I drew a fish!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mzdial/8429357116/

I drew some fish. Recently, I’ve been working on learning how to work tonally with pens. It has been as hard and frustrating as I remember learning any new technique is, drawing things over and over , things not coming out like I wanted. The thing is, it’s especially annoying since I thought that I already knew how to do this.

Now, however , I think I am getting somewhere.
More coming later, no doubt.

While this technique isn’t directly applicable to my ultimate goal of tattooing, I figure that all the work I do improves my basic artistic skill, which will eventually make me better overall. All experience becomes useful eventually.

Practising a fish

The other day, I realised I was terrible at drawing koi fish. Not thy I haven’t tried before – just that trial and error wasn’t teaching me fast enough. I googled for ‘koi fish scales drawing tutorial’, and found a few videos. I watched a couple to get the idea, but I didn’t copy what the video was doing.

So that’s what I came up with. The important thing to note to make the shape believable is that fish are, essentially, cylinders. When drawing cylinders, you always need shade on both edges of the cylinder, and an off-centre highlight. If anyone’s interested, I’ll do a post on how I constructed the fish body in much more detail.