As the end of the year approached I thought it was time to tackle a theme I’d been avoiding. There are 3 subjects that are often either ridiculed or acknowledged as being weirdly difficult to draw. Hands, horses, bikes. These likely aren’t the hardest for everyone but they come up and have been on my mind since starting this year long project. At the start of the year I did hands, just a few weeks ago horses, so it felt like it was time to stop avoiding bikes.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

Pretty awful. I see bikes probably every single day, Montreal is a very active bike city, but it’s not enough for me to summon up bikes clearly in my mind.

Possibly last anatomy week of 2024??? This week is running, which I was pretty surprised I hadn’t done yet. Even just went and skimmed my tracking sheet to double check.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

Some early day 1 space misjudgements here. Chopped off the top of a head.

I can’t believe I waited this long to do bats as a WAP theme. They’re an original favourite animal from my childhood, to the point that a book about different types of bats is one of my strongest childhood memories. However, the kids book Stellaluna may be the reason for my love of them:

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

Day 1 not too bad but I was probably picturing how dragons fly instead of bats. There is definitely more variety to bat faces than I could remember and I think my mental model of a bat has been fairly corrupted by cartoon versions.

After my week of horse riders I thought it would be appropriate to tackle horses on their own. One of the fabled Hard to Draw things along with hands and bicycles (which I have yet to try).

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

I thought day 1 was going pretty okay until I took a step back and got “dog” vibes from my first day of sketches. So I wasn’t exactly getting the legs right.

This week’s practice was a style/master study of Ken Sugimori, the original Pokemon artist, known for drawing all original 151 Pokemon.

I didn’t want to draw just Pokemon, instead leaning on my learnings from anatomy practice and my goal of a self-portrait, I wanted to make myself into a Pokemon trainer. I did a fair bit of YouTube research for this one and I’ll share the resources that were most helpful or insightful throughout the blog post.

Step 1 - Pose​

Following the workflow learn from character design week, step one was to focus on the pose only. Starting from Pinterest I gathered up a bunch of references of original Pokemon trainer artwork as well as a few modern interpretations.

I tried out a few poses, 2 from game references and one that just felt like it really fit the aggressive trainer look.

I didn’t deviate too much from the original poses, wanting this week to be more about design and technique than anatomy or dynamic posing. For proportions, faces, and general shape design, Rjamez Valdez 4 piece trainer tutorial is absolutely excellent. This is someone who has spent a lot of time studying the originals and also drawing trainers. He breaks down each feature to make it seem easy.

Action anatomy week, swimming. Some nice perspective shots but fewer variety to those shots than I expected.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

It quickly became obvious that foreshortening and proportion length would be the main difficulty with these.

This week is another shift in the weekly format. So along with the regular subject studies, and anatomy studies, I want to try to work in a “finished piece” once a month (even if there are only 2 left…). For me a finished piece mostly just means fully rendered to a degree where I’m happy to share it on socials. These will mostly be chosen from current internet art trends or challenges as I like to know my theme going into the week.

The theme for this week is the Pokemon Ability Forms exercise. All Pokemon have an ability, this is usually between two abilities with some Pokemon getting a 3rd hidden ability. Abilities will provide Pokemon with an extra, often passive, mechanic during combat. For example: Pikachu most often has the ability Static, which means that when an opposing Pokemon makes physical contact with that Pikachu, there is a 1 in 3 chance the opposing Pokemon is paralyzed by the static.

The idea behind this challenge is what if a Pokemon’s ability changed the way the Pokemon physically appeared. So a Pikachu with the ability Static might have static electricity jumping all over its fur. I heard of the exercise from a recent Drawfee episode and did some research to try to find the originator of the exercise and I’ve come to believe it was started by n0rtist with this Tumblr post (Sounds like it may have been a Tweet first but Twitter is impossible to use now).

I like it as a challenge because it’s a design challenge with an existing character. So not a full head to toe design but working off of basically one word and a one sentence description to make changes with.

But anyway this is a lot of preamble for a blog post, let’s get into it.

Day 1 - Research & Sketches​

I spent a decent amount of time scrolling a list of all Pokemon and reading their abilities. I wanted one that had 2 basic ones and a hidden ability to have 3 characters to draw. I went with Omastar because I have a soft spot for him after his role in the original Twitch Plays Pokemon and I wanted to keep drawing ocean creatures. He also has 3 abilities that I was able to imagine some solid visual elements right from the get go.

After doing the research phase I did some quick first idea sketches:

This week’s practice is another vague and ambitious theme; flowers. Vague because there are so many different kinds of flowers and ambitious because I often feel like I only know 5 flowers. But I see flowers constantly as they are probably the most common tattoo theme and I follow a lot of tattoo artists on Instagram. But I myself rarely draw them. So I thought it would be good to practice since they are such a common theme in art.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

Not a terrible day one?

Week 30! It feels like a small number when compared to all numbers, but it’s pretty good when compared to 52. And there are still a few more weeks to go in the year. I’m starting to try to figure out how I want to approach art practice next year now. I don’t think I want to keep doing WAP guided practice, I feel like I should get out of the comfort zone and try to move into working on complete pieces. Or another idea is to do more Master Studies.

Having weekly homework has been great for having something to work on every day but it’s also been a fair bit of pressure to get through the practice every week and get a blog post out for each one. But we’ll see, I have no idea what 2025 is going to look like yet so don’t want to make any big commitments.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​

So I actually had two pet sugar gliders from about the age of 14 to 21, so you’d think I’d have a pretty decent mental model of what they look like. But it has been more than 12 years since I’ve been around one…

An anatomy week with an extra complication, horses. My goal for the week wasn’t to learn to draw horses, a famously difficult creature to master. But more to focus on the shape human bodies take while riding.

Day 1 - Drawing from imagination​