The January Drawing Challenge

The list that Kimberly sent was something she picked up on Instagram. Being no user of Instagram myself, I was not privy to the exact rules. She simply sent me the list of daily prompts. Admittedly, as I eager jumped to the challenge, I did not read through the list of 31 prompts.

As I began to work through them, I started to see that there was a wintertime trend. I also thought there was a bit of the cliché winter themes: snowman, icicle, your house when it snows, etc. It was not exactly disappointed in this, but some of the prompts were boring. For the penguin prompt, for instance, I drew an old timey penguin martini shaker. For the snowman, I drew a (not so) slenderman snowman. And for ice skates, I drew two women with “Kate” name tags sitting atop blocks of ice. In a way, I liked thinking about my take on the prompts more that the drawings itself.

Trees In Winter

This being my second drawing challenge, it was a very different experience to Inktober. For starters, with the January challenge, I was not bound exclusively to ink drawings. So, I used ink, I used pencils, I used colored pencils. In case of “trees in winter” prompt, I used just purple and yellow colored pencils to get the image I wanted. The second thing I realized during this process: this particular challenge was not nearly so well designed and intentional as Inktober had been.

Did I have fun? Yes. Did I learn anything? Yes. Was it a good use of time? Yes.

Cardinal

We were meant to spend 15 minutes per drawing. I don't know it that was something that the challenge came up with, something Kimberly and I came up with or if it was just something I tried to stick to. I went over the 15 minutes most days. But in January it's cold and I don't like the cold, so I had no problems with going over the 15 minutes. I wasn't about to go outside and play.

MLK

These are three of my favorites. Trees in Winter, as I already mentioned, I did with two colored pencils. It was layer on layer and I'm pleased with the result. “Cardinal” was one of those prompts that I thought was stupid (or lazy, or both), but it turned out well enough. I used colored ink for the bird, and my mircron pen for the nest. And MLK? Well, that one was just a simple line drawing. I feel like drawing MLK can be both an easy and daunting task. He has one of the most recognizable faces, we all know who he is. That said, any drawing of him must be good or highly stylized. Mine is neither, but I had a great deal of fun drawing it.