How to art? That has been my question of the week.
For my Mausritter adventure site (Goodnight Maus) which is inspired by the children’s book Goodnight Moon, I’m going to try and draw the map and various elements myself. This will be a big challenge for me, which is part of why it’s so appealing.
I used to draw a lot when I was a child. It was my favourite thing to do and I was pretty decent at drawing still life objects. I always struggled with figures or anything fantastical (which is what I always wanted to draw). I eventually grew too frustrated with my failure to perfectly transpose what was in my mind and get it onto a page. So I gave up drawing. And thus robbed myself of decades of potential development.
I’m going to use this project as an excuse to try and catch up, just a smidgen.
For Goodnight Maus I’ll be basically copying the style of the original illustrations. But I’ll let myself drift from the examples so I’m not outright stealing.
Here are my first attempts.
Some hits and misses here, for sure. But I think the proof of concept is there. I believe I can get these sketches to a quality I’m happy with.
The background canvas is nothing much, but it’s also the first thing I attempted and I’m proud of committing pen to paper there.
The comb is fucking class and I won’t have a bad word said against it.
The toy house shows me that I need to use much lighter pencil lines before adding pen, since removing the pencil in photoshop is harder and more time-consuming than I anticipated. I’m going to redo that one completely, because I’d like those lines to be much neater.
The kitten, Tabitha to be precise, is… OK? Maybe? I think?
I don’t hate it. I think I could refine it, though. But the point is I’m really happy that I tried these and I can imagine a future where I have populated my map with all my own sketches.
That was pretty fun.