time to dust off the old blog and actually write something. Whether anyone finds today's post interesting or not, I've realized a few things and this post will help me hold myself accountable to progress I hope to make.

First things first -  I had an amazing time at the end of August at PAX Prime this year! Lots of games, good friends and good times. And some very long lines. I decided to kill time during some of these interludes with some sketching. Lots of interesting people around, and lots of amazing games to inspire ideas, so I had some fun!

A mix of folks actually seen around the convention and some I made up for fun. You get to decide which are which.

Funky animals and faces

Random bard-guy, I dunno could be fun

Now to business. I've identified two major habits of mine that I intend to go about changing, mental obstacles I end up making for myself when deciding how to spend my time.

The first of these getting over the self-pressure to make something awesome, and let myself make whatever comes to mind, crappy or not, for fun and learning. As evidenced by my post frequency, sitting down with the intention of creating something interesting can be intimidating enough to make one avoid it altogether. When the work day is done, and I have precious little free time with which I could produce something, I want it to be good. I want to be able to produce awesomeness at this point in my career, and I'll shoot down idea after idea without even putting pen to paper in search of that next amazing project.

Preemptively striving for perfection and stifling something I used to be able to do just for fun hasn't been getting me anywhere. This is something people have told me all the time as an artist, but only now is really smacking me in the face with enough force to cause me to actually try a different approach. All the time I spend agonizing over what to make and how good it's going to be would collectively to lots of, well, making.

The other of these is to actually see projects, even small ones, through to completion. Regardless of whether I am really excited about a project anymore, finishing it out will still help me build both experience and a body of work. It's hard to have a current best to show if I keep starting things, deciding I hate them halfway through, and then just leaving them aside unfinished. At least completing them will allow me to go through the entire process and have a sold place from which to move on and improve.

So! One of my strategies to help myself improve my habits is to make it so stupidly easy for myself to practice that I shut down any excuses I might have. If I can get myself to go to the gym consistently during the work week, I can certainly commit to an art "workout" each day. I plan to choose a new topic each week for practice and improvement, so that I get some amount of focused work but still change things up often enough not to get bored.

This past week I started with 20 minutes a day, working on value studies. I set the bar low so that there could be no wheedling out of the task for my lazy ass. I also chose to make myself use physical media rather than digital for these 'workouts' just because my job has me working fairly exclusively on the computer. My thinking with this structure is to get myself to do art in a way that eliminates my tendencies towards the bad habits above - it's such a short time I have no excuse for not committing to it, and it removes the feeling of having to come up with awesomeness on the spot.

Here are the results:

Messing around with a bunch of different media for basic value studies - Copic markers (bottom right) were the most difficult

More marker shenanagins (top) and ink with brush and white charcoal pencil (bottom)

As would be expected, I'm fairly rusty and out of shape to start with. But this is my blog, not my portfolio, and I've resolved to post my crappy work as well as my less crappy work, to hold myself accountable and to keep a record of my progress. The point right now is to just redevelop the habit of creating for fun, get and maintain the artistic muscles in shape, and chip away at the bad habits I've developed. And starting with 20+ minutes a day has resulted in a few more hours of practice than I've had most weeks. It's a start. I plan to post more results of my weekly art workouts, as well

I know I'm not the only one to struggle with habits like these, and I'm interested in hearing what other artists have done in terms of getting back into the habit of making stuff, and keeping your own self-criticism from holding back your progress!