Ultraist Studios Blog Journal thoughts, musings and other rambling…

Drawing is really hard.
There’s no other way to put it.

One of my biggest regrets is not pushing my drawing skills over my post-Sheridan years. Now I’m getting old(er). Time is moving faster.

I found while doing sketching at the Toronto Comic Book Expo, that Spy Guy is a hard character to draw. I didn’t realise that before. It’s because of the simplicity. If you get the lines wrong, it shows. There isn’t a lot of detail to hide behind. Also it’s because of that trench coat. It makes it easy to turn the character into a blob. I really have to think about the forms and mass under the trench coat. Especially around the legs. That is what I was experimenting with in these doodles:

This is a sketch I did a while back while I was looking at some Shane Glines Bob G.O.M.P. drawings. I was looking at the way Shane draws his forms, and was trying to mimic it on Spy Guy. I always thought these doodles were successful. They have an appeal:

Whenever I look at stuff by artist at the top of their game (like in the links below) I get a reality check on just how far I am from the watermark I artistically aspire to, and I get a surge of energy to just try to get better. It’s hard work, but it’s work worth doing.

Temple of the Seven Golden Camels – The art of storyboarding (and more).

Walt Stanchfield – Drawing class notes from Walt Disney Studios.

Chen Yi Chang – Animation Presentation (video).

All I can really do is keep drawing. Keep pushing. Keep learning. This is something I should have done years ago. But life has a way of doing that, setting up distractions, veering things off course.

I’ve got a lot to learn.