Fungal February

February was #funguary over on Twitter. A yearly art challenged focused on making different types of mushrooms into creatures hosted by @feefal_.

I stumbled across this challenge in December and kept it in mind for my year of art practice.

Funguary 2023 is soon upon us! A February drawing challenge based around fungi🍄 Here are the rules and all the prompts for the month! -- feef (@feefal_)

A few years ago I was doing monthly challenges like this a few times a year. Those often meant drawing something new every day. For this challenge, I followed the suggested format of doing one a week to keep things more manageable.

In an attempt to make the process smoother for myself I spent time on Pinterest collecting images of all the suggested mushrooms for each week. With this reference collection I spent the first few days of the month sketching the mushrooms. I was hoping to do this for every week but it ended up taking more time then I expected.

I also spent time doing thumbnails for a few of the weeks. I wanted to use that as a chance to push past my first idea and try out different compositions or concepts. But just like sketching mushroom, this took up a fair bit of my limited drawing time so towards the end I started to skip this step.

There were a lot of fun mushrooms discovered during this month so I was a little sad to only choose 4 to focus on. I did end up trying to fit in a few of the other ones in to a few of the projects. These are my 4 final pieces:

I resisted doing any cute lady mushrooms as that was my first instinct. But it felt too easy to just turn all the mushrooms into dresses. I'm not super happy with any of the pieces but there are parts that I like about all of them. I feel like #3 is decently creepy, I like how the shading came out on the body of #4 and I'm shocked I tried to do a scene in #2. I regret not tracking how much time was put into each one as I know I kicked out the last one in one day while the first one took at least 3.

Over the course of the month I did feel like I was improving and becoming more comfortable with Clip Studio Paint as time went on. It was nice to remember a few tricks to using the software too, proof that I hadn't forgotten everything I learned a few years ago.

I don't think I'll do another challenge like this for a few months as it ate away at my actual art lesson time. But it was very nice to take a break from figure drawing humans all the time.