Hey Hive!
We're back again with another Art Attack! If you're new to the series, this is where I share my drawings and the process behind them. A behind-the-scenes look at my artwork, if you will. This is not to say that I'm very good at art, or that I'm a professional in any way. In fact this is the opposite, and serves as a reminder to how I first started, and lets me track my progress too!
I know I don't normally do black and white pieces but this week's piece is a very interesting one; and will really showcase how far I've come since I started drawing for real.
So about 4 years ago when I was going through some really difficult times, Sean noticed that I would doodle stuff on my and his lecture notes during our classes. So he encouraged me to draw and come up with some simple punny designs since we always make silly puns and stuff. And he said that they could maybe be printed on T-shirts in the future. I wasn't so optimistic but I did like doing simple doodles and it was an effective distraction so why not.
Sean bought me a little notebook that I would bring around and just doodle stuff on whenever I was bored and I started coming up with some silly drawings that you can see in my very early posts on instagram.
But anyway, one of them was this one called Dandelion, which I think is pretty self-explanatory:
I think I drew this in April 2016, then I tried to redraw it on a bigger scale and it turned into this:
Which when outlined became this:
And I think I just left it at that for a long time. Until I randomly came across this monthly challenge organised by Doodlewash!
They had this art challenge similar to Inktober where you have a prompt for every day of the month and you have to draw something based on the prompt! I had unfortunately missed most of the month by that point but I saw that Day 23 was Dandelion and thought this was the perfect opportunity to redo the piece I had from years ago and see how well I could do.
For this, I decided to take a different approach and try to make it look realistic. And since this was my first time trying this style, I consulted some youtube tutorials and came across this one by LethalChris Drawing:
It was only five and a half minutes long (it was a time lapse, but still) and he used a mechanical pencil like me so I figured it would be easy to emulate it somewhat. But man, it was definitely not as easy as he made it look!
So he starts with the outline of the head, and the positions of the eyes, nose and mouth. And he gives a lot of helpful tips with regards to the positions and alignment of the facial features to make the head proportional.
Next was shading the eyes. For this I had to improvise a little bit since I couldn't get my lead to come out as dark as his for some reason. I'm not sure what kind of lead he used, but I had to use markers to make it extra dark. And I tried to get the reflection in the eyes like his but obviously mine doesn't look as good as his.
Next was the nose. This wasn't too bad, since it was pretty dark around the nostrils. For the hair I tried my best to emulate Chris' but man it takes so long to get the effect that he got since you need so many layers of dots. I didn't really have the patience to do that and mine kept looking weird but I tried my best.
More hair and shading the mouth. By then my hand was legit cramping from putting so many lines and dots. I don't know how Chris does it. He must be a wizard.
Shading the hair on the forehead! I really tried to give it more dimension like his but I think I must've not been using the right lead or something but that was literally the darkest I could go. Any more shading and it would just become a black splotch on the lion's head.
Oh well. By that point it had already taken me about 3 hours and my arm was so tired so I was pretty much done. I finished up by adding the dandelions for the mane.
And after using my marker to fill in the dandelion poofs and the main stem, it was finished! Or, as complete as I was going to make it anyway.
I realised after that that I didn't make the dandelion poofs fly away like I did for my earlier versions but oh well.
Oh btw Chris' drawing looks like this:
Source: LethalChris Deviantart
This was my first ever attempt at realistic drawing and it was unfortunate that it was just covered in hair because realistic hair/fur is probably one of the most difficult things to draw. In fact, LethalChris has a realistic hair drawing tutorial as well but that was way too much for me.
But anyway, it was fun to try a new style even though I'll probably not be attempting it again anytime soon just because it's too exhausting and time consuming. In the video, Chris said that he took 3 hours to draw the full lion head with the mane and everything and it took me the same amount of time to draw it without the mane, so damn. Props to him for having the skill and patience to do that.
His drawings and videos are really good and helpful so if you're looking to try this style I'd recommend checking out his channel! He also has quite a few tutorials like how to draw realistic eyes, ears, hands, etc. which is a common challenge for many people including me.
I think overall, this piece turned out pretty alright. For a first attempt and probably not having the right tools, that is. I mean, I did my best and it still looks miles better than the very first one so that's something.
Next time you're stumped, try out something new! It's always fun to experiment different style and it's always a learning experience.
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
