Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Drawing aligators


A process I go through often is a basic iteration from idea to interpretation. In this case it was our friend the aligator, cause Vicki goes, "Hey, draw an aligator!" And I'm like, "Sure!"

When you actually sit down to do that, strange things happen. You think and start doodling, and what happens is you start to throw down lines that might be an aligator. Unless you just happen to love them and draw them all the time, an aligator is a good example because it's not something immediately familiar. However, it is a common reptile and most people have a pretty good sense of "aligator."

The first drawing is direct from my brain, as a decently experienced artist, my idea of an alligator. Or more accurately for me, my idea of how other artists might draw an aligator. While not necessarily bad, this is common for more artists than they would care to admit.

As I expected after a quick google image search, my drawing looks absolutely nothing like a real aligator. Reference is good, practice is better. So a second drawing was drawn from photo ref and is used as a learning exercise.

Of course, you don't have to draw a "real" aligator, that's probably not the goal anyways. So taking the elements I had from the idea of an aligator, the lessons learned from drawing an accurate aligator, plus some good old fashioned imagination, my final drawing ends up as my creative interpretation of... an aligator!

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