I wonder how that approach to drawing worked out. I think I was too easy on myself. If you reach a moment when you don't want to go on then you keep on going. Is that right? I haven't made a habit of drawing yet. Even after doing something I'm still afraid to pick up the pencil the next day. I think I waited too long on the personal drawings as well. Way too much time for doubt to creep in and end up having second thoughts. See, if I just went "And that's the end of my post, and here's some stuff I doodled on the side" then it wouldn't be a big deal. Instead I go on talking and talking and it creates an expectation. And it doesn't matter that it's a small unimportant blog; I should know to be careful of what goes on the internet. But really, who's going to care for this. It's all in my head, right?
 |  |
I believe this was the modified contour drawing exercise...well, it says that on the paper but it's not really legible. 2012-02-11. Not much to say about this one aside it making me feel more miserable than anything else the book threw at me up to that point. Hard work is such a foreign concept. I guess it's...okay to the untrained eye for a first attempt. Discrepancies are easy to spot. Obviously, I'd loathe to do this again.
How much time did it say to set aside? An hour? This took like four times as long. At some point I have to learn to be efficient rather than take my sweet time accomplishing what essentially amounts to nothing. Shiny trash is still trash.
An exercise in negative space drawing. Draw one of the shapes on the viewfinder then scale up the rest on paper, focusing on the space between objects. Picked an easy target; no excess curves. 2012/02/17.
 |  |  |  |  |
Found a sketchbook from around 1998 with more of my stuff scribbled in.
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
I was quite fascinated with the evening sky back then, be it from a plane trip from England across the Atlantic or from Bowser in the Sky. I dreamed about additional Bowser levels to play through...a total of seven counting the first three in Super Mario 64. The level designs for all of them were never finalized (and the later ones would have been out of my scope to illustrate), but I went through a few ideas for the fourth level which can be seen in the first, second, and third image.
There's not much to see in the sixth image, but I definitely remember that was going to be the sixth level. You can already see the structure meant to serve as a huge pool, and a bone fish was supposed to be swimming around in it with a red coin somewhere on its body. Further into the level Mario would be jumping across the rooftops of residential areas. It would be in the evening. The image for the seventh level was dominated by a scene of Mario walking across a thin, weaving beam connecting two of the many skyscrapers in the city at night. A stationary fire spitter (called a kuromame I guess) would sit further down on one of the beams that branched off. The view was top-down; you could see the lights of activity below. It would be weird, but worth considering for a future illustration.
