Weekly Art Practice - Week 38
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.
Day 2 - Figure sketching
Day two saw improvements quickly just by being able to look at some photos. However, a quick discovery: not that many exciting photos of bikes.
Day 3 - Reference studies
The realization from day 2 was quickly apparent on day 3, the photos aren’t exciting and drawing bikes… also not exciting. Is drawing bikes hard because imagining a bike isn’t fun? I really had to push myself to just start working on bikes each day.
Day 4 - Style studies
Things got a little nicer on day 4 if only because the references I chose to work with were big on simplification. Not including all the tiny metal bits in the wheels is a huge time saver and takes away the annoying act of having to draw 40 lines.
Reference: Sketchy bikes on VectorStock and Diana-Huang on DeviantArt.
Day 5 - Drawing from imagination
I put off day 5 for as long as I could because even though I found drawing bikes to be fairly boring I was afraid that boredom had stopped any memory of the shape of a bike from my mind. I was certain I was going to draw some kind of bike abomination.
But I decided to take it super slow and draw with some perspective to mix things up. Only to draw the best bike I’ve ever seen. Plus another bike in profile which is okay but doesn’t feel like as much of an accomplishment.
Conclusion
Even though I’m proud of the bike I drew on day 5 I’m still a little torn about this week. Inanimate objects just aren’t as interesting to approach this way due to their lack of movement and change. Living creatures have multiple shapes, sizes, motions, bikes just kind of… are. I had the same problem with a few other object weeks. If I were to keep up this kind of practice I’d probably try to find a different approach for inanimate objects.
I have 2 weeks left of WAP, during which I’ll also be putting together my practice format for next year. It won’t kick off until February as my wife and I are going to participate in Sealed With A Kiss, a month-long game jam to make a visual novel. A second go at Renpy for me after this year's NaNoRenO.
Pinterest board of bicycles.