The Art of Deezy

I’m being lazy about making this week’s comic, and also about getting dressed, so I drew a head. I’ve been studying a lot this morning (and lately in general), and wanted to play around with some recent observations. Also, since this is my blog and I can, I’m going to rant for a minute:

If you ever worry that you’re not sure what you’re doing with this whole art thing, try to just take some time to study what other people are doing and really deconstruct drawings that seem really appealing to you. Before I started doing a weekly comic, I really hadn’t drawn much in years. We’re talking MAYBE once a week, and whatever I was drawing was pretty much scribbly crap that I wasn’t happy with. There’s a lot of stuff in there about depression and life woes that made being creative a real struggle, too. This comic-making thing has really pushed me to draw things I’ve been avoiding and to kick some bad habits to the curb.

After studying animation in college, I picked up a lot of good and bad habits. There’s a very pervasive, generic animation style that’s taken hold of the industry lately, and on the one hand, it’s very appealing and fluid. On the other hand, hiding behind a style can be a good way to end up using shortcuts instead of really understanding how what you’re drawing works. I’ve had to toss out a lot of Disney-esque style influences, amoungst other style influences like indy comics and anime, not because they’re bad, but because they’re bad for me. They don’t vibe with the way I like to draw, and while they made my drawings more dynamic in a lot of ways (not really this head drawing, since she’s kind of got them dead eyes going but it’s cool), using all those style influences resulted in using shortcuts for a lot of anatomy I didn’t feel like drawing. And I like drawing the difficult things! I like drawing hands, and hair, and feet, and knees, and shoulders…but I’ve had to re-learn how to arrange elements on the face, for example, because I’ve been pushing my drawings around so much to make them look lively that I’ve stopped really thinking about things as they really are. I had to learn how to actually draw mouths and lips and eyes and ears and head proportions because I lost track of all those things. I have to think of things in 3D space, but in a way that’s more comfortable for me. I have to find “lively” and “fluid” in a way that’s more reflective of how I want to draw things and what’s appealing to myself, first and foremost. Sooooo I’m working on it.