I played in the Classic Tetris Australia Online tournament today, but despite that I decided to colour the pieces according to guidelines.
This isn’t the greatest execution but I’ll probably return to the concept another time.
[Also I did paint and attempt to post this on Saturday, I only noticed the “update failed” sitting in this tab when I opened my laptop on Monday morning. So still behind on a Friday post but not suuuuper behind……]
Planned to have a lot more of this done tonight but solving the placement of the tetrominoes proved to take much longer than I thought it would (the outline I initially drew up didn’t have the correct area so fixing things took a reasonable amount of time.)
Next time I’d probably mock this up digitally before launching into drawing it!
Wasn’t able to get any drawing done today. In light of yesterday’s post about momentum, I’m making a placeholder post for now, will hopefully be able to do some kind of double post on Monday!
Edit: Here we go, another Piranha plant sketch. I was at a Smash tournament/Splatoon meetup yesterday so Planty seems like a reasonable subject.
The most important element of most Blaugusts that I’ve “succeeded” at has been momentum. Last week our household was struck with illness. Woefully curled up in bed with an awful cold, I took last Monday off from blog posting, and that snowballed quickly – even though I worked from home on Tuesday and was back in the office on Wednesday, I was still moping around not feeling like putting a blog post up.
This topic ties into a meta-Blaugust post that I’ve been wanting to write, but I think I’ll keep that in the back pocket for just a bit longer because what I want to do today is get back into the swing of drawing on the daily.
I signed up to a a free online course run by the University of Newcastle, which started this week. The course is “Natural History Illustration 101” and is focused on the discipline of drawing subjects from nature. It’ll run for the next 6 weeks so I hope the course content dribbling in will give me some continued ideas to draw from. This week we’ve been given a bunch of introductory videos to understand what natural history illustration actually is, which has been a lovely source of cool inspiration (butterflies, birds and plants, oh my!)
In addition, registrants to the course have been offered a login to the Global Plants website, which is apparently a really huge repository for plants.
Today’s sketch is thus a Money Plant. The reference picture is actually from wikipedia, as I didn’t like any of the reference material on the global plants website. I had a recent conversation with John in which I mentioned this plant but he wasn’t familiar with it.
Rendering this was really difficult. For a start, I haven’t done any representational artwork in ages, so those skills are all rusty. But secondly, the tones and patterns on the actual seed pods of the plant made it really hard to convey them in a way that made sense. One seed pod in the photo was really shiny. Others were mottled. They’re actually really flat discs, and I don’t think that’s apparent from my sketch at all.
Anyway, it was good to draw just for the sake of it. Here’s to getting back a bit of momentum.
So when I was stuck for what to draw today, Shellder seemed as good a choice as any. This little guy is actually a bit tricky to draw in ways I hadn’t expected, but lookit it, so cute!
By chance, some dear friends (UnwiseOwl from the Leaflocker and Havra) dropped into my Tetris stream the other night so we decided to play and stream some impromptu games of Mah Jong.
After that, Havra tempted us into another game tonight, so of course we had to oblige! This left me without a lot of time to eke out some art for tonight, so I took inspiration from the game and drew what I could between hands.