I drew Woody today from Disney character drawing book. <Toy Story> is definitely one of my favorite movies. I cry every time I watch the last scene of <Toy Story 3>.
Perhaps I loved Woody too much that I wanted to make him look very lively: colored his cheeks orange, orange, and orange. Now he looks like he drank 100 ounces of beer or something. Sorry, Woody! Next time I will be nicer. 😬
‘Woody’ with orange cheeks
I went to whale watch for the first time in my life with New England Aquarium Whale Watch tour in Boston. Actually, I kind of tried whale watching about two years ago in Norway but the season was not quite right so only thing I saw were dolphins (no offense, dolphins!)
This time was different! We met about five huge whales and two of them even had so much interest in our boat that they circled around and teased us for about 20~30 mins. Whales were right in front of us, breathing out joyfully and diving back down to show their awesome (and huge) tails! People were screaming in joy and now it feels like a dream. I even could feel the water splash from the whales’ breadth in my face (didn’t smell nice, haha. 🐳 )
So on a way back home, I drew two whales with a pencil. I drew them out of a pamphlet they distributed on a boat. What an interesting world that such fantastic creatures are sharing Earth with us!
Whales
This is an original drawing I copied from, the painting by Tom Freeman
‘A Sanctuary Protects Stellwagen Bank’, Tom Freeman
And of course, here are some photos from the tour!
I tried to draw from an old photo of my Mom and auntie (‘Emo’ <이모> in Korean) holding ‘baby-me.’ I picked the photo because it is one of my favorite old black and white picture. And also, if I draw well enough it felt like a good idea to give my drawing to Emo as a present.
Only shortly after starting to draw it I realized ‘oh, I’ve never learned how to draw a portrait.’ I had no clue how to draw a person’s face! Only faces I drew were those of Mickey Mouse+Donald Duck‘s!
At one moment I thought about quitting because Mom and Emo didn’t look like Mom and Emo at all (at one point they didn’t look like a human!) but it felt kind of bad to leave a drawing of family members unfinished… so I kept drawing.
My teacher (Ms. Anne McGhee) told me several times “Don’t try to be a perfectionist.” What an encouraging phrase! So after hours of struggling with the two women’s faces (at this point they are totally new characters by my creation) and just blurring my (the baby’s) face, I decided to call it a day. It didn’t feel too bad to almost skip MY face because it is MINE.
Mom, Emo, and Baby-me
It is good that you always learn from any drawing. So I learned that…
Little bonus for me is that I learned how to make GIF for the first time with a help of a free Mac program, GIPHY Capture.
This is another practice of copying the great Georges Seurat’s charcoal drawing.
I usually choose the drawings that look pretty easy, and every time end up crying out with agony “Oh, it’s so much harder than my expectation! (Maybe he had better paper… or better eraser?)”
Practice after Seurat’s <Factories by Moonlight>
I had to improvise a looooooooot on purpose or not on purpose (mostly not….rather involuntarily forced to!) 🧐
This is Seurat’s original painting <Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight>
Georges Seurat <Courbevoie: Factories by Moonlight>, Conté crayon on paper
ps: a little slideshow to commemorate finishing my first sketchbook!
While visiting Orlando last month, I bought a book called <Celebrated Characters Collection>. What a great book, that I can learn how to draw famous Disney characters!
So I drew Mickey Mouse with a soft pencil and pastel. I just followed the direction on the book then like 30 mins later, I had (a little bit cubby) Mickey Mouse on my small sketchbook! (I drew Donald Duck too, haha)
Mickey Mouse
The second practice was to DRAW the letters ‘Mickey Mouse.’
Mickey Mouse, the letters
My teacher Anne McGhee told me that I have to learn to not trust my brain. To fool the brain, I drew the letters sideway like this.
33, dancing people, track, skyscrapers (not ‘scaper’ :-P), track…
Tried to lie to my brain that these are not letters but are ’33’, ‘dancing people’, ‘skyscraper’ etc. Of course, they are letters, but it was fun just to try to look at the letters with other perspective.
Below is the book <‘Celebrated Characters Collection’> by Walter Foster Jr. and a couple of pages I followed.
small talks about small things 
