My first live drawing session

I've been drawing more than twenty years, but last week I drew the first time in a live session. It was a brainstorming-kind-of-workshop to generate new ideas and point of views for the future pedagogy. I sat randomly in different groups and listened the discussion trying to visualize either groups' thoughts as they were pointed out... or even better, produce new interpretations and points of view or even question their thoughts. In other words, with my drawings I tried to feed groups' thinking even further - give them nice gentle kicks in an illustrated form.

I was pretty nervous before the new experience and I even gave myself a permission to do some sketching, but in the end I drew everything without sketching. What helped me to get into nice work flow, was that I managed to lower the bar of my self critique.

Of course, when I look those drawings now, I get tempted to do some redrawing here and there, but I try to remember the different function they served.

I got a feeling that people in the workshop liked what I did, but what's more difficult to say is how much added value my work managed to produce. Actually I think it's not just what I do and draw, but also how the participants of the workshop can utilize visual stimulus in their thinking.

So, can visualization offer more than just nice entertaining for workshops, seminars or conferences? Hard to say for sure, but personally I believe in visualization. I say YES!

Superman - tricot covered flying object

Usually when I feel an urge to draw just something without having any specific topic I end up drawing something that I've seen others drawing a lot, like superheroes, viking warriors, robots, monsters... the list is endless. Well at least I draw something instead of using 2 years trying to come up with extremely original...

Anyway, here's the Superman. In the end I think I had more dynamic postures in the sketches than in the final piece.

In the coloured version I tried to find a colouring method that would fit with a soft and greasy line work. I guess I failed to do that, because the outline sort of lost the vivid feeling it had before colouring. I believe it needs more subtle colours. That kind of line work needs air to breath. So I still need to work on that. Otherwise I'm quite happy. I believe I found some things that can be useful in future.

Drawing hands - creating expressions

I haven't been totally unaware of it, but I'm afraid I also earlier haven't fully realized it either - the significant role of hands when creating expressions in illustrations. All this especially when drawing in cartoon style.

In my current project I've been illustrating a lot of characters, which need to be as vivid and characteristic as possible. One of the characters is wearing a woolly hat covering his eyes. As the eyes have an important role in creating expressions, I have now had to do it some other way. And that's when the hands come in.

Here is a set of hands I've sketched for those characters. Basically it seems to be the angles - on wrists and fingers - that need to be exaggerated.


And now, seeing these hands cut apart from the bodies, they seem to be like loose sentences out of the original context. They seem to have lost their meaning.

Need of exaggeration

At the moment I'm spending my vacation in NYC. Yesterday, when I was in subway, I saw a dude wearing a cap in a way which was a bit funny. Well, I mean funny from my point of view as we had totally opposite way of wearing caps when I was a teenager. Back then we customized our caps bending the visor as curve as possible and wore them so tight that the cap was nearly blocking the blood circulation. This dude in subway had his cap couple of numbers too big so that the cap rested deep covering the upper parts of his ears. Also the visor was as flat as possible tilting slightly upwards. I couldn't help playing with the idea that, if this dude suddenly turned his head, the cap wouldn't follow.

Later in the evening I tried to sketch that dude with the cap, only realizing that I couldn't achieve the impression as I felt it. As you can see the first sketch in the image is pretty mild. Only when I exaggerated the size of the cap strongly I felt that I could pass on the impression.




This only demonstrates the fact that exaggeration is needed big time when presenting things with comic style illustration.

I also became inspired to play around with a cap way too tight... noting that even an exaggerated version looks pretty normal. So, let's not be too shy when exaggerating things!