Life drawing at the Metro Toronto Zoo

Once in awhile Leigh and I get the urge to head to the zoo and do some life drawing and look at some animals. Life drawing at the zoo is fun but can be a little tough sometimes. Animals in the zoo are not the most cooperative models to draw from. They're either constantly on the move or asleep or hiding behind something so you can't see them. Here's my favourites from this last session.

Life drawings.

Had to go to London to do some court room drawing for the National Post, these images are what I did to warm up a little. I think you'll be able to see the stuff I did in the court room if you swing by the National Post.

Royal Winter Fair 2011

So every year Leigh and I head out to the Royal Winter Fair to do some life drawing of farm animals. We live in a relatively urban area so the opportunity to draw animals tends to be pretty rare. Here's some of the best ones I did this year. I really like those hooded sheep. 

Some guys who were sitting near us while we were drawing cows.

Cows just lying around.

Cow profile and sideways cow butt.

Cow laying down. Their hips are crazy.

Back of a cows head.

A couple of folks unfortunate enough to be sitting near me while riding the Go-Train.

Life drawings

Since I spend a lot of time on public transit commuting to work I get bored some times and draw the people sitting around me. here is some of them

I also went to the Royal Winter Fair back in November and drew some of the animals there. Its a fun exercise if you’re and artist and near one of these fair type things or livestock auctions.  Here’s a couple of the better drawings.

Hawt Girl

Hawt Girl is the resident superheroine spokesmodel for Comic Oasis in Las Vegas. She was also pretty fun to draw. She was designed by Charles Holbert Jr. I've drawn her as part of an art trade with Mr. Holbert Jr. I had a lot of fun drawing this so I figured I'd show you the stages this drawing took to be completed.


Step 1. Pencil Drawing

The first stage of drawing anything, at least for me involves using pencils. I tend to use colored pencils from colerase, this time I drew using tuscan red. I usually draw in purple or tuscan red. They seem to be the least smudgy. 

Step 2. Illustrator for inking
Sometimes I like to use markers or brush and ink when I do this stage of a drawing but I felt like having the line part of the drawing be colored too so I went with illustrator. Its easier to have colored ink lines when you start with colored ink lines instead of adapting them in photoshop.

Step 3. Drawing up the background
Since I felt like handling the background slightly differently than the foreground I drew the background in with a minimum of ink style line. You’ll notice there's a weird gap in the dead zombie nazi. You’ll also notice its the same shape as Hawt Girl’s leg. I figured I didn't need to draw what was behind the leg so I didn't.

Step 4. Coloring Hawt Girl
Even though I was planning on bringing the image into photoshop to do the shading and some touch ups, I decided to laydown the base colors in illustrator. I sort of like how it looks at this stage but I really wanted to give a little more form to Hawt Girl so ...

Step 5. PHOTOSHOP painting.
This is the stage where I bring it into Photoshop and paint in some shadows and highlights and stuff. I spent some time tweaking the contrast on some of the line work and stuff like that. 


THE END.


I hope you enjoyed that little peak into the stages in which I work.

Sketchin' from life!

Aug. 6 on the subway

Still Aug. 6 on the GO-Train home, I really like how that guy in the lower left turned out

more on the GO-Train

Aug. 9 GO-Train, I think she was doing her taxes

Aug. 12. this guy wouldn't stop staring at me so I figured I'd draw him.
That'll teach 'im.

Sketchin' on the subway.

quick life drawing sketches of some girl sitting across from me on the subway

Leech / Squirrel hybrid... no i don't know why.

life drawing on the left weird guy I just came up with on the right

Don't worry there'll be more drawings of monsters and girls in the future. I bought one of those Joe Kubert Cartooning School correspondence courses. I got the horror one, I'll post the assignments here as I do 'em. maybe even the critiques if they're not too embarrassing. 

Assignment one seems to be Draw a monster.  Now I gotta figure out what kind of monster to draw.

London Zoo

I just got back from vacation in England. During my trip I went to the London Zoo while I was there I did a few little life drawing sketches of some of the animals. It was a lot of fun but I found I was a bit rusty, here's the best of them. Leigh and I think we want to hit the Metro Toronto Zoo and do the same thing in the not too distant future, even tho animal life drawings tough. Animals don't like to stay still very long unless they're asleep. then they're kinda boring looking.

I wonder if any of my art buddies would wanna go on an animal drawing fieldtrip?