Friday, July 26, 2013

A Peek Inside My Sketchbooks

In a week or so, I'm taking off on a roadtrip with my mom to go look at schools. Art schools. I don't think I'm really that talented of an artist--I prefer to pretend my specialty is my writing--but it's still something I really enjoy. Especially if I'm creating something that has to do with my writing. So, for a lack of a better blog post, I'm going to show you pictures I drew for my current work in progress, Everlae. A lot of the time, I have to draw out a scene or a specific object in order to figure out how to write it. I make a lot of floor plans and drawings of empty rooms (which never get finished.) I used to think of drawing and company as a sort of side hobby and never really dedicated too much time to it until this past year. Now, I've come to realize that drawing and writing come hand in hand to me--I love doing both as long as there's a story involved. 40% of my sketchbooks are illustrations of Fairy Tales, 20% still lifes,  20% random doodles, and 20% notes for my writing. I guess you could say drawing is very much just a part of my writing process.
Warning: many of the images you are about to see are of poor quality and are not finished.

This was my first attempt at watercolor:


And this was my second attempt:
 I'm not sure what attempt this was, but it's watercolors too:
And here's the sketchbook version of that:

Since I'm considering going into animation, I asked my art teacher what I could do help myself prepare. She told me to create characters. So, the following is where I tried to draw my characters from my novel a la Disney:





 This is an unfinished family portrait for my male MC:


Here is where I was trying to figure out what weapons my characters carried and what clothes they wore:

I was trying to show the change my female MC goes through during the story:

Unfinished drawing of my antagonist:

Semi-realistic drawing of my female MC (colored pencils):


Unfinished map:

Unfinished setting for a scene:

Unfinished random scene:

Ditto:

Some brainstorming for this weird creature I created for my story:

Aaaaaand a floorplan for the house my male MC grew up in:



 What are some things you do for you novels that aren't actually writing?

4 comments:

  1. Cool! You're super talented. That must be fun to be able to draw your characters, that would be fun.

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    1. Thanks! It was (and is) soooo difficult. You can see all of the mess ups I made on there lol

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  2. Wow, these are some real good sketches. I like and wish I could draw like that. Trust me, I have tried especially to draw my characters but for some reason I just don't feel they come out just right, especially the hair I try to draw(let us just say it isn't pretty) haha. :)

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    1. Thanks! Well, I've been drawing since I was...six? So considering all the time I've had to grow on it (11 years), I'm not really that good. There are some people at my school who are just mind blowing. Also, Deviantart? If I put these on there, people would laugh at them in comparison to all of the amazing artists on there.
      Do you actually picture a face when you're writing your characters? Because I don't, really. And if other people are like that, I think that's why it can be so difficult to draw a character. It's just a method of finding a face that fits, I guess. Like, when actors get cast for movies that were books first, and then the author is all like, "OMG, that is exactly how I picture [insert name here]!!!) I don't really think that's exactly how they pictured their character at all--just that once they saw the actor playing the character so well that the face kind of molded into the place of whatever image the author had before. As you can see, my characters don't look exactly the same in each pic because I keep changing my mind on how they should look.
      I do love to draw hair, though. It just takes practice!(:

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I'd love to hear your thoughts!