February 2016 Drawing Recap

In February, Creativebug had a February drawing challenge.  I think they were surprised by the interest from January.  They took existing content and divvied it up into 29 segments.  Because of that, there were less options for how to draw each item.  Instead, there was a bit more information about things such as shading, shadows, and so on.

During the month, there were several blind contour exercises.  Essentially, you look at the object you are drawing and you draw it.  While you are drawing, you do not look at your pen or your paper.   You can stop and look at your drawing every 15 seconds or so.  When you are looking at your drawing, you do not draw or move your pen in any way.

This is my left hand.  It's funky and bizarre and I like it in a weird sort of way.

At the same time when it was not clear if Creativebug would continue the drawing challenges, a group of people from the January drawing challenge started a private page on Facebook.  They decided to create a weekly drawing challenge.  For that one, all you had to work from was that week's theme.  Finished items were supposed to be posted to Instagram.  This was quite a bit harder.  Especially for week 1, I just stared at the page and thought what do I do?  The theme was garden tools, so I went out to the garage and brought in some tools.  I kept it simple, focusing on things that I thought that I could draw.  I also did some practice drawings of those items.  I also didn't worry about composition.  For week 3, the theme was spaceships.

Here are some other drawings from Creativebug's daily challenge in February.

All of this drawing was helping.  I remember one evening in February looking at the glasses sitting on my desk and deciding to try to draw them.  It was amazing to feel like I had some basic information and practice and could try drawing something that I selected, just because I wanted to.

Also in February, I decided to draw several safety pins in a flower dish of mine, rather than try and draw the specific pins and dish in the Creativebug offering.  This drawing made me so very, very happy.  The proportions are off a bit, but I remember thinking I could not have done this on 01/01/16.

One last thought........I've been cropping pictures before posting them using Snapseed.  I really enjoy the cropped result, so much better than the original picture.  There's less visual distraction.