Just kidding - not doing another month-long drawing project again just yet! 😆
I did have fun doing Drawrch though, and so I thought I'd write a little about it, as sort of a post-mortem of the project.
Drawrch was all about drawing faces, which is something I sort of skirt around the edges of, being someone who draws a lot of cartoons. Cartoons have faces, and exaggerated expressions and such, but in my case, not a lot of detail usually - so I felt like doing a project where I would be forced to draw faces in a variety of styles might help me practice. And it did!
One thing that I learned to appreciate more when I moved most of my drawing to digital is to make a sketch before you "ink". Drawing with traditional materials, I almost always go straight from pen to paper, with no underlying sketch. Occasionally I will sketch things out to the side on another piece of paper, but that's about it. When I draw digitally, it's much easier to draw over and dispose of the sketch later, and so I've become pretty accustomed to that process.
So throughout Drawrch I sketched out what I would draw first, and one thing that surprised me was how well some of them turned out. I expected to struggle more - and for a few I did! - but by and large, the sketches turned out pretty well and I was happy to get started coloring them in once they were finished.
Another surprise I had was when I started experimenting more with Procreate's Syrup brush, which relies on pen pressure for thickness. Normally I go with a uniformly sized brush because I haven't practiced much with pen pressure techniques. Once I got comfortable with it though, I was amazed at how much I liked it. There's so much expression in a line with variable width! Of course, I knew this already - but I had a lot of fun playing with that as I drew, and I didn't expect that.
I also really liked using a rough brush (in this case, it was the Inka brush) to color and do details. It created a lot of interesting texture on the illustrations I created with it, and let me get away from the precision that comes with cleaner lines. I definitely want to practice more soon.
There were a few duds in the project, but that's just part of the process. Outside of a few sketches that I abandoned and either re-drew or switched entirely, I never did a piece that didn't get done and added to the body of work, even if I wasn't super happy with it at the end. They all taught me something about what to do and what not to do, and so it was all good practice in the end. I like to have the failures mixed in with the successes.
One part of the process that most people aren't really privy to is my day-to-day mood about the project. Did it feel like a burden? Was I struggling to come up with an idea for the day? Was I looking forward to the whole thing being over with? Would I miss it when it was?
My wife puts up with a lot of complaints during these projects, especially when I have work that needs to get done in addition to spending an hour or two on a new illustration each night. For this project, I made a (mostly) conscious effort to curb the complaints, and things did end up feeling more positive. I still occasionally had some anxiety trying to get it all done, and I did have a few drawings that were cop-outs. But overall it felt a lot better (for me, and my wife) and I will try to continue this in the future.
I'm really happy that I spent my time making these drawing for March - there's a lot of cool work in there that I'm proud of. I guess that's the main takeaway from all this: that it was fun, and I'm glad for the practice. I'm glad I get to share my work with others so easily too.
If you're interested in seeing all the finished illustrations for Drawrch, check them out here.
You can watch them all get drawn as time-lapses at my Youtube channel, too.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll be along with me for the next illustration project! 🙂