Sloths Draw

As always, it's okay to post responses to prompts from previous weeks even if new prompts are already up. So if you have tried anything inspired by older prompts, please feel free to still post! And if you have any suggestions for drawing exercises and prompts, or comments/feedback on the ones I posted, please comment.

1. Capturing actions.
Think of some movement, and then how to bring its essence across by choosing the right moment and the right framing, so that the viewer recognizes what's going on (e.g. is someone getting up or sitting down?). This can be in a single sketch or a series of thumbnails trying out different things, whatever you like.

2. Drawing from different viewpoints.

Pick an object and draw it from different, maybe even unusual viewpoints, like from a bird's eye view, or a worm's eye view, or an unusual angle. It doesn't have to be anything complicated, maybe just an everyday object, like a mug or a kitchen chair, seen in an unusual way.

3. Free-form prompt.

Feathered

Sorry, that it's been more like two weeks rather than one since the last prompts...

As always, it's okay to post responses to prompts from previous weeks even if new prompts are already up. So if you have tried anything inspired by older prompts, please feel free to still post! And if you have any suggestions for drawing exercises and prompts, or comments/feedback on the ones I posted, please comment.

1. Playing with color schemes.

Draw a simple sketch of something, and then try different color schemes for the object in contrast to the background color. (Obviously if you draw a complicated motif rather than a ball or a cube or something like that, it would be simpler to do such variations with computer coloring, but the principle is the same in traditional media.)

Examples for things to try with your object vs your background:

• warm vs. cold colors, e.g. put your object on a warm red/orange background maybe create drama and energy or on a cool blue/green one for a calmer or colder mood
• see how broken colors (with white or black added) change the impression compared to bight unbroken ones (like you could try to vary the "gloomy oppression" level through breaking the background color with black, or go for a light fluffy pastel mood through breaking it with white etc.)
• do foreground and background in a monochromatic scheme, i.e. shades of the same color
• or pick colors that are next to each other on the color wheel (often referred to as analogous schemes e.g. red-purple, purple, blue-purple)
• or choose complementary colors that make each other brighter and attract attention (complimentary in the traditional color wheel sense of mixing pigments with yellow, red and blue as the primary colors, rather in the color theories of computers that are based on mixing light, like RGB values, i.e. the complementary ones for the pigment-based model are orange-blue, red-green, and yellow-purple)
• or try which colors clash (this is somewhat subjective, but pairings of colors that are neither in an evenly spaced triad on a color wheel nor complementary, are often perceived discordant, e.g. red-purple with green)

If you are completely unfamiliar with color theory and its terminology, there's a lot of tutorials available online, e.g. this one explains from a more digital design perspective.

2. Conveying sensations.

This is an exercise from Scott McCloud's comic Making Comics, it's taken from page 183:

Wherever you are, right now, notice your surroundings. List nine aspects of it: sights, sounds, smells, textures, etc. create a single page, nine panel establishing sequence that manages to evoke all of these qualities for the reader.

Since it's a book about drawing comics, he asks for an establishing panel sequence, but the basic idea to evoke sensations with a drawing is not limited to comics. Also if your current surroundings aren't that inspiring there's no reason not to pick some other place for inspiration, as long as it's vivid.

3. Free-form prompt.

Cold

I like the idea of the freeform prompts. When considering "Nightmare", I thought of a lot of things that are really terrifying to me. But I thought I'd take a slightly more tongue-in-cheek approach and show something nightmarish involving dust mites - which really freak me out by the way.

I'll say this is multi-media because it's pencil, ink pen, photo, and Photoshop. I did use a stock photo for the background.

( Nightmare )

Thanks to all who have given feedback about the prompts and exercises. I'm going to try to take it into account. Since several people said that the number of prompts combined with the scanned material was too much, I'll try just three prompts for the next couple of weeks, and throw in the occasional free-form word prompts (though probably not every week, because IMO there's already lots of lists and comms with word prompts), and then see how that works out compared with the previous format of five.

As always, it's okay to post responses to prompts from previous weeks even if new prompts are already up. So if you have tried anything inspired by older prompts, please feel free to still post! And if you have any suggestions for drawing exercises and prompts, or comments/feedback on the ones I posted, please comment.


1. Drawing different ethnicities.

Last week there was a "human diversity" prompt about different body types, this week's is sort of a companion: Draw a couple of humans from different ethnicities.

2. Drawing water.

Draw a body of water, e.g. a puddle, a lake, a river, the ocean..., and make it actually look like water. Water can be tricky, and how it might be rendered depends a lot on the techniques and materials used, but here are some of the pages from the section on drawing water from Jack Hamm's book "Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes", which is mainly focused on pencil drawings, as an inspiration (p. 93 / p. 95 / p. 96 / p. 97 / p. 99 / p. 100 / p. 101 / p. 102). Sorry for the blurriness towards the spine side of these scans.

3. Free-form prompt.

Nightmare.