Sloths Draw

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

1. Drawing humans in motion.

One popular method to get a feeling for how a human body looks in action is to practice by drawing correctly proportioned stick figures, like it's illustrated in these pages from "Figure Drawing Without a Model" by Ron Tiner (p. 54 / p. 55) and these from Andrew Loomis book "Figure Drawing For All It's Worth" (p. 39 / p. 40 / p. 41). Of course if you like some other method to simplify humans better, you could use that, or maybe you are already comfortable with human proportions and mass distribution and prefer to draw solid humans right away. Just draw some lively, interesting looking humans in motion, or maybe displaying emotional poses. Or have your stick figures interact with each other, maybe play out a scene.

2. Drawing expressions.

This is an exercise from Scott McCloud's comic Making Comics, but really it's just a list of emotions to draw. It is intentional that this list doesn't consist of the basic facial expressions that are most clearly recognizable (like joy, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust), but fuzzier ones, that are hard to convey unambiguously, especially just with a face and without added poses or gestures. It's taken from page 127:

Pick two expressions from this list, and draw a face to match each:

• confident
• uncertain
• frustrated
• hurt (emotionally)
• flirtatious
• mischievous
• tired

Then give the same list to a friend, along with your drawings, and ask him/her to guess which expression you were going for.

We could do the guessing part in the community as well.

McCloud's overview of drawing expressions is largely based on Gary Faigin's The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expression, a book that I really recommend, but in case that you don't have either of these or any other reference on hand, Cedarseed has a useful overview and tutorial for facial expressions online that also breaks down expressions into their components.

3. Drawing objects.

This is another exercise from McCloud's book, from page 57:

Test your visual memory. Try making simple drawings of five complex items from memory (examples: a fire hydrant, your favorite skyscraper, a pair of scissors, a sneaker, a game controller...) Then find the real thing or check the web for photos. Study the differences. Then draw the same items again from memory and see if you can capture them more effectively.

4. Using silhouettes.

I'm always afraid to make any area in my drawings truly black, even when black areas would help set a mood or fit with the composition. One way to use black areas are silhouettes. I scanned a chapter from a Wizard How To Draw book to illustrate the technique and show examples for the use of silhouettes (p. 82 /p. 83 / p. 84 / p. 85). So for this prompt, draw something using a silhouette somewhere in the picture.

5. Drawing textures/materials.

Draw as many different textures/materials as you like, whether in realistic styles or with more abstract graphic renderings (e.g. like inking and crosshatching techniques that are "read" as certain materials). Make things look hard and smooth or soft and fuzzy, shiny metal, or reflecting or transparent, wood or cloth or stone, leather or fur...