…Actually no, I don’t really like that song.
Anyhow.
Another retrospective here, and a day late again I’m afraid. This one takes me way back, though — we’re entering the land of eleven-year-old drawings. (I was going to clarify whether that was my age or the age of the drawings, but I realize it works either way give or take a few months. Convenient.)
I try not to bring these drawings into the light of day often, because I was eleven and relatively speaking they’re rather bad. They’re supposed to be; if they weren’t, then I’d be really sad that I hadn’t improved at all since I was eleven. But they’re on the same sketch pad I’m using now (I don’t go through the huge paper as quickly as the 8.5x11s I use like salt), so I was going to have to face them eventually.
I drew a lot of people’s pets. This was a Pyrenees Mountain Dog that made a lot of noise and shed a lot of hair. Speaking of bark, look at that crosshatching. Just look at that. That’s what bark looks like, right? And I definitely knew it needed to be on more than 1/3 of the trunk, but it was just so MUCH crosshatching…
This was a wolf, because preteens draw a lot of wolves. It’s emaciated because I was trying to figure out where the bones went, I guess. There’s a ladybug because I like ladybugs. Ladybugs are cool.
This was one of the fancy birds I always drew when I got some new Prismas — this one was probably for Henna or whatever that burnt-orange color on the upper mandible and around the eye is.
Of course, for every triumphantly-finished and fully-colored full-page extravaganza, there was one of these…
Or these…
…or eventually, in the depths of despair, these…
That lumpish raggedy-unibrow-Anne thing I have going on there is completely accurate for my look at the time. As you can see, I never actually got around to erasing all those “TO BE ERASED” drama-fests; partly because I secretly hoped I could redeem them later, but mostly because these are freakin’ huge sheets of paper and it seemed like a lot of work for no gain (after that much erasing, it wasn’t like I’d be able to draw on it again). So, the record-books of my drawing history are filled with these weird misshapen little orphans, testament to how unreasonably difficult it is to draw an eagle or put a horse’s legs in the right place. I mostly just shred these now if they’re drawn on cheap paper, or turn them into monsters (which I did back then as well, with the ink drawings I couldn’t pretend I’d be erasing later). Who knows, maybe I’m better at drawing monsters now because I had so many mistakes to practice on. Or maybe they just reminded me that real things are too much work to reproduce accurately.
I still can’t draw an eagle, by the way. It’s a weird phenomenon; with eagles and lions I seem to revert back to my formative levels of drawing skills. I think this is why I draw griffins — they just happen to swap out the most difficult features of both species for an easier one from the other. If anyone asks though, griffins are just cool.
Drawn @ Random 