Following on from yesterday’s challenge (scribble a bunch of cats as fast as possible), I tried rendering a couple of cats using new materials. Scruff (above) used mixed coloured pencils (including some metallic pencils that really only look metallic on black paper), wax crayons and black ink pens.
I decided I was trying too hard to draw and that maybe by moving to something larger and less controllable (bigger sheet of paper, palette knife, paint) I might free my inner cat artist.
I dug around in a drawer and found a mysterious plastic bag full of ancient gouache tubes.
I have no idea where these came from, but when I unscrewed a couple of caps, even though they had never been unsealed, the contents were rock hard, so much so that I had to cut the bottom off the tube, chip out some paint, and then attempt to reconstitute with water.
This process was annoying, to say the least, so I limited myself to three random colours: Burnt Sienna, Crimson Red, and Vicious Green. Actually, four colours, there was also some Yellow Ochre involved. Vicious Green is not an actual colour, obviously, but whatever I managed to get out of the tube was potent.
Being short of time, I challenged myself to see how fast I could use these random colours, smear them onto a big sheet of paper and produce something that resembled a cat.
Here’s the cat, which seems more like a kitten for some reason.
While it makes no sense colour-wise and is rough as bags (as Dad used to say), it does actually look like a cat and not a canary.
So, that’s something.
Lesson learned? Loosen up. Get messy. Don’t be scared to play. If you don’t try, ain’t nothing going to show up on the page.
If you decide to try any of the drawing prompts with which I’m tormenting myself, I’d love to see what you come up with. Feel free to post in the comments and let me know where you are on your creative journey :)
And, no, that doesn’t look anything like Mischa, so I will need to resume the cat challenge at some point before he can be added to the GN.