Blog 2.1

I started off this week learning to draw a lions - more specifically a male lion and a female lion. To show if I could progress, I started out by trying to draw the lions with no instruction from the book or the internet. I simply picked several images offline, and tried to copy them. As expected, I did not even know where to start drawing it. You can see below, they did not turn out great, but I wasn't expecting anything different. Also, I worked on for them each for about 15- 20 min. before giving up, and moving on to the actual project.

For the male lion I completely looked out of the book. I first drew circles for the bottom and the chest, then circles for where the knees are. Originally, I drew two circles for the head. After I drew the basic shape of everything, I realized that the lions head was wonky looking, so I went online and looked up some pictures on the internet. I managed to make his head look much better, but it took some time. When it came to shading, I drew his mane with large stokes so it looked like
long hair. For the body I shaded in the area, adding more pressure to where the dark or muscly parts were. I rubbed/ smeared the lead so it looked more fluent and natural instead of seeing the scratch marks of the pencil. I was surprised how much more realistic and better the drawing looked after I had applied shading to it.

     I also mainly looked out of the book when learning how to draw the female lion. I learned that the main point of using circles as starting points is to get the proportions right. At first I drew the body then looked up online how to draw the head (the book did not describe how to do this well enough) only to realize that the head was too far apart from the rest of the body! Not wanting to redraw the head, I erased the body and redrew it with the right proportions. Again, I shaded in the lion and smeared the lead with my finger. I was very happy when I finished this lion because I think it looked much better than the previous one.

Lastly, I decided to draw a deer. This time I had understood the overall idea of how to draw an animal- mostly by putting circles proportional to each other then connecting them with lines. So instead of learning from the book, I tried to copy a picture that I found off of google images. I picked the first deer that was on the page. Overall, I had no problems drawing the body. However, the face was pretty tricky. The head was slightly turned so at first I thought I should draw a lopsided circle to make the face look larger on one side. This was ultimately a mistake, and I found that I had to simply draw a regular circle then position the eyes in the appropriate places to make it seem like the face was bigger on one side. I then completely erased the lines on the  side of the face the faces the body, and I shaded the part where the neck reaches the face. This way there is no definite place where the face ended. I think I did pretty good on drawing this deer. My big mistake though, now that I look at the picture, is that the body seems a bit too long.

For this next week I will either continue learning how to draw animals, learn how to draw insects, or learn how to draw plants- I have not decided yet.