It's Legal So They Do

Does anyone remember Mac and Quaid? If you don't, you can either find out about from posts back in February, the 100th post or the Droey and Co. page. For those who do, here they are again, and they're getting married!

I used a situation prompt and it told me to draw the 'dream wedding'. As I started thinking about wedding, the first thing that came to mind was Mac and Quaid, who haven't really seen much attention but that was about to change.

I now consider their artwork to have told a chronological story, their debut in February being the proposal. And here they are finally getting their rings and they couldn't be happier! Unlike the vicar witnessing their marriage.

After using a variety of equipment for my 100th post, I rediscovered the glory of ballpoint pens and so used them for this work of art. The shading for this went alright but unfortunately there was a minor mishap when I accidentally placed shadows on the wrong side of Mac's arm, the light is supposed to radiate from the center of the illustration. Another issue was the proportion problem that Tenvad is suffering from, her legs having increased in height and perhaps her overall body being too small. That's what I get for working with a limited space.

Are you looking forward to seeing more of this couple? And how about the rest of Droey and Co., are you wanting more frequent appearances from them? Be sure to let me know and I'll see what can be arranged for their future.

Character Redesign : Bliss

By now a lot of you fans of the Powerpuff Girls may be aware that there is a fourth PowerPuff Girl featured in Cartoon Network's new special (and most probably appearing again in future content). This is the character 'Bliss', who let's be honest was created to get the show more ratings, so if you're against the show then yeah, just let it happen.

So here's an image of Bliss (not my own) as she appears in 'The Power Of Four'.

Now I'm not against there being more than three PowerPuffs, so long as only the original three stay as main characters. And I'm going to be honest, apart from reminding me of the Mary Sue concept (in terms of character rather than design), I don't really mind Bliss.

What I do hold against her with certainty however is her design. On her own the design looks rather flawed and (although hundreds have said it) reminds me of those many OCs you'll find, which isn't bad if you're just expressing yourself and developing your artistic talents, but from a business which owns the official characters, this you would not expect. I mean not to insult anyone's OCs but there are better looking ones than Bliss.

My biggest issues are her Turquoise hair, which I find to be a bit of an eye sore. Her 'uniformed' colour being lilac, which is just the same as the much loved 'Bunny'. Her legs are also incredibly long, making the design rather disproportionate, it's slightly painful to watch when she's in action.

Okay, enough critiquing the official design, I myself am not the best but I would like to take a shot at 'healing' the design of Bliss.

My first attempt stays fairly faithful to the real design, in the sense that she still has most of her PowerPuff Girl traits.

So here she is. I altered her proportions so that her limbs and torso would be stretched out more, and shortened her hair length to her knees. This fixes the visual appeal of the legs and allows Bliss to look more like the rest of her sisters. You'll notice I also reduced her hips to normal size, no particular reason, it just disturbed me a little. 

You may notice that Bliss' trousers are different... or are they? SPOILER ALERT! : Bliss has been wearing the same clothes since her birth, which means that for a good ten years probably she has grown within her clothes, so they should be looking rather small on her now. Both the dress and trousers therefore come short, something the official design attempted. Because her dress is shorter, we see the top of the trousers.

Her colour scheme was another task when it came to amending the design. I took a study of the colour schemes for Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. I noticed that excluding their skin, trousers and shoes, each sticks to two colours (or in Blossom's case, three). With that in mind, I set three colours as the maximum for Bliss, you'll notice her official design has four colours according to this study.

I kept the turquoise by applying it to the heart piece on her headband, as an accent colour it stands out nicely. I wanted to keep the hair colour natural so I reused the brown colour, using a darker shade for her hair and leaving a white streak. 

The uniform colour was stripped of it's purple and you can see I made a chart of colours that had been used by 'PowerPuffs', including non PowerPuffs who aspired to be one or was engineered to rival them. Given that already the entire spectrum is covered, there aren't many options left (some of which are shown on the chart). I resulted in choosing a bronze yellow, since it didn't clash so badly with Princess Morbuck's yellow and also stood out against the original PowerPuff Girls' colours.

With this new colour scheme, I think Bliss looks much better and more like she would if Craig McCracken himself has created her. If only this was the Bliss flying around with her sisters.

But I'm not done yet! Here's another redesign of which is truly faithful to the original series' style. You see, Bliss is a teenager and you've probably guessed it! I'm going to The City Of Clipsville!

There's not much that's new I can say about this one. The colour scheme is the same, though I stretched the clothing out as if Bliss had been given a new outfit upon her return. Based on the model of Teenage Blossom, I was able to build Bliss, simply having to apply the standard PowerPuff Girl uniform and then Bliss' hair, which still goes down to her knees but because of her new height, is much longer. Would it not have been fun to see Bliss appear like this? It would have at least made for a fairly decent easter egg.

So what do you think of this redesign? Or maybe you have attempted to redesign Bliss yourself, I'd be intrigued to know how it turned out. If there's anyone else you think I should try to redesign, let me know in the comments.

Magna Girl Fan Art

It might be old news to you, but DrawingWiffWaffles is a YouTube art channel that I very much enjoy viewing. With such being the case I am aware of her web comic 'Magna Girl' and so far have enjoyed it very much.

As a fan of Magna Girl, I thought I'd take a shot at depicting her with my own creative hands. I hope to have done her justice.

So the costume is based on the one seen in her style swap video where she draws Magna girl in the Manga style. Her hair style however is based on the Maggie that we know at the start of the comic (and have seen in most other artworks). I'm not sure if this causes any continuity clashes, the comic (at the time of posting this) has yet to put Magna girl in her costume.

I was really happy with how the anatomy turned out in this drawing, while some might not consider it perfect (I don't expect it to be), it is certainly great compared to most of my more realistic approaches. I particularly love her legs and right arm, they just look so brilliant!

The challenges of this piece were the fire and the head. Heads as drawn by Waffles are difficult to portray in a different style I find. Her heads are so distinctive that I struggle to see the head as that of  a Waffles character if it is not drawn in her style. So I set about trying to get a close to the style as I could without replicating it. The end result was quite satisfying, I think the nose is a match and her ear is something I was also impressed with.

I have drawn fire before and most times I have been satisfied, but trying to draw fire as some kind of magical entity is simpler than I thought it would be. The only real challenge with his fire was preventing any two sections of it from looking exactly alike, as it would feel less natural that way.

DrawingWiffWaffles, if you're reading this or have seen this piece, I really hope you do like it and that Maggie has been portrayed to your satisfaction. I'll be sure to keep up to date with her adventures!

100th Post! - Droey and Co.

I was making this by chance alongside tomorrow's piece but I realized that this week would be my 100th post on the blog! So I decided this (given the nature of what I was creating) would get the honour of being presented on this post.

You most probably have seen them all before, but now see them unite together in this creative little poster of Droey and Co!

Meet the familiar faces that you have gotten to discover throughout the past 100 posts as well as a couple of new ones. I shan't give the less obvious ones away in case you feel like guessing. Instead these boxes will be referred to from top left to bottom right.

On the top frame we've got the iconic Drawson sword, which can be seen in the sidebar as held by Droey Drawson. This is a watercolour pencil piece, over the past few months I have come to love watercolour pencils. I was never good with watercolour paint, be it a case of colours being too muted or patchy, so the pencils allowed me to succeed where normally I hadn't. Having said that, I'm afraid that this particular box is one of my less favourite jobs with this tool. Perhaps I was a bit impatient, but as a result some of the paint bled beyond repair. I shan't say where, I suppose it can be seen without my mentioning. If you didn't notice, then yipee I guess!

Back in February, I took a couple of character design polls and a situation poll which resulted in the creation of two lovers, one of which is Quaid. I was considering adding colour to his face but after colouring the background of his piece with fireworks in the night (reminiscent to his original appearance), his face seemed to make the perfect contrast.

For similar reasons, Mac's face is also left white. For those of you unaware, Mac is the Elven man of the couple. His background contains a rainbow, since he is one of a homosexual couple. I felt the rainbow would suit him better than it would Quaid. Mac's face is left white because I didn't want his face to clash with the rainbow in the background, it could have resulted in being an eyesore. On the positive side, his face now matches Quaid somewhat, still a match made in heaven!

This man needs no introductions, it's Droey Drawson himself. Droey is coloured in pencil while his background is a striped pattern to match his eyes, inked with pens of the same brand. My only nitpick is the skin tone, as since recent months Droey's skintone is no longer Caucasian (as in the peachy skin tone) but is just pure white.

If my memory serve me right, this one never actually has shown up on the blog yet. He doesn't really have a name or anything to him other than this rather simplistic getup. All I can say is that his arm is like that of an olympic torch, the element of fire being something he can play to his advantage. Maybe one day you'll get to see the full view of this mysterious man.

The masterpiece this is based on, I often look back to with great pride. It was simply a character design session and accidentally became experimental, out of my style and popular. Hence my decision to give it the biggest square of the lot. This is the fortune telling orb leaving a reminder of a rather deadly fortune teller, from the iconic 'I never meant this to happen'. This time I used better quality materials to add some grey tones and I think the smaller scale helps the ball point pen's shading effect.

This ear piercing decorated with the Drawson star, as well as the purple spots, are token traits to the character design of Anne Natalie, one of the original members of Droey and Co. Admittedly she has not seen much attention, particularly in recent months but I don't have anything against bringing her back into the spotlight, she most probably will be showing up again.

Droey Drawson was given a robotic counterpart some time around March or April, this is called 'Drobot'. Here you can see a close up of his head piece which replaces Droey's cap, as well as Drobot's visor. I applied a base of very light blues and greens and then shaded the metallic work with a pencil. Highliters were used for the reflective effect and some grey scale markers added shading to the white sections.

Tenvad is aside from Droey, the first member of the group. This box matched the shape of her face, just about. It made sense to simply place her face in it's place. A highlighter was used for her green screen and also her lips. The rest was done with my usual pens. Normally Tenvad's green screen has been coloured with a light green pencil but I wanted her screen to look more saturated as it should, so I tried the highlighter. While the overlaps tend to show up a bit, the saturation is still present and thus was not a total loss.

I remember during the summer I encountered a Hawkmoth. And thus you got to see Tenvad face off against a Hawkmoth of her own. Here he is again, glaring at his ultimate desire, a bright light. This has to be my favourite watercolour pencil masterpiece that I have ever created! The head of the moth himself is nicely done, not too saturated and the eye reflects the light rather well. The light however steals the show for me, it feels so much more real than anything I have coloured to date. I did not apply any paint where the bulb physically is, and the rest is a gradient from yellow to brown to black. I look at this piece and sometimes I have to look away because it genuinely feels like I am looking into a light! Do you get that feeling, or maybe it only works looking at this in the flesh. Regardless, I consider this (out of all of my work) colour blending at it's finest.

John Esposito was going to be added to the gang but seemed to face into the shadows. This character was designed solely from a pizza. Everything from his costume to his colour scheme. Even his head is shaped like a slice! I didn't have any gray scale pieces by the time it came to working in this box (there is red featured in the crystal orb's box) so I used a ball point pen and that alone to draw and shade the trademark beard of John Esposito. It's been a long time since I did a piece like this so it was quite interesting, I don't think I have done it since my A Levels, only this one turned out so much better, I have little surprise in saying!

One character you probably don't know much about is Ida Noe, who wouldn't know herself!  What you're seeing is the tail in her hair, pulled into it's question mark like pose by the headband. This box was coloured using just pen and shaded the same way, no outlines this time.

Now all you're seeing is a pair of eyes, not looking to happy. What could this possibly be a reference to? In my early days on this blog, I created a human prediction of the girl in question from the song 'Five Colours In Her Hair', as sung by McFly. I could never find a music video for the song and do depicted the girl from scratch. The background of his piece, quite obviously, being her hair's colours.

And what of this last character in the bottom right? Well I haven't posted him on the blog yet, but I do intend to bring him out of the shadows some time. Once I do, he will make sense and so will the gimmick he has. I'm afraid until then he's just going to be a mystery for you to wonder about.

So that's all of the content provided in this special masterpiece. Feel free to go back through the blog's history to see the entries such content in this piece refers to. I hope you like this and have enjoyed the work I bring to this blog. I will continue to post of course as this is only a small dose of what I can provide you and with time, my skills will grow in order to provide you with much more. Thank you for joining me on this journey and here's to the next milestone! 

The Alphabet Challenge | S

S is for Splinter

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are without a doubt a phenomenon and indeed to this day are still going strong, no matter how many times they retell their story. Of course, the franchise is equally dependent on their rat sensei, (expecting all 2012 TMNT fans to hold a moment of silence) Master Splinter, real name Hamato Yoshi.

I don't think I have ever drawn him before and this time I really wanted to do him justice. Now while the Turtles only have minor changes throughout their years, Splinter has a diverse variety of designs so I decided not to focus on a particular version of him and to merge the three I was most familiar with, the televised Master Splinters from the 80's, 4Kids and 2012 cartoons.

I got a reference for a martial arts pose, deciding this was the pose to go for and then simply drew the human form with this pose, remembering to make a few modifications for Splinter's body type. After that it was a case of replacing some of the human parts with rat parts. The easiest head to construct was that of the 2012 Splinter, and personally my favourite (I might as well say Nickelodeon's take on the show is my overall favourite).

You'll notice that I took his costume design from the 4Kids Splinter and his colour scheme (minus the hands, feet and nose) from the 1980's Splinter, a way of including all of the Splinters that contributed to my history with the franchise.

I was going to include a symbol of the Hamato Clan on his costume but decided against it for two reasons. The size of the logo would make it difficult to read properly and the colouring would allow the logo to blend in too easily.

Have you seen the letter R? If not you can check it out via my page for the 'Alphabet Challenge' as well as previous entries. Look out for T coming soon!

It's Time To Face The Music!

To sum it all up, only one thing would really need to be said and that is, The X Factor is back.

For the past few years I did actually watch the show but now I no longer do. While one of my favourite singers was an X Factor contestant, I am to say the least disappointed with the show's more recent outcomes. Despite this, members of my family still enjoy this show very much so I do still end up being aware of what is going on with the show. Time to face a few months of musical madness!

This was done using some colour pencils, it's simply that. No sketch layer done in pencil first, I have used only colour pencils all from two families, Blue and Red. As you can see, the blue colouring was used on Droey while the red on that iconic X. I was considering the addition of yellow for some lighting but I decided to stick to just the two colours otherwise it would start looking a bit like Superman's costume!

One thing I would change about this is the position Droey is stood in. If he were slightly towards the left, then he would align perfectly with the X, which was my intention. Now I am aware that an X across someone is quite commonly used to connote death or an approaching death, but I can assure you that is not the case, Droey won't be going anywhere. He is simply trying to cover up the X, plus the X is behind him and covering his face.

I Call It 'Miracle De La Coccinelle'

This is actually a rather old piece I did earlier in the summer, but this week I finally sought to finish it and I can say I think the wait has paid off.

So I created this after hearing about the game 'Passparout the Starving Artist', I have not played this myself as I don't tend to play games but I have watched the game being played and was inspired by it to create this Frenchman trying to sell a painting.

And here he is, with his wine and baguettes as he convinces this potential customer to buy his painting. The colouring for this piece is what kept it waiting for so long. I knew I wanted the painting itself to be in colour but as to how the rest of the composition would be given colour was a decision I struggled to make. I eventually decided to just make everything grey scale so that the painting would pop. I used my only pen collection truly suitable for the job of grey scale masterpieces, my Tombow pack. I have missed using these pens and had finally found them this week and I'm glad not to have forgotten how to work with them.

And now for the painting. To give it a painting effect, I resorted to my watercolour pencils. I just had to think what to 'paint'. I don't usually find myself in the situation of coming up with two different artworks to make one. Well it was only this week when that idea actually came to me and I can't believe I didn't realize it before.

Something French that is currently popular and indeed something I enjoy, is our Miraculous Ladybug. So why not paint a ladybug? No I didn't draw Marinette herself, I drew a literal Ladybug and then even made sure I was drawing a genuinely French flower to place the ladybug on. However I think the colour came across a bit too blue in the end, the blue was only meant to function as a shadow.

Looking at the completed result, I am very satisfied and quite proud of my grey scale work. But to be fair, I do use artist's markers for that effect which is outside the majority of my supplies. I do have hopes to expand on my marker collection, as for now I only have skin tones and greys. Maybe I need to sell that ladybug painting!

YouTubers as Mr. Men

Just as I was getting all the Mr. Men out of my system, Dr. Men only went and released the second wave of books! I got them straight away, red them straight away and was back into drawing Mr. Men straight away! I'm trying my best not to make it a habit that dominates the content of my blog.

I decided I felt like drawing some of the YouTubers that I frequently watch, and chose the Mr. Men style. I haven't put any names on these in case you wanted to guess, but if you do wan't to guess then I advise not reading beyond the image until you feel ready to see the answers.

Okay, below this sentence I will begin identifying them all for anyone who does not know the identities of these Mr. Men and Little Misses. From top left to bottom right, here is the list:

DrawingWiffWaffles

Familiars to this blog will have heard this name before because this particular YouTuber is who drove me to do the Alphabet Challenge myself. Waffles [which I will refer to her as to make this easier] comes across as that one cartoon character whose always bubbly and joyful. Her art style is fantastic and before I started Droey's Draws I would be watching her sketchbook tours, loving her traditional art work. Her digital art also boasts her talent and by watching her create those masterpieces I have been able to learn enough to make my own digital art, so if you're reading this, thanks Waffles!

For her Little Miss, I drew most of the inspiration from her Waffle logo, including what is now a cute little hat. I added a nose similar to the shape of the noses she draws (I love her noses, I can't quite match them but they look so good!). This design was also given freckles, Waffle's real hair and her boots that she wore in her #MeetTheArtist video.

Jaiden Animations

My favourite of the animation channels. Not to say I don't like any of the others but Jaiden was the first I stumbled upon. I find her content relatable due to our fairly similar personality traits and her style of animation is always a joy to watch. I felt it was about time I made a bit of fan art including her, especially since so many of her fans already do.

Her Little Miss design was easy to come up with. I wanted to be as faithful to her animated self as possible. So I kept her circle head, placed the hair on it and then coloured her in her light purple. I also made her a taller Little Miss like Somersault so that her hair would not have to be shortened.

Butch Hartman

If you don't know who this guy is, you've probably been living under a rock or just don't like cartoons. Hartman is known for Danny Phantom, Fairly Odd Parents and Tuff Puppy (also will be known by a new generation for Bunsen Is A Beast). These cartoons all have fandoms and with only access to Fairly Odd Parents, that was show I would know him for. He is currently active with his own channel where he will draw or discuss his work and coming from someone who has made at least three respectable cartoons, he's the kind of person I ought to be taking notes from!

On the end cards of his videos, he will appear in his animated style and this is what I used as a base for his Mr. Man. I wanted to find a way to make the nose work into the design but I felt I couldn't do it and keep the design flattering. Now there was a part of me that wanted to colour him black (most probably due to that being the colour he constantly wears) but there were a few red flags. Primarily, that fact his design would be completely black, no Mr. Men or Little Miss to date have ever been black (but that could change, who knows?) or perhaps I would end up in the same trouble as Pokemon did with their Jynx (or however you spell it). So I resorted to his natural skin tone, which seems to have been done before for Mr. Men (see Wilfred the Wizzard).

BlackNerdComedy

I came across this channel by accident a few years ago. Some of you may know I'm a fan of Ninja Turtles, well so is this guy. Andre is known for summarizing, reviewing and discussing pop culture, mostly television shows of nostalgic value but also a few recent shows. His humour never fails to bring a smile to my face when it comes to watching his videos and since the discovery of him I have been keeping up with most of his videos.

I drew Andre's hair in the same way that Antony Ainley's The Master is depicted, since despite having shorter hair than Ainley, Andre's hair follows a very similar shape (from what I am able to tell in his videos anyway). However this means his Mr. Men counterpart's beard is more prominent as the Mr. Men don't really have a way to making the hair colour less obvious, it's either full opacity or none. I gave him the Mr. Forgetful shape to save making another circular Mr. Man and then placed a turtle next to him.

SuperCarlinBrothers

So there's a Little Miss Twins, why not have a duo of Mr. Men as well? And so my chosen duo are the Super Carlin Brothers, specialists in Disney owned paraphernalia. It is thanks to these two that one of my favourite Pixar movies, Ratatouille became even better (and has it's holes filled). If you think something is missing in that film, check out Anton Ego's Origins.

So turning these two into Mr. Men was a simple task. Pick a shape that suits them both, colour them accordingly to their logo and then give them some shoes (I felt they needed some sneakers). Like how Peter Capaldi's nose was featured on his design, these two have been given their noses, this would have to be the case so a pair of glasses could be applied (if you haven't noticed, all glasses bearing Mr. Men tend to have a nose).

MeiYuArt / FunToDraw

Mei Yu does a fair amount of fan art and art challenges, some of which I enjoy very much. I usually watch her FunToDraw videos and you may notice that in her Style Challenge Part 3, she actually made herself a Little Miss already! It was a decent interpretation but to me some things didn't seem quite right. By all means, she'll do her art how she likes, I respect that; but I felt the need to tweak this Little Miss a bit. I hope you don't mind Mei Yu, not trying to be better than you (I'm a long way off from being able to match!)

So as I said, this Little Miss is a tweaked design. The first thing to change and probably the most noticeable different (other than her skin tone) was the lack of clothes. Some wear shoes, hats or neck attire. But that's it. What a Mr. Man or Little Miss wears is restricted to what a human would wear on their head, hands and feet. This meant the t-shirt and trousers combo had to go. Blue remained an element of the colour scheme in her shoes, but the red was now absent so I replaced her skin tone with the red and made her nose the same pink as her original design. The other change I made was to remove the eye lashes, these would only be a genuine design feature if her character was to appear on Cartoon Networks' 'The Mr. Men Show'.

LavenderTowne

LavenderTowne is a YouTube artist who created the web-comic 'Unfamiliar' and has a delightful art style. In fact, you'll be able to find that some time around April or May I attempted her style on myself and gave Lavender the original Drawson style. Her videos are rather relaxing and her use of colour as well as shape really put her style on the map.

I tried to capture the typical shape used on the heads of LavenderTowne's characters so act as the body of her Little Miss. This resulted in a fairly rounded square which continues to curve all the way along each edge. The nose is also a nod to her art style as she seems to have the trademark of a tiny triangular nose where the skin tone is slightly darker. You may also notice she doesn't have the typical eyes of a Mr. Man or Little Miss. I didn't want to give the design the typical beady eyes since her eyes are also very distinctive, so I drew from Mr. Sneeze's eyes.

Bill Cipher

Wait what?

Okay he's not a YouTuber but I felt the need to interpret Bill Cipher as a Mr. Man. How do you think I did?

This is rather enjoyable but I'm not sure I will do this again, except from drawing these guys in the Drawson style, when I finally decide what that is. Do you think these YouTubers would like these interpretations of themselves, or would have done them this way? Who would you transfer to the world of Mr. Men and how would you try it?

Drawing Spooky Icons

So I felt like drawing or creating characters. Nothing complicated or detailed, just simply drawing characters for the fun of it and the theme I chose was spooky icons, particularly those seen around the Halloween season which, there's no point in denying, is on it's way.

Here are the original three, all named and all designed around the three basic shapes. Composed of circles is Jack O'Lantern (how original), or squares is Adam / and then of triangles is my favorite of the designs, Madge Pell. I liked this witch so much that I had to draw her again.

And so here she is in front and side view. I changed the costume after the first drawing slightly. I didn't remove the hat from the design, but I wanted to draw Madge's full head to get a full concept of her hair style. Her sleeves are now separate from her dress and the hair tucks itself in towards her head rather than dropping straight down.

In addition to this, I tried a skeleton resembling the skeleton costumes people wear on Halloween, which would mean that the bones are bonded together by a suit. I also created a spider (which probably won't be returning without a redesign. Lastly is the scary tree, inspired by those trees with scary faces and those which come alive and walk out from the ground. This would be some strange entity with a tree like shell, inspired by the character Penny from 'The Amazing World Of Gumball'.

That's all I can say about this for now but you may see more from these spooky designs some time soon, especially since next month is October.

The Aplhabet Challenge | R

R is for Roley

Ah Bob the Builder. Used to be a pretty decent cartoon. While the show never got any better than it formerly was, it was good while it lasted, even gaining enough fame for his name to last to this day.

As a tribute to the former Bob the Builder series, here is Roley. Funny thing is that all the while I used to think he was a rather depressed character, simply because of his mouth piece, but as you see it in this drawing, he can smile.

Much like my entry for Q, Roley is inked with pen. Although the colours are slightly off from his actual colour scheme. The green is a bit bright, the mouth piece is too dark and his cab it a bit short. Other than that I think Roley came out rather well.

I think out of all of Bob's crew, Roley would have been the easiest one to draw aside from Dizzy. The only mystery when it came to making this was the cab interior, which I don't recall actually seeing on the show. There were no images for it that I could find either, so I assumed it would be made so someone can sit inside him, which would defy Bob the Builder logic, everyone seems to just hang from the side of the vehicles.

Have you seen the letter Q? If not you can check it out via my page for the 'Alphabet Challenge' as well as previous entries. Look out for S coming soon!

[15+] Move Off The Bench

WARNING

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT IS INTENDED FOR OLDER AUDIENCES, VIEW AND SHARE AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION

After watching some videos, I decided it was time to return the use of prompts. I found a random word generator and what I got was 'Bench'.

This instantly brought about memories of my drama class, which had done a couple of tasks which centered around a bench. One of them was a performance for an awards ceremony (of which I could have participated in but regret not doing) and the other was an improvisation exercise. The latter of which I shall discuss.

Set something up for use a bench and then you begin. One actor will sit on the bench and the task of the other actor is to persuade them to get off the bench so they can have it all to themselves. This is supposed to encourage the actor to come up quickly with a unique resolve to the problem, each time an actor doing trying their own scheme.

Our teacher was on the bench, just sat on one end as she waited for the next competition. And this particular actor (a good sport for putting up with the humor directed towards him afterwards) decided to get the teacher to move by 'playing with himself', not for real I should add! Naturally the teacher got off the bench straight away, surprised and amused. After that the exercise continued in a more child friendly light.

I suppose those witnesses will have forgotten about that and may be remembering now, but it's one of those memories I did not forget. And so to be nostalgic, I apologize to that individual as I make another poke at this memory, this time with an illustration!

Unlike most of my content, I worked on this masterpiece in a different book, made of acrylic paper which is better at withstanding watercolours than my Derwent sketch book. I used a combination of Derwent's water colour pencils and Crayola's water colour pencils and tried to stick to a minimalistic colour scheme. The colours used in the end were blue, green, greyscales, browns. Granted I used more than five specific colours but kept them in that range to prevent the piece looking too busy.

I aimed for a simpler and more geometric art style (showing better through the scenery and props) which I think I will continue to use as it suits me, I think it comes across as orderly. I just need to spend some time making sure I can make the people and other characters match this style.

Some of you may notice a little influence from Kasey Golden the YouTube artist. Yes she is the one  to thank for leading me to this. I'm sure next time I try something like this however that it will be for a more universal audience, of which I think she as well as many of you would be happy about.

Here you can see the sketches done in my usual book in preparation for the official masterpiece. I started off with the most important element, the bench. I drew a couple from memory, one of a bench I used to have outside my house and another from a park I used to go to. After that I looked at some benches on Google Images and found the perfect bench for the style I was drawing in.

After that I started focusing on the character designs and poses. I knew I wanted the male to be facing away and up to his business, so he was simple. As for the female, it took me a few sketches to decide just how she would be reacting to this public indecency. I admit that the female's feet were proving a difficulty for me so I decided to cheat a bit and put a bag in front of her feet, it did fit with the sort of character I was trying to portray.

And lastly an important element was some of the background detail, of which I sketched the trees. Did you notice? One happens to be shaped similarly to a particular part of the male body. Then the bushes in the foreground happen to be a similar shape to a cell often connected with that part of the male body. And if you didn't know that already, sorry for spoiling the surprise.

And now for anyone who does have children, I have something they may like to see coming Monday with my next addition to the Alphabet Challenge. Be sure to check it out as well as the seventeen other entries! That's it for now, until the next time.

The Ten Minute Mr. Men Challenge

I was feeling bored one day and then decided to do myself a challenge. I was thinking of doing the 10 minute, 5 minute, 1 minute challenge but couldn't come up with something to draw for the challenge. I still had a bit of the Mr. Men vibe from those Dr. Men books and know that I have drawn the cast of the actual Mr. Men series many times. Could I do it from memory?

I set myself the challenge to draw as many as I could in ten minutes with no references or eraser (as a security measure I drew in pen). The quickest way for me to remember the characters was to go in the order they are aligned on the back cover of their books. So with everything set up I got started.

I was surprised to find ten minuets later that I had only drawn twenty of them, each one taking almost thirty seconds at an approximate. Unfortunately I didn't get to finish the only Little Miss on the sheet, Little Miss Sunshine. While all of the Mr. Men can be identified, I think some of them came out misshapen, such as Mr. Tickle, Mr. Bump and Mr. Lazy.

I wasn't proud of this, but I learnt from it and what's a better outcome than signing my praises I think. I realize I am not a very fast artist and if I ever need to work faster, I should work on picking up the pace. I know that my memory can serve better than my expectations (not to say that I will never use a reference of course) and that I am capable of drawing with the pen straight away, something I should work on to be able to ink lines more confidently.

Do you think you're up to the challenge? Can you beat 20.5 characters? Give this a try and let me know what your results are, and good luck to you if you try it out.