In art school, you do a lot of figure drawing. A LOT of figure drawing. You start to figure out the human body, how feet work, how legs bend, the rough shape of a head. You figure it out because you do it all the time.
15 years after finishing art school, and not drawing a heck of a lot during those 15 years, I was rusty, but the days upon days of figure drawing are still in my system.
The thing we didn’t do a lot of in art school was dinosaur drawing. There was a dino-skeleton in the Biology building and one day we all went to the atrium to draw from reference. All of the nerds immediately sized up the big old skeleton. After 5 minutes of drawing dino bones, most people gave up and moved onto drawing a plant or turtle… I pushed through and tried to draw the damned thing, ribs and teeth and all.
The drawing was horrible.
After my miserable failure, I returned to the Biology building a few times to draw from that monster, but it always sucked.
At the time I was drawing every day – and mostly people. I would draw people waiting for the bus, on the bus, in class, in the lounge, in restaurants, everywhere. I was pretty happy drawing people.
Then the t-rex stepped in. And damn it all, I never could get that skeleton to look remotely good.
Now, for better or worse, I’m climbing back on that horse.
There are going to be a lot of dinosaurs in Petra’s Call. One is even going to be an important character. It’s not going to be easy, and at times, it won’t be pretty, but I’m taking this one on.
Chasing down your demons, even from 15 years ago, is hard, but what really scares me is when I have to draw robots, and then have the robot fight dinosaurs… While it’ll be super awesome and fun when it’s done, sitting down to actually draw it scares the crap out of me.