DRAWESOME

Title: Page 102
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: gen
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: ink, watercolor, paper



( larger plus photo of supplies )

Title: The 50th Box
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: gen
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: Ballpoint pen (despite the medium being officially frowned upon by "Draw a Box" guidelines.)

This is probably perfect for a January goals challenge, because this is the classic sort of thing that I do. Set a goal. Decide it's hard. Argue with myself whether I even want to keep doing the goal. Make excuses for not doing the goal. Forget I was doing the goal. Find it months later and remember I was trying to do the thing and realize I barely made any progress on it.

I hate "Draw a Box" so much. It's super annoying. I suck at it. I see no evidence that I'm getting any better. The rules feel arbitrary. (Why can't I do this in pencil? Why do I have to put down the perfect line on my first attempt?) But I also know (just like the gym) that the reason I'm failing is probably because I'm being so half-hearted about this. I started this MONTHS ago. My first page of boxes is dated AUGUST. So I'm not sure these first fifty boxes even count since they were spread out over such a long period of time and clearly aren't helping to build muscle memory or hand-eye coordination or whatever it was that drawing 250 boxes is supposed to accomplish.

Opinions? To get the full benefit, do I need to start over and complete 250 boxes within a more reasonable timeframe? Or do I just draw 200 more ugly boxes and call it good enough?

Title: 2:59 AM or 2:59 PM?
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: gen
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: 2022 Drawtober, coloring with alcohol markers, line art was a Fudenosuke pen

Drawtober 2022, Day 6: Gravity



larger version (and a couple other days) here

Title: Better Late Than Never
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: gen
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: digital mirroring of a marker drawing

"Day 22 of Drawtober 2022: Symmetry"

That's not a typo. I do mean 2022. I have that kind of relationship with deadlines.

These thumbnails are digitally mirrored.


See the original unedited marker drawing here. Call it symmetrically inspired... ish.

Title: still life with pencil sharpener
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: gen
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: pencil



at my journal (with bonus cat butt getting in the way)

Title: Dream Man
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: G
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: Digital edit (of a pen drawing). He might be some kind of antelope centaur. Or maybe he should have a mermaid tail like a capricorn. My brain left a lot of details out of this idea. It just seemed important that he have a really long neck and rainbow hair.



( slightly larger )

Title: Jared Padalecki
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: G
Fandom: Supernatural
Characters/Pairings: Sam Winchester
Content Notes: colored pencil layered over alcohol marker

I forget which season this publicity photo was from, but his expression amused me at the time and it was one of the first drawings I did in Sketchbook #1. (I've had many "sketchbooks" in the past, but I always tore out pages I didn't like until there were no pages left. 2017 was the first year that I vowed to fill up sketchbooks without tearing any pages out.) I hated the initial drawing and tried again in 2018 and was super impressed with my improvement, so after that it became a tradition to re-draw Jared Padalecki every year or so using the same publicity photo as a reference to see if I noticed improvement in my art.

I'll be posting more meta thoughts on my own journal, but the short version is that I don't think colored pencils are really my medium of choice, nor is realism my prefered style. I think it's good as an exercise to test myself once in awhile and see how realistic I can make something, but this is not my happy place and I think I'll be going back to more stylistic drawings for the most part.

Title: Nightmare Fuel
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: G? PG? (There's nothing specific that makes this worse than G, but personally it creeps me out.)
Fandom: none, original art
Characters/Pairings: mermaid and sea life
Content Notes: {pilot pen on paper} I was going for whimsical childrens-book-illustration style and somehow veered off into nightmare territory. (The disjointed body was always going to be a bit weird, but that face really pushed it over the edge.) I colored this in, but it didn't turn out right at all. If anyone wants to take the squiggle-swap to the next level of collaboration and color this in, feel free! I release this into the void.

( behind cut )

(Also, see my journal for color version and a badly-lit snapshot of the original squiggles that inspired this.)

Title: Sea Monster and Butterfly
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: G
Fandom: none
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: based on the squiggle prompt by goss (I traced the squiggle so I could work on it in my sketchbook instead of digitally.)

prompt:


final drawing compared to early sketch with prompt squiggle(s) highlighted::


( larger )

EDIT to add headers (I always forget headers)

Title: Fresh Eyes
Artist: eye_of_toad
Rating: G? (I think you'd really have to use your imagination to care that the original references were nudes.)
Fandom: none (or BYOF: bring your own fandom)
Characters/Pairings: none
Content Notes: blink warning: For real warning about that blinking gif behind the cut. I love it, but it's also an eye sore. I used the photo references from the Love Life Drawing's "Fresh Eyes" course (days one and two). Supplies: initial sketch with a colored mechanical pencil, colored in with cheap markers, and then digitally edited with free software (FireAlpaca for the editing and clean-up, lunapic.com for the fun filters that I used on the backgrounds, ezgif.com for the the blinking animation).

I'm doubling up and using the prompts for figure drawing practice whenever possible. Here are a few of my "negative space" attempts.



( obnoxious blinking one hidden behind cut )

More here.