This week I took a break from my usual practice schedule to participate in Paintables’s One Week Character class. The students were provided with briefs to choose from and then focus on trying to work with that brief while following David Belliveau’s workflow. He did live videos from Monday to Friday covering each stage of the process and answering questions.

It’s a good workflow overall, but I struggled to tune in to the sessions so did everything a day or two behind. There was a whole Discord community for it but I found it was too busy and messy, the way I often find Discord servers to be. But it was a good experience and it helped me stay focused on one piece for a whole week and be pretty happy with the end product.

This week's theme is chameleons, another creature I’ve always loved. But I can’t trace back my memory to any particular stand out chameleons. Not in tv, movies or books. They’ve always been weird little guys, between the colour changing, the long tongue. Maybe that’s enough to make them memorable to a kid.

This week is another one pulled from old childhood art, another book cover I made featuring a crying sea turtle. I loved turtles a lot when I was a kid. Franklin was my favourite toy, I had almost every book, even dressed as Franklin for Halloween once. These turtles are not Franklin turtles though, this week is sea turtles only.

It’s time for another anatomy week. This week I went with volleyball poses. I played a lot of volleyball between the ages of ~14-18 so I’m pretty familiar with the sport, but it has been a long time since I’ve seen any volleyball in action.

This week I went for hyenas. They’ve always been pretty cool and feel like another “weird dog” type. But surprise surprise, I actually learned a lot about hyenas this week. First one being, they aren’t that closely related to dogs. Instead they are closer to the cat family but their closest animal relative is actually the meerkat.

I’m two weeks behind on blog posts so I’m gonna keep these two rather short to get them out. This week was another childhood animal revisit: Penguins.

Some of my upcoming animal week themes are based on photos of artwork from my childhood that my mom has been sending me. This week comes from this ink hawk I did when I was 14. Started to get into calligraphy pens and ink in general. Honestly, this is something I don’t cringe at and I think I would struggle to recreate today.

This week was my first week at trying to do some focused anatomy and human poses. For references I went with figure skaters as they do some pretty weird stuff with their body that you don’t see people doing in other situations.

Which, surprise surprise, does make it more difficult.

As mentioned in my last WAP, I’ve made a return to creature drawing to have some easier WAP weeks. I’m not sure how I got the idea for anteaters, possibly Pinterest simply showed me an image of one and I went “whoa strange dog.”

I also tried out a new practice method that I learned from a YouTube video this week. It… didn’t go great.

This was a messy WAP week. Dana suggested fancy books so I gave that a shot, but turns out inanimate objects just aren’t that interesting. Reminding me why I so rarely do still life pieces.