So my #inktober will be a #catober, with the goal of doing a deep dive into cat anatomy and construction, and bridging the gap between my #cat drawings from ref or direct observation and those from imagination.
Here where I was yesterday drawing from ref, feeling rusty because my summer was many things but focused on drawing it wasn't.
Also, sphynx cats are just the coolest.
And here is today's starting attempt at drawing cats from imagination. I swear I could do them better half a year ago, but this is where I was today, mapping out the gaps in my cat knowledge.
And then some skeleton studies to start to fill in those gaps...
Damn I miss studying _hard_, I wish I could just do nothing but draw cats all October, I could do a thousand cats - yes that would be doable if drawing cats full time, 30-40 cats per day is not at all impossible.
If I had nothing else to do. Gnah.
Fuck, now I want to do that. 1000 cats. But that would likely actually _not_ be the best way to learn about them, because it would make it tempting to skip the slow anatomy studies and just go for volume instead.
*itch *itchitchitch
This was #catober day 2 yesterday. Not enough time to do real study, but at least did get the lack-of-knowledge mapping and some cougars from ref in.
I still feel like my mind has half forgotten how to think in line, but it got better in the second half of the page of cougars, especially with this one. Here a slightly cleaned up version to make myself feel good:
#catober day 3 yesterday. started again by mapping my notknowing, then followed along with the first cat lesson by Joe Weatherly on NMA. Then I tried to apply that first helping of rough anatomical info to some of my sketches from the day before. Last I made a bunch more sketches from ref, and again made some attempts at very rudimentary anatomical analysis.
Last of yesterday's #catober pages. This one was fun to do, but also I could feel myself being strongly pulled to doing pretty flat shape based drawing reproducing the references without really understanding their forms in space, in other words without really knowing what I was doing.
I could do this all day and enjoy myself a lot, but I would not be learning much from it, and would be no wiser trying to draw cats from imagination afterwards.
#catober day 4. Today I felt like my mind was a bit more awake than before when I did this morning's mapping of notknowing. Still far away from looking good, but at least looking not-good with more of a 3d feel to them.Then a page with studies after Bammes and Wendling, trying to map yesterday's rough anatomy on how these artists have drawn felines. Then put a sheet of marker paper over yesterday's sketches and tried to work out wtf these cats' skeletons are doing.
@dymaxion Oh hey, thank you :) Usually this stuff just goes in my journals, page after page after page of it. Also very much something that has been drilled into me as a nono to share in the capital A Art World, but here I can do such silly things.
✊ DOWN WITH THE MYSTIQUE! ✊
Oona is pushing paint around
Eleanor Saitta