Page 3, Part Three

[Click to enlarge.]

Despite how it may appear, the tortoise did not win.

Raena and I took, well, a nine month break from our joint blog.  But we are back!  And we intend to treat this sketchbook like a hot potato - or at least a lukewarm one, so that we will post more often in the future.  We resolve not to try for perfection and not to be intimidated by the blank page or each other.  Instead we are going to be challenged by one another's art and ideas, and grow, grow, grow!  (We hope).

You can see how we started this page in the last two posts.  To this page, I have now added the boy who is pulling the dinosaur's tail.  Months ago I had no idea what to do when Raena added the dinosaur.  I was toying with the idea of a boy swooping down, riding a pterodactyl.  I made several pre-drawings.  But I couldn't make it work.  I'll leave that kind of thing to James Gurney, at least for now.

This time, the idea of the boy trying to hold back the dinosaur came to me right away.  First I looked at several tug-of-war photos.  I was aiming for a certain body position, and found a woman that was just right.  Then I found a photo of a young Indian boy.  Then I looked for facial expressions by googling the word "determination", to get his expression.  I used all of these as guides for the final product.

The entire time I had Sadami's advice in my head - I tried to capture his movement, effort and resolve.

I'm using a thicker pen these days than before and automatically picked it up without thinking - it gives the boy a rougher appearance than the girl that works, I think.  In the arms though, I accidentally picked up an even thicker pen.  It's okay.  I think whatever background is put in place will minimize most of it.  I've learned that this is the attitude we must have - use the mistakes - it's what makes your art unique.  Also, perfection is boring!

So there you go, Raena - it'll be in the mail shortly on its cross-country journey to you.  What will you do next?