Tuesday, January 29, 2013

DRAWING - 'Doodles' Then & Now




You don't know how happy I was to have discovered an old CD-ROM (yes, that's right, back in my day, we used to save our digital photos on blank CDs) with a bunch of old photographs from 2003. Amongst those photos was a picture I took of this Spiderman drawing I did during that summer when I was at Columbia University in NYC for a summer research fellowship. 

I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was at a meeting where some scientists were presenting their recent work, and I just so happened to be sitting near the back. Since the presentation was in the form of a powerpoint projection at the front of the room, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and my boredom and do a drawing with my red and blue pens.

Now you have to take into account that this was during a time when I was going to UCLA to study science, and I hadn't drawn since I was 11 years old. I NEVER sketched for practice or fun, and this one exception was just a very random occurrence. It was basically me 'doodling' out of boredom, and the subject matter just so happened to be what I had always been interested in.

The sketch page at the bottom is an 11"x17" comic book page that I just started 'doodling' on one day earlier this month as part of my attempts to SKETCH DAILY. Naturally, I just started drawing Spiderman because of my childhood fascination with him, but also because he provides artists with a true test of the human form. Spiderman poses are and should be extremely dynamic, and his acrobatic moves have always motivated me to get better at drawing the human figure.

It's interesting to look back and see my old drawing versus my new ones. Yes, there are a lot of improvements, but what I find most interesting is that the old Spidey sketch provides a 'snapshot' of what I knew back then. It was basically everything I had learned when I was 11, which was when I stopped drawing and stopped reading comics. 

In my next post, I'll dive deeper into my understanding of anatomy and my ever-growing desire to master it in the pursuit of mastering the human figure.

4 comments:

  1. Very interesting, Mauricio. I love your sketches. Your skill with the pencil has increased a lot, but it's also nice the old job!

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  2. Nice Spidey sketches, Mauricio. That red and blue one is amazing for your first sketch as an adult. It's also interesting that you stopped drawing when you had such a talent. Guess science is considered a more respectable field when in college. Glad you got it right in the end. ha.

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  3. Good stuff! Looks like spiderman's lost weight in the past decade so he can more easily float like a butterfly and sting like a bee..err spider.

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Thanks for letting me know what you think :)