Quick Daily Animal Studies

In the middle of June, I set out to do a daily practice of animal drawings. Now, I ended up forgetting about this more than a couple of times so it ended up being just a series of about 2 sketches a week (if that) but I do feel that my experience is worth sharing.

Throughout the past two years, I started to incorporate animals into my surface pattern design work. I drew whales, big cats, and birds in pencil, scanned my drawings in and added them to my repeat patterns. However, I found that I really didn't draw animals without the intention to put them in my final work. While I do enjoy drawing them, I realized that I tend to get a bit intimidated every time I start an animal drawing. To alleviate this hesitation, I decided to start a daily practice, giving myself five to ten minutes a day to sketch whatever animal popped in my head. Here are the results:

This exercise helped because (1) practicing always helps, you can never go wrong with sketching every day to get better, and (2) doing this in a very informal way (i.e. not trying to make it perfect for a project), helped me loosen up a bit. There was no pressure to make these look beautiful, perfect, or "finished" which made it more enjoyable. I just sketched out the animal of the day once, did another sketch of the same animal if I felt like it, then added a background color that I felt went with that animal (whether the color was found on the animal or in it's habitat) to polish up my rough sketches a bit.

I still haven't decided on whether or not I want to continue these exercises. I might just do a few more then move onto something else I want to work on. Being home now, with no job prospects yet, I feel like this is the time to work on my art "insecurities". Just practice some things I'd like to get better at and to make some new work!

I know this was rather short, but I think this'll be a good segue into more posts about different ways to improve art skills! Hopefully, these will inspire you to conquer your own art insecurities!