A few weeks ago I recalled that I liked Japanese cars a lot. I could stare at car pamphlets for hours. I even cut a few car pictures, glued them to a carton base, and put them on my desk. I cannot remember what exactly I liked about cars, but the recollection made me want to draw cars again.
I have never been good at drawing cars, so I took this time to improve. I sketched a few, collecting mental rules on cars.
I started off with wrong proportions: the window height is too close to the door height (see the sedans on the upper-left corner). Next, I tend to draw narrow cars, making them look cartoony.
Right now I still have difficulty drawing modern sedans. They have very complex curves (compared to the cars I drew so far, which are blocky).
Do you like cars? What do you think about cars? Let me know in the comments below :)
I started drawing this on the train on my way home from work. I had a vivid image of children happily eating cookies and drinking milk, so I started drawing. I looked for photo references afterwards, so the final look is a bit different from my mental image.
(I wondered a bit why I had this image; I never had this experience in my childhood. I think one likely reason was the comfort I had at home before this while recovering from a mild fever. I sure hope to see this scene live someday...)
I designed this drawing as a Christmas greeting image. As we will see below, it is a lesson of planning and letting go for me.
Process
I began with the idea of winter holiday. After some thoughts, I came up with two requirements:
a set that immediately conveys "winter holiday" to the audience and
Maggie and Faito are in the drawing.
My solution was to give them a magical place that they visit in their adventure. The place will have snow to give the winter feel. Conveying the idea of holiday was harder.
Thumbnails I drew for planning
I drew the first thumbnail with the idea of showing Faito being so happy and excited. I reinforced this with a Christmas tree in the second (yes, there is a creature head at the top of the tree that we may or may not see in the future--I have not made up my mind) and third thumbnails.
At this point I felt that I need to research more ideas for Christmas holiday symbols. (I usually researched ideas using Pinterest. You can see the images I collected in this "Ornaments" board.) One idea I liked was using a pine cone as a Christmas tree.
Pine cones are small, though. How do I explain a giant pine cone tree? Well, why not make it even larger? A Pine Cone Mountain! And so I arrived at the final idea.
As I drew the huge pine cone in the foreground, I realized that it may not be immediately recognizable as a pine cone because most of its parts were out of frame. In the final image, I added a pine cone in the background as a visual hint. I also added giant Christmas ornaments to reinforce the holiday theme.
So far so good. Except it was already Christmas when I started coloring. Pressed for time, I neglected planning for colors and values. I simply tried out color combinations and went on coloring. The result was quite far from what I wanted.
Lesson 1: never skip color and value planning.
I finished coloring just in time for the new year 2017:
I could have let it go and moved on, but I did not. I thought I could fix the color and values digitally, so I put in more hours to edit the image. The further I worked on it, the more I realized that I was spending time unwisely. In the end, I simply made the background lighter and added simple gradients.
So, lesson 2: let go a finished drawing.
Time is better spent planning for the next piece and working on the next piece.
As always, let me know your thoughts and comments.
