I've decided to start drawing again. It's been years--it kind of faded out somewhere around my sophomore year of high school (barring doodles in class and the one studio art class I took freshman year of college) when I realized I wasn't getting any better. But I still have loads of supplies, and I'm wondering if now that I'm more mature, I might be able to get them to do the things that I couldn't back then.

Anyway, at work last Tuesday, while I was waiting for pages (there's always lags towards the end of the day as we wait for the last few pages to get written and laid out), I sketched my left hand. I always used to like sketching hands, especially since my own are always there. So I was sketching it (crudely; I'm very rusty), and I had the shocking realization that these were not the same hands I used to sketch. I mean, the structure is the same--short fingers on normal-sized palms, the same as my mom's hands--but somewhere between high school and now, my hands have begun to wrinkle. You don't notice unless you look closely, but there are quite a few more fine lines there than there were when I drew my hands back in high school.

I remember back when I was first learning to draw, being aware of how drawing changed the way I saw the world, made me see things I wouldn't see otherwise. I wonder what other surprises I'll discover if I start doing it again.

When I want to relax, sometimes I pull out MS Paint and my old Wacom tablet and doodle in black and white. Here are a couple of the more successful attempts. (Believe me, for each of these, there are three "meh" drawings.) Click on the thumbnails to view the pictures as they were meant to be seen! They're not greyscale, I swear!





The second one comes from last semester, and it's definitely my favorite of all of these that I've done.

Man, if I had $300 to throw away, I would totally take advantage of this. However, I don't have $3 to throw away, let alone $300. So, I decided to make do with what I have and make some art with my really old and erratic Graphire 2 and . . . Microsoft Paint.

See, I used to do these really cool little drawings with the airbrush in Paint, and somehow this weekend the urge struck me to go back and try a few. Here are my two favorite results--click on the thumbnail for full sized. (I'd just put them under a cut, but they're pretty big, pixel-wise, because it's impossible to make them smaller without destroying the effect.)



(The first one is actually a reworking of this old thing, while the second one combines elements of this with another old picture that I never uploaded anywhere.)

So, basically all weekend, my roommate has had to put up with me going, "Hey, how does this look from back there? Can you tell what it is?"

So, I finally took my camera down to the art building to get photographs of my art projects so far this semester. Since my last art post, we've done charcoal, conte crayons and oil pastels, and all my finished projects are under the cut.

( Warning: BIG files )

I've always had this addiction to posting pictures of stuff I draw on the Internet. I think it stems from liking to show my friends what my life is like. Someday I'll get around to posting some of my doodles from last semester, because I took all the trouble of scanning them, so I may as well share. But today, I have some of the contour drawing from that first art class. (We've moved on to charcoal, but I don't have anything finished yet.)

As a warning: the rules we were given were extremely restrictive. No lifting the pen. Don't look at the paper except for the briefest glances. As a result, everything is very deformed and out of proportion (you'll see what I mean if you click the cut). I like to think there's still a certain charm to them, though.

( Emo teapot! Tricycle! Caboose! )

So last night as I was wrapping up the RP I posted about yesterday, somebody paged me and asked if they could draw my character. And they did, and it was cool. (I love getting pictures from people. It's warm and fuzzy.)

But more importantly, it inspired me to draw the OdyPony.

( ODYPONY! )