Well, it’s taken me this long into the month to resort to old art, but I guess the floodgates are open now. Here’s a sketch I did while on our company retreat in Cancun, Mexico. It was drawn from the ground floor of the hacienda we were staying at, looking upwards at the first floor.
Still at it. It occurred to me that the hearts on the left take 19 blocks to form.
Coincidentally, 19 is the total number of unique rotations of all the Tetris pieces, summed accordingly: T – 4 S + Z – 2 each J + L – 4 each I – 2 O – 1
I wonder if there’s a solution that uses each rotation once AND avoids piece adjacency?
These were tough to re-revise. Might take another crack at it tomorrow. The one on the right is starting to get closer to a good balance of colours/piece rotations…
Some squids with food on their heads, in imitation of the Splatoon 2 region mascots used in the European Championships and Japanese Koshien tournaments. The style was surprisingly difficult to emulate.
Here are some rejects. The Kitchener bun was the original inspiration for the whole undertaking, so I’m sad I couldn’t make it recognisable. The Milo Dinosaur was just a hurried little fun thing.
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!