I NOTICED when I was drawing my assignments for Drawing Words, Writing Pictures that when it came to making up a cartoon situation I invariably;
- imagined male characters
- gave them very generalised costumes
I realised that I needed to feed my imagination a bit by drawing particular people in the real world so, when we had to call at the doctors, I sat a the back of the waiting room and made some visual notes. I thought that notes on colours might help too as I think that I’ve got a tendency to revert to a habitual, limited palette. There wasn’t time to get out my watercolours and I was using a fountain pen containing water soluble ink so I couldn’t have anyway, so I made brief notes.
It’s great to have a procession of people of different sizes, shapes and sexes, although I would have appreciated a bit more time to build up character. Because of the angle that I was drawing from, the next person joining the queue regularly blocked my view of the person I’d just started drawing.
I realised that the best way to proceed was to assume that I’d have only a few seconds for each character and to draw in the basic shape very quickly, then work up the the drawing if I got did happen to have an unrestricted view for a minute or two.
I feel that fountain pen is the quickest medium for this situation. Fibre tips pens don’t flow quite as freely. Pencil, the way I use it when I’m in a hurry, is too messy.
When the supply of queuers temporarily dried up, I reverted to my old standby; drawing my left hand.