This week
Materials:
- pencil
- pen
- eraser
- paper (printer paper, notebook, etc)
- colors (colored pencils, crayons, watercolor, etc)
- alternatives to the above: smart phone or tablet drawing app.
Day 87: yokai
I found this book at the library, Manga Art for Everyone by Danica Davidson and Rena Saiya, and thought it would be a good jumping off point for a drawing. I choose the four characters in the book that appealed to me:
- shojo manga (shojo girl in Japanese; manga targeting teenage girls)
- shonen manga (boys’ comics; manga targeting adolescent boys)
- nekojin (cat person)
- yokai (beings from old Japanese folklore)
I then looked for youtube demonstrations of these four. This is the last manga from this series.
THE YOKAI
I found the Brief History of Yokai by Zack Davisson interesting.
More interesting, for our puposes, is Japan A venue’s The Yokai. It provides an illustrated list that we can use to find a drawing to copy:
- Oni, the Japanese Demon
- Tengu, the long nosed guardian of the mountain
- How to Draw a Tengu mask by theBrokenPuppet. Rick is a tattoo artist and you can see how this discipline affects his design, creating a careful line drawing with distinct colorations that can be duplicated in a tattoo.
- Yurei, the ghost worthy of horror movies
- Kappa, the sneaky boy from the river
- In Kappa's Dream: Making a yokai illustration by Atelier Sentô (6 minutes, 12K views) the artist traces the drawing and colors it with watercolor.
- Akaname, the bathroom monster
- Ashiarai Yashiki, the giant foot
- Tanuki, the spirit of the forest
- Kitsune, the multifaceted fox
- Bakeneko, the ghost cat
- Rokurokubi, the long necked monster
- Yama Uba, the witch wearing a kimino
- Kasa-obake, the prankster umbrella
I suggest that you browse these monsters and select one that appeals to you. I chose Tengu as my model.
Day 88: zentangles
- First create a palette of doodle designs.
- On a piece of paper, draw lines to create 9 rectangles.
- In each rectangle draw a doodle pattern.
- On a clean piece of paper draw the outline of the first letter of your name
- Using your palette of doodles as guides, fill in the outside of your letter's design.
Charvi Ashtekar has a video where she makes 24 Doodle Patterns (21 minutes, 1M views).
The Art gEEK Beginners Guide to Start Zentangles (8 minutes, 489K views)
Here is the zentangles ‘palette’ that I created:
Here are the videos of the zentangles palette and the my zentangles “A”:
Day 89: gesture drawing
Jess Karp guides us through her preparation and implementation of gesture drawing practice. I particularly like her reminder to herself of “BYE BYE PERFECTION”.
I’ve created an album of gesture drawing references for us to use. I recommend that you do three 1-minute gesture drawing and two 2-minute gesture drawing.
Here is Proko giving us Gesture Drawing Examples - 2 Minute Poses (5 minutes, 834K views)
Here is my 11 second video of gesture drawings
Day 90: manga hair
Art Senpai How to Draw Anime Hair Like a Pro (8 minutes, 4.1K views)
Art Senpai leads us through five elements for drawing anime hair:
- Structure and shape
- Proportion
- Perspective
- Line Art
- Details
First, in structure and shape, we look at the hair as a form and not as something made up of individual hairs. Art breaks the hair form into three main sections: the bangs, the sides and the back. He labels the origin of these three sections as the swirl.
For proportion, Art introduces the use of a three to one ratio. To do this he divides 10 into the numbers 6, 3, and 1 and applies it to drawing the three sections based on which is closest to the viewer. He further uses the 631 proportions to drawing hair section details.
For perspective, art uses a cube as a guide sketching the skull and the hair form.
Line art involves using line weight to indicate light and shadow in the hair form: thin lines on the section side facing the light source and heavy lines on the sides of thge sections away from the light source.
Finally, details. This is a style question for you to decide how much detail you want to include.
Whyt Manga How to draw hair. (20 minutes, 1.2M views)
Day 91: outdoor sketching
If you think about it, we human beings having been doing our art outdoors a whole lot longer than we've 
even had an indoors. Artists who work outdoors currently include landscape artists, seascape artists, plein air artists, urban sketchers, and artists like you and me.
even had an indoors. Artists who work outdoors currently include landscape artists, seascape artists, plein air artists, urban sketchers, and artists like you and me.
As we think about taking our art outside we are challenged with the question: "What do we need?"
At a minimum we need something to draw with and something to draw on. Since many of us are just starting to explore drawing outside, let's keep it simple: a pencil, an eraser, a pen and paper on a stiff surface.
Next we need to find a place to do our outdoor sketching. Today the temperature where I live will be about 108 F. If I go outside to sketch I'd be sweating and miserable. So I'll be doing my outdoor drawing from indoors (remember art's first 3 rules). I'll find a place where I can comfortably sit by a window and draw something outdoors that captures my attention. If it wasn't so hot, I would find someplace to sit outside and draw.
So let's get started! Find something that "smiles at you" and draw it. (My wife, Chris, introduced me to the idea of "smiles at you" when I asked her how she shopped for clothes. She told me that she would meander around the clothes department until something "smiled at her". Being a rational person, this made absolutely no sense! How could a piece of cloth "smile at her"! Over the 50+ years we've been together I had glimpses of what "smiles at you" means. Baby steps to learning this was being coached by an art teacher on how to view pictures at an exhibit. He said to go into each gallery, find an unobtrusive location and just look. Eventually something will catch your eye. If nothing catches your eye, go to the next gallery. That 'something catching your eye' is the beginning of a "smile at you").
Day 92: drawing comics
Ryan Benjamin, an artist who has worked with Marvel for decades, gives us tips for drawing comics:
- basic materials: Ryan suggests using pencils between 2H and 2B (2H, H, F, HB, B, 2B)
- red and blue pencils: he uses red pencils to lightly rough in his designs. He then uses his 2B to pencil in his preliminary design. He scans this and eliminates the red lines in his digital drawing app.
- getting started: Ryan demonstrates making various marks with the tip and sides of his pencil.
- primitive shapes:
- thinking with primitive forms
Day 93: texture: hair
In How to Draw Hair (7 minutes, 2M views) Stan Prokopenko once again does a wonderful job of giving us an overview of the do's and don'ts of drawing hair followed by guiding us through the process he uses to create a well formed drawing of hair.
