Catching up and moving forward [UPDATE]

A few months ago I posted about doing a personal challenge, of drawing a vehicle everyday over February, I said that I'd update my progress over a few weeks, so why am I only updating it now at the beginning of April? The main reason that I left this so late is that I did not complete this challenge as I'd hoped to I made it to day 10 of my 30 day vehicle challenge. However that's not to say that I didn't draw everyday in February, I just didn't draw a vehicle. As I wrote before the inspiration for this challenge came from a task to design my own vehicles, and from that realising that I really don't know how to draw vehicles. But immediately after that task was completed another was set, to draw an interesting character. This project is where the rest of my 20 days went in terms of drawing everyday. For this project and the days after I went out and drew people everyday and took what I observed and put it into a character that I am pretty proud of. In hindsight I could have drawn some vehicles whilst I was out drawing people, but live and learn. And though I did not complete this challenge properly still managed to keep the goal of drawing everyday in that month, so not a complete success, not a complete failure.

So without further a do I'll show the work produced over the course of February. Firstly the 10 days where I kept to the challenge of drawing vehicles:

  to begin with I just started random drawings of vehicles,using the same methods of drawing that I used in the vehicles project (silhouettes, thumbnails etc) though I did get better at generating ideas as I went along, I didn't get that far with this, and my vehicles lack believability unfortunately.

  A few days of this challenge also went to redesigning my initial vehicle for modelling in 3D. This was one of the fun parts of the vehicle projects, as I hadn't worked with clay in years I found this process therapeutic.

 I also did a few observational drawings of cars and finished off the 3D modelling project set in games production.

Now for the rest of the month I sat in cafes, pubs,restaurants and just out and about drawing people living their lives. And it was a very fun experience seeing the differences in peoples faces, the way they walked, the way that they held themselves. And seeing the similarities as well, at the end of the first week it was very hard to find someone not wearing this style of large coat. From my observations I singled out this little lady as my interesting character. What drew me to her initially was her retro looking make-up despite her age, then it dawned on me that when she was my age this was the style that people wore, things have just come full circle now and its back in fashion. She also wore a large coat like many others I saw. So I decided to see what type of coats were worn in the 1970s sort of era to influence her design. And though she was initially tall I decided to give her the statue of another older woman I drew who I found interesting due to her size. This was then exaggerated to give the final feel of my character.

Though this is where my drawings for the February challenge ended, I did not stop developing my character, the final is below.

During the February challenge I found that I can't approach my learning in the same way for every subject. Though going out and drawing  people and faces came easily to me, this just didn't work out with vehicles. I think when it comes to vehicles I'd need to take a more technical approach to my learning, knowing how engines work, why cars are shaped the way that they are, what are they made of and why how are they made and most importantly the limits of vehicles, Before I can go out and draw a convincing vehicle let alone draw them consistently over a month. So not a complete failure, not a complete success.