Of Animal Sketches and Noisy Tapirs

In an attempt to get in some more animal gestures and sketches in to my sketchbook, I'd utilized my membership to the fullest and visited the Minnesota Zoo three consecutive weekends. I'm still not sick of going. The first trip resulted in me forgetting I was even carrying a sketchbook around for the most part but there are a couple of doodles from day one included here. Day two consisted of attempting to sketch while wearing mittens. It was still pretty chilly out but discovered I could still grip my pencil decently well with mittens on, so I spent a good few hours at the outdoor exhibits.

The third weekend I went later in the day, and it seemed to make a huge difference in what animals were up and moving around. The tapirs were especially playful so I just sat and watched them for a bit while I sketched. I'd never seen them do anything besides lay around before.

I was able to capture some footage of the two up and about, might come in handy sometime. Apologies for the rather shoddy quality video, just a point and shoot. 

I would like to go a few more times soon and do more style studies of a particular animal or work in some marker value studies. We'll see what happens!

Thanks for lookin'!

Caricature Lunch Sketches

Ta-da! Here marks the first of my sketchbook posts and it's none other than subject matter that is different my usual, and in a style that's not particularly representative of my usual look. I wanted to start to get myself to focus on working on areas that are terribly lacking in my body of work, this session focusing on males.

Usually, when I tell myself to draw a male character, it ends up being a fantastical creature such as a centaur where I can replace the head with that of the animal rather than the human. I thought I was so clever, avoiding having to draw male faces an' all that. So, over a few of my lunch breaks I made an attempt at moving away from that and actually working on drawing some male faces but didn't want to start out with too serious of studies so I played with it and exaggerated some shapes and lines.

These were done without any sort of reference, regrettably, and it's noticeable - I found I need to study more about the shapes around the cheeks, under the lips and over the brow. I'm not exactly happy with these but I feel it's important to track my progress and post these types of things to learn from.

Thanks for lookin'!