Re-building a habit is hard work but I suspect I made it harder for myself. I kind of stuck to my guns of trying to learn charcoal and also continue with the digital practise. For charcoal, this was kind of tough because learning to use that material with its various options is not easy (no matter how easy so many youtubers make it). The digital drawing was a bit easier, and for a period in August, I did that to tick the drawing box for that day but there was a huge element of tokenism about it – I think the learning curve whilst not completely flat, was flatish!
I’m not going to bother with the data, but I did draw 15 of the 31 days which is an improvement on July and the previous months.
The big lesson learnt from last month is basically not make it hard for myself and my motivation. So this month, I’ve begun the process of teaching myself to draw cats but not as before ie drawing reference images. No this time, I am trying to learn to draw cats without reference images and de-constructing the cat into shapes and planes with a view to being able to manipulate them as I want. The difficulty is that there are not a lot of resources out there that break a cat head down in the same way as a Loomis Head for example. So I’ve been working with images of Freddie and George, my own cats to learn their proportions and where their face furniture goes. This has a double benefit because they are the cats I want to eventually illustrate and it will help me identify and then capture their differences.
That is the plan anyway. I’ll try and keep this updated a bit more regularly as well.